Page 42 of Sophie’s Ruin (Crimson and Shadows #2)

In my dream, I was still in Henry’s bedroom, standing before the window, the heavy gray curtains closed tightly.

My brows wrinkled. Why was I inside? I’d gotten used to being outside in my dreams, with Henry all hard, lean muscles and sun-kissed skin by my side.

He was here with me now, standing to the left of the window much like he’d stood when I’d watched my last sunrise before being turned.

My gaze darted to him, and I flinched. His arms were folded over his bare chest where the wound I’d inflicted was still healing, and he glared at me from beneath the dark brows.

“How could you do this to me?” he snarled, disdain dripping from his voice.

My heart twisted in my chest as breathing became difficult. Tears rushed to the surface and spilled, rolling down my cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” I rasped. “I wasn’t myself. I was lost, just like you said. I wanted to destroy our enemies. I wanted to keep you safe. I was scared of losing you—”

Henry’s laughter interrupted me, and it sounded all wrong—cold and dead. I’d never heard such a sound from him before, and it made a shiver of trepidation curl down my spine.

“You were scared of losing me?” he asked, his eyes blazing.

His gaze was scathing, blistering my skin.

“The things you did…how could you do them? You were scared of losing me? Well, now you’ve lost me anyway.

How can I love someone who’d committed such atrocious cruelties?

You are a monster, Sophie. I can’t believe it has taken me this long to see it. ”

A keening sound escaped me as violent tremors began to shake my body.

I couldn’t breathe in this place, inside this room with Henry spewing words of hatred at me.

Why were we here and not under the sun, where the air was clean and not filled with smoke and shadows of the darkness?

Why were the curtains closed tight? It was daylight outside, I could feel it.

I needed to open the drapes and let the light in, let it banish the darkness that had filled this space, suffocating me.

Maybe then Henry would see that not all was lost, that there was still hope for me, for us.

I reached for the curtains and pulled them apart, desperate to escape the darkness.

The sunlight blinded me, and I screamed.

Sophie!

I screamed as the flames erupted, eating up my skin and incinerating my flesh and bones.

Sophie!!

My eyes flew open. I was staring at Henry. He was sitting up in the bed, clasping my shoulders.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his gaze searching my face.

“Yes, it was just a nightmare,” I replied, my voice hoarse from screaming in my dream.

“I gathered that,” he said, his hands gliding down my arms before sliding back up to my shoulders, then to my neck as if making sure I was really here and in one piece. “I mean, are you okay?” he asked, cupping my face.

My chest constricted as tears blurred my vision. I’d thought I’d see loathing in his eyes, but I saw potent relief instead, and the scattered bleeding pieces of my heart pulled closer to each other as if they might stitch themselves together one day.

“You’re asking me if I’m okay? After what I did—”

He sealed his lips to mine, silencing me.

The salt from my tears mixed with the taste of him, and a whimpering sound escaped as I kissed him back, my tongue stroking his.

Relief rolled off him in waves. Relief, not the hatred I’d been dreading to find when he opened his eyes.

There was almost a longing in the way he kissed me, longing for the one he’d fallen in love with.

For who I used to be before I turned into this… monster.

I abruptly broke the kiss, rising from the chair.

“How can you ask me if I’m okay?” I said through the tears, as I began pacing the room. “How can you touch me? How can you kiss me after everything I’ve done?”

“Because I love you—”

“I’m a monster!” I shouted.

The words rang out in the otherwise quiet room, loud and condemning. Once they were out, there was no taking them back. They carved into my skin like lacerations, like a brand to mark me for all eternity.

Henry grunted, trying to leave the bed.

“Don’t!” I stepped closer, throwing my hands up as if to stop him from a distance.

He winced in pain as he rested his back against the headboard.

“If you don’t want me to come to you, then you need to come to me so we can talk.”

“How can you even want me near you?” I asked low, the words difficult to get out.

Henry’s eyes shuttered.

“Come here,” he whispered—no, he begged.

I didn’t deserve him. Funny how mere weeks ago, I’d thought him a monster. There was only one monster in this room, and it wasn’t him. I didn’t deserve him, yet my legs carried me to him, my body always pulled toward him as if I couldn’t physically be more than a few feet away.

They moved in unison, Isabelle had said earlier about Vincent and Rosalind.

Now I thought I knew what she’d meant. I might be a monster, and I might not deserve him, but I couldn’t stay away from him, either.

It was physically impossible. I would always come to him as long as he wanted me by his side.

And if there ever came a day when he didn’t…

well, I would still be close, hiding in the shadows, watching from afar…

longing, desperate for another touch. But that day was not today, so I would take what he would give for as long as he would give it.

Slowly, I approached the bed and perched on the edge, close to where he was sitting. When he reached for my hand, I flinched, trying to pull away, as if my touch would hurt him.

I did this, I thought with a shudder, my gaze dropping to his chest.

These hands that itched to touch him, to trace the defined muscles and beautiful features, had caused him severe pain and suffering.

I’d been desperate to protect him from the others.

In the end, I’d failed to protect him from myself.

A ragged cry broke past my lips, and I clamped my free hand over my mouth.

“Shh.” Henry reached out and pried my hand away, before clasping the back of my neck and resting his forehead against mine. “Breathe with me.”

At first, I couldn’t do as he’d instructed because I was shaking too much, but after a while, I focused on the beating of his heart and his controlled, measured inhales and exhales.

I began to match the rhythm, filling up my lungs with air when he did and letting it out slowly when he exhaled.

Being so close to him helped soothe me, too, his fresh and woodsy scent surrounding me, settling over me with the comfort of a blanket.

Once my breathing had evened out, Henry pulled away and let go of my neck. He didn’t let go of my hand, though, as he settled back against the headboard.

His eyes were haunted, and he swallowed, his throat bobbing, before he opened his mouth to speak.

My heart dropped. He was going to send me away.

Any second now, he would utter the words that would undo me, sentencing me to an eternity of misery and pain.

Of loneliness. Because I knew there would never be another. Not after him.

My heart and my breathing sped up again, but before I could succumb to a full-blown panic attack, Henry said, “I think it’s time I tell you about my human family.

” He didn’t say “my real family” because the Duval clan was his real family, too.

Just in a different life. In the life after the almost-death that had made him a vampire.

But he had a past life. A life before that moment when Vincent had decided to save him because he’d seen good in him.

Gods, how grateful I was to Vincent for everything.

For helping my grandmother, then my mother with the amulet, for giving me Henry.

I held my breath, waiting for him to continue. He didn’t for a long time.

The look on his face was tortured and pained, and his voice was hoarse when he finally spoke.

“My father, Bernard, was a doctor.” A pause and a thick swallow as if it were difficult for him to force the words out, to speak about his family.

“He was like a rock, unwavering and firm. My mother, Louise,” the corners of his mouth lifted slightly as his voice became gentle, reverent, “She was a nurse. They were healers in a small village they grew up in before they moved to the city. My mother was the softness to my father’s hardness, but she was strong.

It was the kind of quiet strength that told you if my father, the rock, ever crumbled, she would be there to pick up the pieces, making him whole again.

” Deep-blue eyes locked on me, and he wasn’t just looking at me, but also into me.

Could he see the broken shards of my heart?

“Your strength is not always quiet, but you do remind me of her.”

“You mean me before…before I became this.” I didn’t deserve to be compared to her, to the one who’d brought him into this world.

Henry’s lips thinned into a firm line, and he didn’t acknowledge my comment before he continued, “They had me when they were young, and they wanted more children, but as the years went on, it became clear that wasn’t going to happen for them.

One day, when I was nineteen, apprenticing with my father, someone brought a little girl into the infirmary where he worked.

They found her on the streets, gravely ill.

She was an orphan. We nursed her back to health and took her in. ”

“What was her name?”

“Marceline…Marcy.” A smile lit up his face, genuine and warm, the brightest one I’d ever seen.

“It was almost strange how easily she fit in. One day, it was just the three of us. The next day, we were a family of four, and it felt like Marcy had been with us all along, as if she’d always occupied the spare bedroom by the stairs, and that place in our hearts we hadn’t even known was empty until she came into our lives. ”