Page 29 of The Same Backward as Forward

The words were closer to a whisper in my mind than the seething vow they’d once been, but I held to them letter after letter, moment after moment, touch after touch.

When Harry was finished, he capped the pen. My gaze was drawn to his biceps and forearms, no longer under gauze. His second-degree burns had healed nicely. Any scarring he had from them would be light.

His chest was a different matter.

“Twenty letters.” I focused on my hand. “I’m not going to ask what they mean.”

“Excellent.” He rose from the bed, ready to make good onhisend of the deal. “Because I wouldn’t tell you.”

Chapter 24

That night, in my own bed, I tried to read—a retelling ofBeauty and the Beast.

A mansion of marvels. A stolen clockwork rose. A curse.But it was the beast himself that kept me from reading past the first hundred pages. His habit of brutally shoving people away. His arrogance, as enduring as his curse. The fact that heknewwhat he was, knew that loving him might destroy her if, by some miracle, she was the one.

As I closed the book, a little harder than necessary, I could practically hear Harry talking about my sugar packet castles.Do you believe in fairy tales, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?

I really, truly didn’t. I laid back and closed my eyes, willing sleep to come, but my stubborn eyelids crept back open.Damn it.I looked at my hand.

I started where Harry had—with theW.

“W,Y,I,E,H…” I said under my breath. Phonetically, if I tried to pronounce that as a single word, it sounded a bit likewhy? Next wasnoc, thennuh.

In other words: a whole lot of nothing. Looking at all the letters, I wondered if there were any palindromes buried somewherein the sequence. There were threeN’s, threeH’s, twoE’s, two each ofU,W, andY.

Nun. Ewe. Eye.I really, really hated the fact that I could so vividly picture the way Harry’s lips looked when he smirked.No.I wasn’t going to waste another minute on this little game of his.

Not one.

And yet, at the hospital the next day, when the pen marks on the back of my hand began to rub off under the force of repeated hand washings, I used my break to redraw the circle and letters myself.

W,Y,I,E,H,N,O,C… I was vaguely annoyed by the fact that I had the entire sequence memorized—but not as annoyed as I was by the fact that I still couldn’t solve it.

“Do you want a hint?”

I glared at Harry and his smug Harry face.

“I’ll take that as ano, then.” He winked at me as I finished rebandaging his chest. “I do hope you appreciate how magnanimous I’m being by not gloating right now.”

“Youaregloating.” It always took me a moment, after I’d dressed his remaining burns, to stop thinking about the places on his chest and torso where smooth skin gave way to what I knew would someday be very heavy scars. There were days when I felt likeIhad scarred him.

I’d given him more than he ever would have had any right to ask me of me, and it wasn’t enough.

“I am gloating in anunderstatedmanner. I assure you that, were I not, my method of gloating would be far more memorable.”

I responded with a very sweet smile, which he rightly found concerning.

“Should I even ask what torture you have planned for me today?” he said dryly.

Today was my day off. “Today,” I told him, “we work on uneven ground.”

“Dare I hope that’s a metaphor?”

“For what?” I gave him a look. “On second thought: Don’t answer that. Today, we go outside.”

“In the light of day?” Harry’s arch question set my heart to beating in my throat. For so long, his world—ourworld—had been this shack. Going outside, where we could be seen, was a risk—but a necessary one.

“No one comes out this far,” I told myself as much as him. I walked to open the metal door—first a crack to verify, then wider to prove my point. The only thing I could see was the lighthouse a hundred yards away. Nothing—and no one—else.