Page 89 of The Truths We Burn

“Oh, this isn’t a question. It’s a statement.” The music changes to another piano-themed melody, overcast and somber. “I’m just giving you a chance to admit it to yourself first.”

“What are you getting at, man?”

“Well,” he starts, hitting a particularly sensitive spot and making me hiss in discomfort, “it never made sense. There hadn’t been anything to throw you over the edge. You were content being Alistair’s and your father’s punching bag. What was the nail in the coffin that drove you to me? To this?”

The taste of strawberry vodka and betrayal.

I drop my head down on my arms in front of me, staring down at the concrete ground.

My last hope in humanity had been set ablaze by a set of neon blue eyes and a pretty poison mouth.

“It didn’t add up. Not until the other night.”

My body freezes, going solid. There’s no way he noticed. He couldn’t have.

Behind me, I hear him drop the scalpel into a bowl, clunking around the metal. The cutting is done, and now begins the cleanup. The sound of paper tearing echoes as he prepares to bandage me up.

“Sweetheart Sage Donahue,” he says keenly, always so smug, especially when he knows he’s right about something. “How long did you plan on keeping her from us?”

I go pale and not just from the blood loss.

He swipes a wet cloth across my back, making me suck in air through my teeth. I bow my spine a little, letting my head fall back as he wipes me down with alcohol, cleaning the wound out

“I don’t know what you’re going on about,” I say coolly, shaking my head a bit, hoping my calm nature will throw him off.

“Don’t insult my intelligence or my instincts, Rook. I saw the way you looked at her when she showed up at the cliff. The way she would have continued asking us, without care of her pride or our opposition. But as soon as you said something, she was done. I know what it looks like for a person to be broken, and your simple words disintegrated her.”

Thatcher knows the human body and its reactions better than most of the population. He knows the arteries and veins that ride throughout your limbs by name, organs, and their functions, but he is also the only person who doesn’t understand it beyond a chemical level.

He’s observant; there is nothing he misses. He picks up on body language, tone shifts, how certain mannerisms differ from person to person. He watches and can replicate it almost flawlessly, but it’s not real.

He can fake it. He can even make others believe it.

However, the reality is Thatcher has no empathy.

That portion of his brain hadn’t got the memo apparently, because he feels absolutely nothing. Understands nothing about emotions of the heart or emotions in general. He has no one to compare it to.

So while he could spew for hours and hours about how the respiratory system works in minute detail, he would never grasp what it feels like to breathe for another person. Would never be able to comprehend just how powerful betrayal and heartbreak are.

That’s why, yes, I think he valued Rose as a human, just as he does us. He is bound by loyalty and that alone. He’s the most clearheaded in this situation because he has no emotional attachment. It’s simply a business transaction. Rose was taken, and he is going to do what he needs to in order to replace that asset or at the very least fill its gap.

So he’s the very last person I want to have this conversation with. Yet, somehow, I knew it would be him.

“So I’ll ask you again, and only once more, Van Doren,” he warns, tone cold and removed. “What does Sage have to do with this? What are you punishing yourself for this time?”

“Fuck this, man.” I jerk away from him, exploding out of my chair and knocking it forward. “You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, and I didn’t sign up for your psychobabble bullshit.”

I grab my shirt that rests on the shiny steel table in the middle of the room, tugging it over my shoulders and making the tape pull against my skin, the wounds beneath pulsating with a muted pain.

“If she is going to be a problem for us, if she puts us at risk for what we are doing—if she isyourproblem—then it’s my business to know. I won’t have you messing this up because you can’t keep your impulsive hormones in check.”

I turn, stepping up in his face, but he barely blinks, rolling the white sleeves of his shirt down his arms. So technical, so precise that there isn’t a drop of blood on him.

“Don’t you fucking go there, you pretentious cunt,” I bite out. “I would never do anything that would put you all at risk. She is nothing, has always been nothing.”

Acid eats my insides, my body’s way of calling me a liar. Lying to someone I call a friend, one of my closest friends.

I want to believe it—that she is nothing. Goddamn I would give anything for her to be nothing.