Page 15
Chapter 15
EZEKIEL
I draw in a sharp breath, unable to release it as her voice cuts through the silence.
Cuts through me.
My mouth is hanging open, but I don't care what I look like right now.
This woman.
This shy yet lionhearted woman is anything but fragile. She just showed me a part of herself that I'm not sure she's ever shown anyone else, just by how she’s looking at me. I can’t say for certain, but I sense the courage it must have taken her to speak to me at all.
A stranger.
A man.
My chest tightens as an unfamiliar feeling digs its nails deep into my heart, reminding me that I have one.
I think I might be falling for her.
Not just anyone.
Airlie.
She can’t be fucking older than nineteen, what the fuck is wrong with me?
Her hands tremble, and I reach out to hold them without thinking. My fingers brush against her delicate, almost translucent skin as she willingly places her small hands in my much larger ones. It’s all I can do not to lift her in my arms and claim her as mine, right here, right now, but I won't, even if it’s what my soul is compelling me to do.
That's not what she needs.
Airlie needs to know that she's protected, that allowing a man, allowing me, to see her raw and vulnerable, wasn't a mistake, and that for once in her life, her heart is safe.
She’s safe with me.
Even if my soul, that seems to be calling all the shots right now, is damned.
I spent half my miserable life thinking I’d never be happy and the other half believing I didn’t deserve happiness at all.
Is the latter still true?
Fuck yes.
But right now, with her hands in mine, I’ll take whatever she’s willing to give. She’s avoided me for weeks, and I’ve been going out of my fucking mind. And now, she’s right here in front of me.
“Airlie, I—” I choke out. I can’t even talk right now with how she’s smiling up at me with those wide, blue-green eyes.
The darkness isn’t strong enough to hide her beauty from me, but it’s her tenderness that catches me off guard, leaving me completely speechless.
She reminds me of the sun as it sets, its warm glow dancing across the earth, and everything pure and beautiful.
Everything I am not.
She should run.
Her instincts to do so have clearly left the building because she’s here, like this, with me. Not hovering on the edges of the cave but a breath away from being in my arms.
I’m fucking terrified.
I am terrified that the darkness that has been seething beneath my flesh for the thirty-two years I’ve been breathing will swallow her innocence, her light, leaving nothing but emptiness and pain in its wake.
I’m not good , certainly not good enough for her.
For anyone.
And now I’ve gone and complicated shit by catching feelings for her. I don't know how or when. But there's no use denying it. In the short time I’ve known her, she’s cared for me in ways no one else ever has.
The chains, well, that’s neither here nor there at this point. Part of me thinks she only chained me up to keep me hidden. The other part of me believes that she’s afraid that I’ll leave her, and I get it.
I understand her because I think she understands me.
We don't need words.
We don't need anything, just us.
This world is lonely, yet I’m starting to think it doesn’t have to be with her around. If she would only take off these fucking chains because the only way we will truly be safe is if every last one of those assholes is dead. And if I don’t see this mission through, then the past four years of my life would have been for nothing.
Everything I did.
Everything that had been done to me.
The horrors I carry with me, and I'm forced to relive each night in my dreams.
If The Royal and any other bastard associated with them continue to exist, I’d be nothing more than a bad man. A monster just like them, who has done very bad things.
There will be no redemption for me.
I refuse to live the rest of my life knowing that all those innocent people, victims, by my hands or The Royals, died for nothing in a world that doesn’t even fucking care they existed. And that's exactly what failing would mean.
It would mean that I’d be failing them.
Failing Airlie.
“What's your name?” she whispers, her voice raspy and hesitant. Her voice is like music to me. I lean in closer, not enough to make her fear me, but just enough that she knows that I trust her too, which is a damn first, much like these strange feelings I have for her.
“Ezekiel,” I reply. She considers that for a moment, and her eyes roll over the shadows and contours of my body that the moonlight allows her to see.
“ Ezekiel ,” she says slowly as if trying my name on for the first time, and it fucks me up. “H-how did you… why are you here?” she questions.
“I blew up a boat,” I answer. Opting for the PG version of the story.
“What do you mean?” she asks. Her brows knit together, and I’m reminded just how little she seems to know about the outside world. I don’t want to embarrass or make her feel like she’s beneath me in any way, so I decide that I’ll tell her whatever she wants to know, whenever she wants to know it.
I can’t imagine too much of the truth being told around here, especially to Airlie, and she deserves to learn everything there is to know about this world, even if it is mostly horror. Then again, if she’s here in Atlantara and has experienced more than once what I listened to those fuckers do to her, I figure that, whatever stories I share, she won’t be all that shocked by them.
“I was working for monsters. People who hid behind their privilege and abused their power. I blew up their ship to keep the world safe from them,” I answer, and she looks away, taking it all in.
“Were you supposed to die too?” she asks, her quiet voice now filled with worry as she stares up at me.
“Yes,” I say, not wanting to lie to her. I didn’t see another way out at the time. Didn't want another way out.
“Do you kill people often?” she questions, not batting an eye. If she’s frightened, she doesn’t show it. I’m a little caught off guard because that wasn’t remotely where I thought this was going. Then again, she’s not like anyone else.
I thought she’d at least consider her safety, given her close proximity to a killer, or, at the very least, question why I wanted to blow up an entire ship full of people in the first place. The remorseful expression she wears shows me that she’s more concerned about how I feel about being a murderer than the fact that people are dead.
What happened to her that was so brutal that it has left her so desensitized by the mention of death?
She said before that her mother called her Airlie, as in the past tense.
I make a mental note to ask her about it later.
Now isn’t the right time.
“Yes,” I answer. My eyes search her shadowed features, looking for signs that she might be uncomfortable or at least a little afraid of me, but she gives me nothing. If anything, she seems more at ease.
“I don’t believe you are bad,” she says with finality, and my lip twitches, threatening to curve into a smile. I suppress it, not wanting her to think I’m mocking her.
“Oh, yeah, how so?” I challenge, raising an eyebrow. I’m not sure what she sees in me that I can’t, but she clearly isn’t looking hard enough.
“Because you aren’t. You could’ve hurt me, and yet, you haven’t.”
“ Yet ,” I counter.
“You won’t,” she snaps back. An order. “You're not like them.” I know by them , she means those mother fuckers who hurt her that night.
My jaw tightens, and an uncontrollable rage begins to simmer in my chest, surging through my entire body with the memory of her screams as they tortured and raped her echoes through my mind.
They will regret ever laying a fucking hand on her. I silently make a vow that I will remove their fucking arms with my teeth and feed them to the sharks the minute she lets me go.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Airlie. I am just like them. The question is, does that bother you?” While I may not be as callous about the sick and twisted things that I’ve done in my life, I am still guilty of them.
When she doesn’t answer, I decide it’s my turn to ask questions. Locking my anger somewhere deep down.
“Do you know where you are? This place. Do you know what it means to be here?” She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, unanswering, staring into the darkness behind me.
“Those men said that this was Atlantar— something, but no, I don’t know what that means,” she says, not meeting my gaze.
“That's right. Atlantara. The place where the Devil lives. It’s a palace of skin and bones built with the blood of people like you and me,” her eyes shoot to mine, confusion etching her pretty features.
“Father says that the devil isn’t real.”
Father?
“Who is your Father?” I all but snap at her. My mind is racing a million miles per minute, but I say nothing more.
Waiting.
Regret pinches the corners of her eyes, and if I didn’t know better, I'd say that mentioning him at all was a mistake.
A long moment passes between us as she continues to stare into the shadows, lost to her thoughts.
“Father Grimsby. He isn’t really my father. He’s a priest.” My head is screaming, my heart on the brink of fucking failure while I conjure as much strength as I can not let her see my inner turmoil.
A fucking priest.
The church.
I want to beg her to let me go right the fuck now, but I remember her reluctance to hear me out the last time I begged for her to free me. Resulting in her not acknowledging me at all in the weeks that followed. I knew she had visited me by the water bottles and clams she left for me to eat, not to mention the housekeeping was always taken care of. I can’t say I’m over the moon about her doing that .
Still, she has only just started trusting me enough to speak to me, and I don’t want to ruin it. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to go back to staring at a cold stone wall all fucking day. Trapped in my head, fully aware of where I am, who is around me, and how completely fucking useless I am, not able to do a damn thing about any of it.
“There will come a time when you’ll have to let me go, Airlie,” I say, and her grip on my hands grows tighter.
She is scared, but not of me.
For me.
Everything I suspected about why she chained me up here has turned out to be true. She’s scared that she’ll lose me.
She won’t.
We may not have known each other for long, and the circumstances are not even remotely romantic or normal, but we don’t exactly have normal lives. Time is either always insignificant or the only thing that matters, and I wish I could assure her that we have all the time in the world.
The truth is, I’m not sure what tomorrow holds for us. By now, The Royal would be aware that Charles Jensen and co are well and truly dead, and they’d most likely be on high alert, suspecting it was a takedown. It was, but they won’t be sure.
The last thing we want is for them to start evacuating because they won’t bother to take any victims with them. They’d burn this place down, along with every innocent person locked inside, and the thought of anything happening to Airlie is enough to send me fucking mad.
She squeezes my hands, holding onto me like I’m her lifeline, and in ways that she won’t fully understand, I am.
I move closer to her, wrapping my arms around her shoulders and pulling her to my chest. She buries herself into me. Her long, pomegranate hair, still dripping with water, is cold against my warm skin.
I realize she’s wearing clothing for the first time, if you can even call it that. I don’t need to look at it to know that it’s far too short to be called a dress with how her exposed, slender legs glisten in the moonlight.
“I won’t let them take you from me,” she whispers softly against me. Her breathing grows faster, and I hold her tighter, careful so that the chains don’t scratch her sensitive skin.
I can’t promise her that everything will work out. I can’t give her the cliche nonchalance you see in movies or read about in books. She needs to understand the weight of what’s happening, the bigger picture, because when the walls start crashing down around her, and one way or another, they will, those men, Father Grimsby , will leave her behind to rot. That is if they don’t kill her first. If she knows what’s happening here, it could ruin the element of surprise that they will no doubt get off on, giving her a chance to escape if I can’t get to her.
Her breathing is softer now. Her too-tiny frame is swallowed by my muscular one as she begins to calm down. She’s not asleep. She’s content like this.
Here with me.
“You know that this all ends in blood, Little Siren. But if you don’t let me go, it will be our blood that spills, not theirs.”