Chapter 23 #2
I shake my head, refusing. I’ll be damned if I add anything else to the slabs already weighing down our chests.
I promised I wouldn’t lie, and I don’t care about it right now. I’ll lie if it keeps her smiling. “I handle things differently from others. Don’t mistake me losing my train of thought?—”
“Bullshit,” she snaps, disgust radiating from her explicit.
I school my face into an impassive stare. “It’s not.”
“I know you think you’re helping. You think by being the one who never loses their shit that you can keep both of our heads above water. You can’t. It will drown you.”
“Forgive me if I don’t want to give them the pleasure.”
Why am I fighting her? Why is my voice souring when I’ve waited so damn long to be in this exact spot with her?
When I move away, she grabs my sleeve, digging into the cashmere. “Tell me what they did to you. Be honest.”
“No.”
She won’t ease up, seeking my eyes when I refuse them. “Tell me how losing your mother made you feel. ”
“ No .”
She’s fisting my shirt, stretching the material, hissing when I shove her hands down, walking off to decompress. To stop the ticking bomb that lives inside me from imploding.
I'm rounding a sculpture when she appears on the other side, a vision of rage. As if reaching out for a lifeline, her hands surround the back of my neck, stretching her toes to reach my height, and I still have to dip my chin to look at her.
This feeling is so familiar. It began when I lost her, and it hasn’t left. I hate it. I fucking loathe it—hopelessness. I didn’t know the true meaning until she was gone.
My plea is soft and utterly desperate. “Sophie, please .”
Her wild inky waves frame her face. A face that, in just a few days, seems to glow as brightly as the heavens do. She’s an angel—my angel. For over a year, that wasn’t just a thought. It was a real, hard fact I lived with every single fucking day.
“Your father. Tell me what hurting him did to you,” she says, cupping my face as I avert my gaze. “Tell me what you felt when they told you I was dead. Tell me what being this has done to you. Tell me all of it!”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t bring you here for this. This isn’t how this was supposed to go.”
“These sculptures are beautiful, Xavier. This place is a dream. But they fail miserably compared to what’s right in front of me.” Sophie’s lips press against my cheek. I close my eyes, my hands tight around her wrists. “My pain doesn’t strip you of yours. We are broken, so broken. And that’s okay.”
Fuck. I can’t do this.
She shifts until my eyes are forced to return to her. Does she see the terror?
“It’s okay , baby. We’ve earned the right to feel this.”
The urge to lash out at her stems from a deep-seated darkness, a force that says she’s right, that there’s no way around this. It’s not something I can fix and arrange like everything else in my life.
When I look at her, I see myself beaten on the floor of her apartment in the heart of Madrid.
I see the gun on my nightstand, once a form of protection that, in her absence, became a temptation.
I see the shell of a man who struggled to move, let alone run an entire organization, raise a child, anticipate betrayals, and search every day for the wife he failed to protect.
“I’ve wanted to die,” I whisper. “Every damn day, from the moment I opened my eyes till I drank them closed, it’s all I’ve thought about.”
The horror that crosses her face hearing that confession is precisely what kept my mouth shut in the first place. But she wants to hear it. Fine .
“I can’t remember the last time I slept through a full night.
I can’t remember when my body was free of phantom pain from the punishments they carried out on me, places that are still numb from where my nerves permenantly severed.
This feeling didn’t begin when I lost you; it developed while you were trapped and I wasn’t.
While I had to pretend to give a shit about the man who was ordering abuse on you day in and day out. ”
Now that it’s spilling out of me, she’s frightened.
“I still look at you and imagine all the times I saw you over the last four years and had to tell myself that you weren’t real.
That I would never see you again. That I would never touch you again or feel even a shred of happiness. I'm still there, Sophie.”
“I’d be scared if you weren’t,” she says. “This pain means you’re still you.”
“Sometimes, I feel anything but myself.”
“Well, I’ll love him too. Any version of you.”
She brings my hands to her face, pressing them against her flushed skin. “I'm here. X, I’m here. ”
The sculptures stand as silent observers while my hands trace where the shadows fade, both outside my skin and within, wanting nothing more than to lose myself in her warmth.
When she guides my head to hers, my eyes wander to the ceiling, that camera, and the men in the booth.
“Not here,” I breathe against her.
“Why?”
Nothing has gone the way I want it to. “The cameras. My… soldiers.”
She locates the red flashing dot on the security camera in the room’s corner, lowering her face. “They’re here?”
“I wanted to laugh tonight.” My teeth grind. “Ease your mind. But we’re in public, and being alone isn’t a luxury we can afford when the other territories would do just about anything to unseat me.”
Her sapphire depths are endless in this dim light. “Where are you safest?”
Deep down, she knows where.
It’s a fortress we’ve been avoiding for days.
“Then take me there,” Sophie says, walking into my chest. “Now.”
“Soph.” I'm not ready.
Her arms surround my waist as we walk towards the exit, crossing the galleries and corridors of art unseen.
She buries her head into the crook of my arm, clinging to me as we pass the curious attendant wordlessly.
Two capos are waiting beyond the doors, bowing their heads as we scale the stairs.
She doesn’t lift her head to see the row of soldiers lining the street, one who is opening the door to a bulletproof vehicle.
Stepping off the curb, I guide her inside, passing a look to my driver. “Michael.”
“Boss.”
“Take us to the estate.”
Sinking into the sleek leather, I'm already planning how to make this easier for her when Sophie, not bothering to clip her seatbelt, slides across the leather, melting to my side. Our gazes shift to the museum we walked into as free people and left as this. Right back where we started.
Sophie gently guides my face to hers, such exquisite beauty amongst this darkness. “We’ll come back here, X… when we’re ready to laugh.”