Chapter 20 #2
Alexander watched the stage, yes, yet part of him remained permanently aware of Diana at his side—of the faint perfume at her throat, of the rise and fall of her breathing, of the way her gloved hands rested in her lap in stillness when she was absorbed by something and tightened when emotion reached her.
Tonight, she was moved.
He sensed the change in her before he fully saw it.
Something in her posture shifted during a scene in which the mother, with heartbreaking tenderness, prepared to leave her child in safer hands rather than risk his destruction with them.
The father knelt before the boy and spoke of love in the language of farewell, and when Alexander glanced toward Diana at the same instant, he saw the sheen in her eyes.
She blinked once, slowly, trying to master whatever memory the scene had called up, and something in Alexander gave a hard, painful twist.
Her parents. He knew it at once. The look on her face now was too private and too old to belong to the play alone.
Without speaking, he moved his hand across the narrow divide between their seats until it rested lightly atop hers.
Diana flinched and turned her face toward him in the dimness of the box. The stage light cast soft, shifting patterns over her features. For one suspended second, she only looked at him, and he saw the effort she was making not to let her emotion spill past the decorum the theatre demanded.
His thumb brushed once across the back of her hand. Her fingers turned beneath his and closed around his hand instead.
The response was small and immediate, and it went through him with startling force. She leaned the barest fraction closer. The effect of that trust upon him was so profound that for a moment the stage vanished entirely.
He became aware only of her hand in his and the quiet plea hidden in the way she held it.
Comfort me. Stay. Do not make me bear this alone.
His chest tightened. It was absurd, perhaps, how fiercely he wanted to answer that unspoken plea, how instinctively his entire being moved toward her pain.
She turned toward him, composed, though there was a softness in her expression he had not seen earlier in the evening.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“For what?”
Her glance flickered toward the stage below. “For noticing.”
Alexander held her gaze. “I always notice.”
He had said those words to her once before, but tonight they landed differently.
Something passed between them in the stillness that followed, though Alexander was not yet prepared to name it.
I would do this forever.
The realization startled him.
The play continued, but he could not have named a single line afterward.
The rest of the evening passed with outward smoothness. They took their leave of the others after the final applause, returning by carriage through streets glossed dark with mist and lamplight.
Diana was quieter than she had been on the ride there, though not unhappily so. Once, when the carriage turned sharply, her shoulder brushed his. Neither of them moved away.
Alexander sat awake long after the house had gone still.
He did not at first understand why sleep refused him.
He had known fatigue. The theatre, the evening air, the closeness of Diana beside him in the carriage and earlier in the box, all should have left him pleasantly spent.
Instead, he felt restless beneath the skin, as if some deeper part of him remained alert.
It had been happening more often.
Not every night, but enough that he recognized the pattern. He would sleep heavily for several hours, then wake with his body rigid, his pulse unsteady, and some shadow of memory clinging to him without form. Usually, it vanished before he could seize it.
Tonight was different.
He dreamed of leather first.
Not the object itself, but the smell of it, old and sharp in a room gone close with heat. Then came the sound—heavy footfalls, a man’s voice, low and cruel in its restraint, as though fury delivered quietly was somehow more terrifying than shouting.
He was not fully in the dream before terror entered it.
His body braced too hard as his hands clenched at his sides. The knowledge that flinching would make it worse. Then came the strike. Pain split across the back of his shoulders. A voice saying something about weakness.
Alexander woke with a violent jerk.
The darkness of his bedchamber swam into focus slowly, moonlight falling in pale bars across the rug while his breath tore in and out of him far too hard for a man waking in safety.
He sat upright at once, one hand braced against the bedpost, the other pressed against his ribs as though he might force his heart back under control by sheer pressure.
For several seconds, he could not tell where he was.
The realization he was in his room came in pieces, but the feeling did not leave.
His back ached with a ghost pain. His skin felt too tight. Sweat had gathered cold at his temple and along the back of his neck. More than memory, the nightmare left behind a certainty so vicious it made his stomach turn.
My father.
Despite his incomplete, unclear memories, he knew.
Alexander swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there in the dark, breathing through the remnants of panic with his elbows braced on his thighs.
The room was silent but for the faint hiss of the dying fire and the clock ticking somewhere beyond the dressing room door.
He stared at the floorboards without seeing them, every muscle still taut as wire.
He had remembered more, and the knowledge horrified him.
If this was the man who had shaped his childhood, then the harsher edges of himself no longer felt abstract. They had roots. He could feel them now, twined through memory and instinct alike.
He rose at last and crossed to the washstand, pouring water into the basin. When he splashed the cold water over his face, the shock of it cleared some of the haze from his thoughts, but not the memory.
He straightened slowly, water dripping from his jaw, and met his own reflection in the dark mirror above the basin.
The face that looked back at him was his own and yet not entirely familiar—sandy hair fallen loose, green eyes shadowed, expression harder now than it had been when he retired only hours before.
He set both hands on the washstand and lowered his head briefly.
The theatre returned to him then without warning.
Diana’s eyes shining with unshed tears in the dark, and her hand turning beneath his until she held him back. Something in his chest eased by the smallest degree.
Even in the wake of his forgotten memories, the thought of her remained the only thing that did not feel uncertain.
He knew what she did to him. Knew what it was to want to protect her, comfort her, keep her safe from every cruelty the world had shown her and every cruelty he himself had once added to her life by walking away.
And knew, with growing unease, that he was already far in too deep to pretend otherwise.