Chapter 39
DOVE
At first, I have no words.
I just cry.
I fucking cry and cry, screaming into his chest. Then I cry some more, because I’m angry with myself for crying in the first place, instead of dropping to my knees and begging his forgiveness.
Because as the truth sinks into me like razorblades, the realization and recognition of that truth flows out of my veins like blood.
I’m not Dove.
I’m the other.
The razorblade twists, gouging and carving deeper.
I’m not Dove.
I’m Lark.
And I’m the villain of this story.
Eventually, the only sound is my hitched, ragged breath as he holds me in his arms, both of us still kneeling in the middle of the room.
When I shift because my knees are starting to ache, Bane pulls me with him as he moves to sit against the wall. I slide down to the floor beside him, numb, just staring into space, my hands limp in my lap.
We sit in silence for so long I lose track of time.
Bane’s brow furrows. I glance at him curiously when he leans over and reaches underneath the old desk. He smirks, pulling out an ancient, half-crumpled pack of cigarettes with a loop of duct tape glued to the back of it.
“Agatha hated it when you smoked,” he says quietly, slipping one between his lips and lighting it with a faded pink plastic lighter stuffed into the pack.
The end of it glows and catches as he inhales. I feel my throat tighten as he exhales a thin plume of smoke through his lips. He plucks the cigarette away from his mouth and hands it my way without looking at me.
“Oh, no, I quit after rehab.”
Bane says nothing, just staring straight ahead. He doesn’t pull the smoldering cigarette back from me.
“Actually…thanks,” I mumble, taking it from him. My fingertips brush the backs of his knuckles as I do, and I feel a deep, dark pulse between us as I bring the smoke to my lips.
“You always looked like her.”
His voice is husky, his eyes still stabbing into the opposite wall. I take a long drag of the cigarette, feeling the dry bite of the smoke hitting the back of my throat. I exhale, hoping to God the nicotine calms my frantic pulse, and hand the cigarette back to him.
Bane’s eyes stay glued ahead as he takes another puff, gray smoke curling like ribbons around his head and drifting on still air toward the ceiling.
“For being fraternal, not identical twins…” He shakes his head. “You always did look so similar. It was the personalities and the way you presented yourselves to the world that were different. Dove was the popular cheerleader. You were—”
“The unpopular psycho,” I grumble before I can stop myself.
Bane snorts, one side of his mouth lifting in a small smirk. He takes another slow drag of the cigarette and hands it back to me, his face darkening.
“When Antonio and the rest of your father’s men barged into the house on Staten Island, the room you were in was the first door they kicked in. And there you were, black hair shaved—”
“I think it was purple,” I say quietly.
Bane shakes his head. “No, you’d dyed it raven-black three days before.”
My gaze drops to the floor. “Oh,” I say.
“In that place, with your hair shaved off and the rest of your personality stripped away by that motherfucker,” he growls, “when Antonio kicked in the door, he thought you were Dove; Cesare’s daughter and princess of the Marchetti empire.
So you are who they grabbed. Antonio was there to get you both, obviously, but his boss’s daughter was the priority.
They were carrying you out when the chemicals from Lorenzo's meth lab went up and the place exploded.”
He takes the cigarette from where I'm holding it out to him, still looking dead ahead, like he can’t look at me.
Maybe like he doesn’t want to.
“Then that fucking roof beam came down and hit the side of your head, and took your memory…”
He closes his eyes, his mouth turning grim.
“When you woke up in the hospital, everyone was calling you Dove. They all thought that's who you were. And you thought you were Dove because that’s what everyone called you. They pressed you to remember things. They showed you pictures and told you stories, and you remembered Dove’s life because you had been in her life since day one. ”
His Adam’s apple bobs.
“You remembered those birthdays because you were there too,” Bane growls like broken glass. “You remembered her triumphs and wins, because you celebrated them with her. You remembered her sad days because you were there to comfort her.”
A bitter, broken sound cracks the silence, and it takes me a second to realize it’s me.
Tears roll down my cheeks, my breath coming unevenly. I take the cigarette back when he offers it, my hands shaking as I suck greedily at the smoke. I inhale deeply, filling my lungs with black poison, trying to drown myself in it.
“Lark.”
I startle to hear that name from his lips. I slowly turn to look at him with haggard eyes. Bane nods his chin at the cigarette between my fingers, and when I look at it in a daze, I see it’s burned all the way down to the filter.
Wordlessly, Bane pulls an old mug off the top of the desk and sets it on the floor between us. He drops the burned stub of the cigarette into it, pulls a fresh one from the pack, and lights it. He exhales slowly and passes the new one to me.
“Does…” I shiver as I bring the cigarette to my lips. “Does my dad know?”
Bane shakes his head thoughtfully.
“Honestly? I don't know. I’ve wondered, though. If he did…”
“All I’ve ever been to him is a bargaining chip to further his empire,” I say bitterly. “I mean, at least in the last seven years…that I’ve been her.”
By which I mean, even if Dad did realize it was Lark and not Dove who came out of that building alive, if everyone was calling me Dove, and I thought I was Dove…
Well, he still has a daughter to trade via an arranged marriage.
Which leads to the next question that comes burning to the front of my mind.
“Does he know?” I croak. “I mean, about—”
Bane glances at me. “That he had twin daughters? I'm not sure,” he says quietly. “I knew it from you years ago that Dove’s mom had died during childbirth. But then, that video…” His eyes tighten with sadness and sympathy as he shakes his head again.
“I don’t know if Cesare knows you’re his daughter, or if he was an absent enough father that he didn’t even notice that you weren’t Dove—”
“You didn’t either,” I blurt, bitterness creeping into my voice. I look away, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.
“I was in pain,” he chokes. “I was dying inside, because I thought I’d lost you. And when I saw who I was told was Dove, alive and well, at your funeral…”
I turn to watch his face crumple as he sucks furiously at the cigarette, eyes stabbing into the opposite wall as he shakes his head.
“I was so fucking angry,” he hisses. “That Dove would live through that, and you wouldn’t.
I was so bitter that the one thing I had that made me happy and stopped the screaming in my head and the nightmares had been ripped away from me, and the very fucking person who’d talked her into going out that night was the one person who’d come home. ”
He passes the fresh cigarette to me and looks up, exhaling a thin smoke curl.
“I was blinded,” he growls. “By pain, and rage, and my need for vengeance, and I pushed you away.”
We’re both quiet for another minute, just passing the cigarette back and forth, until it burns out too. Bane drops it into the mug, and I reach for a third.
Not because I want the nicotine. I need the burn of the smoke in my lungs and the sting of it in my eyes. I need the cigarette occupying my hands, because if not, I’m going to pick my cuticles to fucking ribbons.
“How long have you known.”
The question drops like deadweight from my mouth. When he remains silent as he takes the cigarette from my fingers, I turn to him.
“How long,” I choke, staring at him as he drags on the smoke. “How long have you known I’m—”
“Since the roof.”
Bane nods, still looking at the wall in front of us. “Since that night on the roof, on the eighty-third floor. When you called for a truce, and shook my hand…”
His head swivels, eyes dropping to my hands twisting in my lap. He points with the cigarette to the burn on the back of my right hand. Then I tremble when he takes that hand with his free one, running his thumb over the scar.
“I felt this when I took your hand…” He swallows heavily. “And I knew.”
The sound that I hear inside me is my heart breaking in half. It’s the truth hitting me like a punch to the gut, doubling me over as all my air, my strength, and my very soul are all knocked out of me.
Bane’s dark, piercing gaze drags up to mine. “I knew you were the girl I loved ever since the night we didn’t jump, baby.”
Tears instantly well up in my eyes, running in hot rivulets down my face as I swallow back a sob.
“Don’t call me that,” I choke. “Please don’t ever call me that.”
He frowns.
“Baby?” I spit, feeling sick, unable to stop the tears and the snot from choking my voice. “I don’t deserve babys.” My face falls as I look up at him, my heart in my hands. “Bane, I was horrible to you,” I whisper brokenly.
His brow knits. “No, you were—”
“Yes, I was,” I insist. “I’ve read the diary,” I say bitterly.
“I lied to you. Manipulated you. Said awful, shitty things…” My face twists.
“I was a monster to you,” I breathe, my voice cracking as I reach for the cigarette and bring it to my lips.
I take a heavy drag, my body trembling as the full weight of what I did sinks into me. “I was a cruel, vengeful, bitch to—“
“You wrote down your worst thoughts in that dairy,” he growls. “Just like people posting the best versions of themselves on social media, you took all your horrible parts and put them in that book to get them out of your head.”
“Stop it,” I choke. “Don’t you dare try to rewrite history. Don’t you dare try to say that you never hated me for the bullshit I pulled and the way I treated you, Bane.”
He whips his head around to stare at me.
“You think I never hated you?” he spits venomously.
“Is that what you want to hear?! Fine!” he roars.
“Yeah, Lark, I fucking hated your bullshit sometimes! I hated the way you acted, and the mind games, and the way you’d try to make me jealous by flirting with that motherfucker Scott Hathaway right in front of me!
!” His lips snarl, teeth glinting as he glares at me.
“I hated all that,” he spits. “But most of all?!”
His cold dark eyes pierce right into my soul.
“I hated that I couldn’t fucking hate you. I hated you for making me love you, and never once releasing me from your spell, no matter what you did or said.”
The air leaves my body with a whoosh as his words slam into me like a fist to the stomach.
But I deserve it, and so much worse.
“But when you love something,” he continues, “you love it for all that it is. You don’t love it despite its flaws.
You love it because of those flaws.” He yanks the cigarette from my fingers and brings it viciously to his mouth.
“I think that’s partly why I trapped you in this marriage once I realized who you were. To keep you caged with me.”
My heart wrenches as he takes a deep breath, then turns to let his eyes nail me to the fucking floor.
“And I was fucking angry,” he growls. “So fucking angry. Angry with myself for pushing you away in my grief and pain and not realizing what had happened. Angry with you…” He closes his eyes, squeezing them shut.
“For all of it, and the way you spiraled so hard at the end. So yeah, part of all of this was that I wanted to punish you.”
He shoves the cigarette back my way.
“But I was also angry for all the shit you’d done to yourself. The self-harm. The drugs. Being on that roof looking to kill yourself. All the fucking men that came after I shoved you out of my life—”
“I lied.”
The words pop out of my mouth in a jumbled rush.
“There… There weren’t dozens,” I mumble.
I take one last drag of the cigarette, my throat on fire after sharing three of these fucking things with him. I drop it into the mug and twist my body toward him.
“Not dozens,” I say quietly. I reach for his hand, tangling my fingers with his. “Not a dozen. Not even half a dozen— ”
“Lark—”
“Or five, or four, or three—”
“Baby—“
“There was never anyone after you,” I choke. I swivel on my knees to face him fully and take both his hands in mine, holding them tight as my body is wracked by a sudden shudder. “Even though I didn’t know there was a you.”
Bane’s face is hard, his eyes sparking with dark fire as he turns to face me.
“There was no one after you for me, either,” he says quietly.
My heart twists, a choke ripping from my throat as I clench his hands tighter.
“And I lied, too,” he growls, his eyes locked with mine as he leans into me.
I lean in as well, until my forehead touches his. My breath is shaky and haggard, my pulse skipping in a staccato thud.
“About?”
Bane closes his eyes, inhaling deeply like he’s trying to breathe me into his very lungs.
“I never actually did hate you,” he breathes. His eyes open to lock with mine as his hands cup my face. “I’m incapable of anything but loving you. That’s my flaw.”
A tear trickles down my cheek and over his fingers. I tremble, breathing in his scent and trying to press my forehead to his tightly enough that we absorb each other.
“I’ve got so many flaws,” I whisper. “I don’t know why you would love—”
“Because to me, you’re perfect,” he growls. “Because your only flaw was loving me back.”
I don’t know who technically kisses the other. All I know is, when our lips crush together, and when the sob of agony, love, and rebirth wrenches from my throat?
I’m home.
I know who I am.
I know I love him.
And nothing on Earth will ever take those truths away.