Chapter 25 Silva #3
“You shouldn’t be here. The world kept moving, just as it was meant to.
You have a whole life that doesn’t include me in it anymore, Silva.
And I’m glad. I am happy for you. I hope you got everything you wanted, dove.
I’m sorry I couldn’t be the one to give it to you.
I don’t want to disrupt your life any more than I’ve already done. You should go home to your family.”
“You don’t get to sit there and give me your blessing!
” Her voice hitched with tears, a ring of hysteria making it reverberate against the tin tiles of the high ceiling.
“You’re not some benevolent ghost of my past, Tate.
You have no idea what you’re even talking about, but that doesn’t matter to you.
You’d rather cling to what you think is best than actually listen to me. ”
She broke off, sobbing as the tears overwhelmed her. Two years she’d searched for him. It was a tragic oversight that she’d never considered what this reunion might look like or how it would go.
“How is it that you were always so good at seeing me, Tate, but so bad at listening?”
She could almost see him distancing himself from her, mentally packing himself away from her again. She had a family that needed her, and he would hold himself outside that.
He had told her that, too, that very first weekend.
He expected her to leave and go on and do all of the things she was meant to do, according to that carefully designed roadmap .
. . and that he would be here when she needed an escape from her real life, a shadow on the side.
Not ever expecting or assuming he’d be a part of it. Too late for that.
He was so sure he was right, so certain he was being noble. Silva had no doubt that if she left right now and returned to the apartment in fifteen minutes, he would be gone and she’d never see him again. You could probably follow his bloody footprints.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Silva.”
She jumped to her feet as if his words were an electric shock. “Oh, you don’t know what to say? Now you don’t know what to say?”
She pulled the stack of folded letters from her bag, brandishing each, dropping them one at a time on him, letting them float down until they covered him like a blanket.
“You couldn’t tell me any of this with your mouth when you had the chance, right?
Because you didn’t know what to say. You let me twist every single day, not knowing where I stood because you didn’t know what to say.
Why? Why can’t you still just tell me? Why can’t you ever be honest about the way you feel?
Do you think reading all this after you were gone made it easier?
When the whole time we were together, this was all I wanted?
Why can’t you just let me in? That’s all I ever wanted, Tate.
For you to let me in. And you still won’t.
You thought about it. But you just couldn’t say it. ”
He was pushing himself up, and she could see it took him considerable effort to do so. She had no idea how he’d been let out of the hospital in such a sorry state. No wonder the apartment was a wreck, by his standards.
Silva snatched up the letters he’d written her. They were some of her most prized possessions, regardless of how angry she was, and she wasn’t about to leave them behind or let him rip them to shreds, if that was his intent.
“Silva, I love you more than anything in this world.” His voice had more strength behind it than he’d exhibited since she’d entered the room.
“You’re the only thing on either side of the veil that matters.
Five years, you said?” Hers wasn’t the only voice tinged in mania.
“It was days for me, dove. I was keeping track. Days. What would you like me to do? Come to your house and explain to your husband that I’m sure he’s had a good run for the last five years, but now some cunt he’s never laid eyes on is back, so the life you’ve built needs to come crashing down?
” He choked out a mad laugh at the thought.
Silva sank back into the chair before she fell, legs shaking. Days for him. Years for her. Not all that is lost must be followed.
“I love you, Silva,” he went on emphatically.
“Don’t be confused about that. My only aim when I was there was to keep you safe.
Keep you safe and make sure they’d never be able to find their way to you ever again.
You’re still my heartbeat and you always will be.
But the world kept moving, and I’m too late.
I don’t have the right to come back and ruin your life twice. ”
The silence when he was finished was overloud.
Silva dropped her head back and tried to breathe through the congestion of her tears.
The Pixie’s ventilation system hummed, and beyond the window, she could hear the sound of a delivery truck beeping as it backed up to a business.
She was exhausted. And he’s the one who looks like he fell off a cliff.
“What happened to you?” The question popped out, and when her eyes opened, she saw Tate had done the same as her — dropped back against his pillows, head tipped, eyes closed. “How did they even let you out of the hospital like this?”
His eyes opened, a clear look of annoyance on his face. It was the most Tate-like he’d looked since her arrival, and she couldn’t help the way her lips tugged to see it.
“I’m not even fucking hurt that badly. I’ve cracked my skull before. I can have Rukh hit my nose with a hammer and knock it back into place.”
“You were like a water fountain of blood. Don’t tell me you’re fine.”
“My ribs are broken. That’s it. The end. They’re fucking broken, and I’m going to be in pain every fucking time I breathe until they stop being broken. Nothing to do for it. One of them stabbed my lung; it happens. Aside from the excruciating pain, I’m fine now.”
“You were covered in blood,” she reminded him. “Covered in it, Tate. You have a hole under your eye.”
“Most of that blood wasn’t mine.”
His words sat heavily between them. There had been so much blood. There was no way one could lose that much blood and live to tell the tale, she’d thought then, so terrified he would succumb to his wounds in the hospital and die while she was gone.
“Whose was it?” She already knew, she thought, but she desperately needed him to confirm it. “The man by the water? He had teeth like yours. Was it his?”
Tate’s eyes had fluttered shut, his head dropped back against the pillows, as if the conversation exhausted him. “You won’t ever have to worry about him again, Silva.”
“Tell me.”
That hysterical note had returned to her voice, the mere thought of the man she’d dreamed of over and over again braiding her in fear.
Tate’s eyes opened, fixed on her, golden and unblinking, so like her little girl’s. “It was his.”
A shudder moved through her, five years of half-remembered nightmares shaking loose.
“What happened to him?” Silva was certain she knew the answer to that as well, but she needed the confirmation if she ever wanted those nightmares to slip free.
She listened to the sound of the hamlet waking up, traffic from the resort on the road. Tate’s eyes never moved from hers.
“He’s gone, Silva. You don’t need to worry about him anymore.”
Her exhalation left her winded as he nodded at the dresser across the room.
Silva rose woodenly. A watch, a beautiful gold-cased watch.
One of his grandfather’s, she could tell immediately from the fine craftsmanship and tiny details.
It was spotted in dried blood. We can clean that for him, make it good as new.
Beside the watch was a coin. Her stomach dropped at the sight of it, her hand shaking as she lifted it from the dresser’s polished surface.
An elvish coin, large and long out of circulation, minted exclusively for the wedding tradition of dropping a coin into a wishing well to ask for a baby. It was also covered in dried blood.
Silva spun, her eyes wide. She was doing the same thing she had just screamed at him for, making inferences without actually knowing, but she already knew what happened.
He had nearly gotten himself killed to retrieve the coin she had thrown into the paper wishing well at that wedding, where the man beside the pool had retrieved it.
He killed someone. Because of you. He almost died to save you . . . and now he’s trying to send you home to your husband. Because he’s a fucking idiot.
“He’s gone, dove. None of them will be able to find you.” Tate wheezed out a scraping laugh. “Won’t be able to find me, either, without the cunt there to do the fetching.”
The coin spun against the top of the dresser when she dropped it, crossing the room and several strides to perch on the edge of the bed beside him. Silva felt his quick intake of breath when she pressed her mouth to his, heard the slight hiss of pain behind it, but she didn’t care.
She could taste the salt of tears as she kissed him, but she couldn’t tell if they were his or hers.
There was a jagged line of stitches near the back of his head, felt as she pushed her fingers through his hair, her hand curling back to not touch the injury.
Her teeth were small and unsharp, nothing like his, but she bit his swollen lip anyway, knowing he’d never shove her roughly away.
The heat of his mouth was like coming home.
The mere thought made her crumple against him, lips sliding apart as she sobbed at his shoulder. Home. Five years, but now he was home. Are you family? Of course, they were.
“I thought you were going to die.” Saying the words out loud for the first time crystallized them; the fear she’d felt when he’d collapsed before her, nearly ripped away after being gone so long, only made her cry harder.