CHAPTER 99 ROHAN
ROHAN
Tears did not suit Savannah Grayson. Tchaikovsky did. Rohan gave himself a moment to observe her in her natural environment: an indoor half-court, with nary a basketball in sight. Three of the four walls bore mirrors—or they had, once upon a time.
Every single one of those mirrors had been shattered.
Rohan didn’t spare even one glance for his splintered reflection as he made his presence known, stepping between Savannah and the closest shattered mirror.
“If you feel compelled to slam me back against the wall…” Rohan just almost managed to smirk. “Be gentle.”
Savannah just stared at him. “You’re alive.”
Rohan knew an accusation when he heard one. “So it would seem.” He waited, but Savannah said nothing, did nothing. At least she wasn’t crying now.
“Where is she?” Rohan asked, prodding at her. “Our cat?”
“Our cat?” Savannah repeated dangerously.
There you are, winter girl. Rohan went to smile but found himself swallowing instead. So this was what it felt like to offer up one’s throat. “If it’s any consolation, love, if I were any slower, I would be dead. If I had any less endurance, I would have drowned.”
And if I were a coward, I wouldn’t be here.
“I thought you were dead.” Savannah’s voice shook. Her feet were bare, but Rohan was fairly certain that if she’d been wearing heels, she would have found a way to weaponize them. “Get out.”
“I’m here,” Rohan told her. “I am right here, Savannah.”
“Go away, Rohan.”
“If you play any game long enough, certain patterns will always repeat.” Rohan had never heard his own voice sound tender before.
“Allow me to save you the trouble of telling me that I don’t get to decide what you do next, that the one and only thing I will ever get to decide about us again is whether I really am that scared.
Of you. And the answer to that is yes.” He willed his body to take a step toward her, and she stepped back.
“Truth be told, you terrify me, Savannah Grayson.”
Love was weakness. Rohan knew that. He’d known that for as long as he could remember. But I’m here, aren’t I?
“Why?” Savannah’s voice was cold as ice.
Why am I here? Rohan managed a smile this time. “Why do you terrify me? How long do you have?”
“Why won’t you let me go?” This time, Savannah’s voice came out halfway between an accusation and an ache. “I was done. Why won’t you let me be done?”
Love was a thing that happened to some people, but Rohan didn’t want to be a thing that happened to Savannah. What choice did we have? Right from the start, love, what choice did either one of us have?
So he gave one. “One last wager,” Rohan proposed, “and if you win, I will leave, and you need never see or hear from me again.”
“It’s always one more wager with you.”
“Three questions. I will ask you three yes-or-no questions. Get them all correct, and you win.” Rohan didn’t give her a chance to negotiate those terms before unleashing the first of his gambits. “When I was six years old, did I bludgeon a grown man to death with a rock?”
Savannah stared at him. “Dark water. You couldn’t swim.”
“Yes or no, Savannah?”
“Yes.”
Rohan looked down. “For the longest time, I thought I’d killed my mother, too.”
For the longest time, anything soft or warm, anything safe or real had felt like a trap.
“I was his leverage against her, and she was his leverage against me, but when I made sure he couldn’t hurt either one of us ever again, she looked at me like I was the monster.
She pushed me away, and I have been pushing people away ever since. ”
This was Rohan on his knees.
This was him offering her his throat.
“What’s your second question?” Savannah’s expression was impossible to read.
Countless, shattered versions of them stared back at Rohan as he answered. “When I believed your life to be at stake, did I sign away the Proprietorship—the Mercy—to save you?”
The blood seemed to drain right out of Savannah. She shook her head. Something like vulnerability flickered in her wintery eyes, but it didn’t last as she shook her head a second time, staring bullets in him.
“Is that your final answer, love?”
“You son of a bitch.” Her fury was a thing to behold. She was.
“Answer the question, Savannah, yes or no?”
Savannah Grayson was many things, but she was not a coward. “You wouldn’t be asking,” she bit out, “if the answer was no.”
“And thus,” Rohan said, memorizing her eyes, her voice, the way she stood, “by the process of elimination, the answer is…”
“Yes.” She said that word like she hated him for making her say it, like she ached with the truth of it and hated him for that, too.
“Yes,” Rohan murmured back. Yes, he’d chosen her.
Back when he was still a coward, back when he could not let himself feel a fraction of what he felt now, he had chosen her.
“You told me once,” Rohan continued, “that you do not want things, that you set goals and achieve them—but I want, Savannah, and I always have.”
“I gave you what you wanted.” Savannah closed her eyes, and when she opened them, there was fire behind the ice. “I gave you your everything.”
You are my everything, Rohan thought, but the second he opened his mouth, she came at him.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, her face less than an inch from his. “Don’t you say it.”
Rohan took Savannah’s hand in his. “You decide,” he said, brushing his lips over her knuckles. “Not me.” He eyed a bandage on one of her fingers. “Little thing’s still biting, I see.”
A quiver passed through Savannah’s body, and a moment later, she ripped her hand from his. “Leave. Right now, Rohan, or so help me—”
“You have to answer one more question,” Rohan said quietly. “A deal’s a deal.”
“Then ask it,” Savannah said, her voice breaking, “and go.”
She wasn’t a person who broke, wasn’t a person who quivered, and Rohan had never been one to drop to his knees and offer up his throat, but he did it now. He literally, physically went down on his knees before her, tilting his head back to meet her gaze.
“Do I love you?” he asked. Everything in him rebelled at the question. Every muscle, every bone, every ending of every nerve, every wall built up in his mind over years and years. He repeated himself. “Do I love you?”
A tear slipped from Savannah’s eye as she stared down at him. “I hate you,” she said. “I hate you so much.”
Rohan stood, taking her head in his hands. “That’s not an answer, love.”
Savannah closed her eyes but didn’t pull back from his touch. “Go.”
“One more right answer,” Rohan told her, “and I will.”
Her chest heaved with every breath, and still, she did not pull back. “I hate you, Rohan.”
“I know,” he murmured.
“You’re a liar.” Her voice broke again.
“I always have been.” He allowed his thumb to trace her jaw.
“This is the part,” Savannah whispered, “where you tell me that we are all liars.”
“This is the part,” Rohan replied, his voice hoarse, “where I tell you that I’ve been stripped down to raw truth: what matters, what doesn’t, what I am, and what I could be.”
“I am not asking you to be anything for me.”
“You weren’t made for asking, Savannah Grayson. Everything about you is a command. Your eyes, your lips, the set of your jaw…” Everything about her was perfect to him. “Answer the question, love.”
And there I go, giving the answer away again.
“Don’t,” Savannah said fiercely. “Don’t call me that.”
“Savannah.” Rohan lingered on her name. “Do I love you?”
Her hand made its way to his face. “I don’t love you,” she whispered.
“Good thing that wasn’t the question,” Rohan said. He hadn’t come here to make her show her throat. He hadn’t come here with any expectations at all. “And as it happens, I’ve never known you to back down from a wager.”
“You don’t know me.” She didn’t call him British, the way she had, once upon a time. She didn’t call him Rohan, didn’t even call him nothing.
Nihil.
“I know,” Rohan told her, “that short hair suits you, and so does winning. I know that you hate flowers and most especially roses. I know that you were your father’s favorite, and your sister is yours.
I know that you are a woman of your word and that you see right through me.
I know that someone made you think that you are cold when you burn like no one I have ever met.
I know that you cannot bring yourself to lose to me, even now.
So tell me, Savannah Grayson: Do I love you? ”
She stared at him and into him. She threw knives at him with her eyes. “Yes.” Her voice broke. “Now go.”
“A deal,” Rohan said, “is a deal.” He didn’t get to decide what he was to her. All he got to decide was who he was without the Mercy, and that was a person who had dared at last to reach for something warm and real.
He turned—to go.
“Just like that?” Savannah said behind him. Her words washed over him, and Rohan heard her take a single step forward—toward him.
“Consider it proof,” Rohan replied, his own voice breaking, “that I am capable of holding up my end of a deal.”
Suddenly, she wasn’t behind him anymore. “I hate you,” Savannah told him, tears streaking down her face in earnest now, and Rohan could not help thinking that she said I hate you the way Toby Hawthorne had always said the name Hannah. “I hate you, Rohan.”
Rohan stared at and into her, memorizing every last detail of her face, of her tears, of this moment. “I know.”
With a flash of teeth, Savannah pushed her fingers roughly into his hair. She pulled his head down toward hers, his lips down toward hers. No hesitation.
She’d always been incapable of hesitation.
Rohan kissed her, knowing better than to hope it meant anything. He knew better than to hope, period.
But then, he’d known better from the start.
“There will,” Savannah said, her lips moving against his in a way that let him—made him—feel her everywhere, “be rules.”
There would be rules—and the two of them would break them.
Again.
And again.
And again.
“I don’t know how to be anything but a magnificent bastard,” Rohan warned her. “I don’t know how to live in this world. I don’t know how to be normal.”
“What ever gave you the idea,” Savannah murmured, “that I want normal?”
Her lips made their way to Rohan’s neck, and he drove his hands into her hair. His shirt came off, and her nails came out, and he smiled.
“What’s the board, Savannah?”
Ice-blue eyes locked on to his. “The world.”
The world and the whole damn sky. “Has anyone ever offered,” Rohan murmured into her, “to give you the world?”