Chapter Six – Tristan
I sit on the top step of the stairwell, so I see when she comes. I watch as she goes into the office, where Wolf is already waiting for her. I don’t know why I sit there, but I do, even when I can’t hear or see anything for a while.
Will I sit there the entire time she’s here? Maybe. It isn’t like I have anything better to do. Wolf has kept my world immeasurably small—for good reason, but after a while it does get tiring.
I perk up like a damn dog when I see her come out. The door closes behind her, and though I can only see her feet from where I’m sitting, I know she’s standing there, motionless. If I have to guess, I’d say Wolf told her something she didn’t want to hear.
Trust me, I’d know all about that. The man has told me a lot of things that made me wish I could take a knife and plunge it into his chest, directly into his heart like the master assassin I used to be.
But, to his credit, I don’t think of murder with quite the same frequency anymore.
After a few moments, she takes off, except she doesn’t go toward the front door; she heads deeper into the house, like she’s desperately trying to get away from Wolf and whatever he said. I assume she can’t just hop in the car and leave; someone drives her here, though I don’t know who.
Wolf didn’t see her go. Now is my chance. Probably my only chance. Though it’s the last thing I should do, I could get up and find her—and if Wolf comes around, my excuse would be an easy one: I’m with her just to make sure she’s okay. Wolf couldn’t get too pissed at that, could he?
I shouldn’t. There are a million reasons why I shouldn’t get up and find her. I have no reason to speak with her, no reason at all to want to see her. Hell, I don’t know why I waited for her to arrive for her appointment. I don’t know her. Maybe I’m only curious because she’s kind of like a portal to the outside world, a world I haven’t seen in a long, long time.
I could sit there and debate with myself forever, but to do so would be to waste time, so I mentally say, fuck it , and I get up and noiselessly move down the stairs. Entering forbidden territory, but like I mentioned before, I have an excuse ready.
Through the house I go, checking the rooms as I pass them. It’s not long at all before I walk into the kitchen and happen to see her sitting in one of the chairs outside on the patio through the large windows on the house’s back end. I move to the back door. She left it open; it’s a slider, so I could walk right out and she wouldn’t hear.
I hold in a breath. I shouldn’t go out there. This is a bad idea. I’m not… I don’t know that I’ll ever be ready for something like this. On a country-wide list of severely fucked up individuals, I must be pretty damn close to the top.
I killed people—and not just any people, but my parents. My family’s butler. I killed family friends, and that’s ignoring the people I killed as an assassin. I cut out a man’s tongue and kept it in a jar because I didn’t like what the fucker said to my sister. I would have killed so many more if Shay would have sided with me. If she chose me.
But she didn’t, and my love for my sister was my ultimate downfall.
This, whatever this is, whatever it could be, could only end in disaster. Being here, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am not a man who will ever see a happy ending. My life is purgatory, plain and simple. I’m in the grave I dug for myself and there’s no way out of it.
So, no, I shouldn’t go out there with her. I shouldn’t speak to her. I shouldn’t want to.
But I do.
I step outside and move toward the chair on the other side of the table the girl sits at. I’m purposefully not quiet about it, so she hears me, and she turns her head and watches as I sit down three feet away. I don’t look at her. I stare out at the small grassy clearing just beyond the patio.
She sits a little straighter when she sees me, and I tug at the sleeves on my arms, making sure they’re down. The scars on my face are visible in the dull daylight, but hiding them is an impossible feat.
She’s the one who breaks the silence first, whispering a soft, “Hi.” The word is short and sweet, yet the trepidation is clear in her tone. She wants to talk to me, but at the same time she’s nervous and doesn’t quite know what to say.
I grind my teeth. Maybe this was a mistake after all. I should get up and go. This could only end badly, for her and for me, so it’s better for us to avoid it entirely.
“You’re Dr. Wolf’s other patient, right?” she asks. “I’m Mabel.”
Typically that’s when someone would tell the other person their name, but my jaw stays firmly clamped shut. Hmm. Maybe I’m not ready for this after all. I can’t seem to say a single word; you’d think I was the one with his tongue cut out and not that Palmer asshole.
She doesn’t seem to take it personally. Her gaze falls to her lap, where she toys with her hands in what must be an anxious gesture. “He seems smart. Maybe too smart. I don’t want what he says to be true.”
As she talks, I finally look at her. I only feel comfortable looking at her from such close a distance because she’s not paying attention to me. She’s not studying the scars on my face, so I take it upon myself to study her.
Her blond hair is messy, halfway between straight and curly. There are strands of it that are a more golden blond than others, and the length easily falls past her shoulders. She’s thin, like she doesn’t eat enough. Her body is currently being drowned underneath the hoodie she wears.
It’s like she doesn’t want the world to see her. Like she wants to be invisible. As someone who was invisible by his own choice for years, I understand the feeling well—though I don’t know why she would feel this way.
Suddenly she turns her head in my direction, meeting my stare with eyes the color of the current sky: a solid gray. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
I should look away, stop staring at her, but for some strange reason I can’t. All I do is shake my head no. If I could use my words right now, I’d tell her I don’t have access to the outside world, so if she’s been in the news or something, I haven’t seen or heard about it.
Her shoulders relax once I shake my head. It’s almost as if she’s grateful that I don’t know. I suppose I should feel the same since she doesn’t know me and what I’ve done.
“How long have you been here? A while?” Still she tries to make conversation with me, and my jaw is clamped shut, like someone used superglue on my mouth to keep it closed. After a while, she whispers, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have asked.”
The crestfallen expression on her face is the only reason I finally speak, though I don’t answer her most recent question. I answer the first one she spoke: “Tristan.”
“Tristan,” she repeats my name as a slow smile spreads across her face.
That smile… it’s the first smile I’ve seen in, fuck, I don’t even know how long. Longer than my time with Wolf. Longer than my imprisonment after my failed coup of the Black Hand. No one ever smiled at me when I was the man behind the mask, the Cobra.
It’s been years since someone smiled at me like that.Maybe the first time in my life.
Maybe it’s because of that smile, but I find myself asking, “Why are you out here when you should be in with Wolf?” I can’t take my eyes off her. The smile has faded by now, but the feeling it gave me remains. It really did light up her whole face.
Mabel shakes her head once. “He, um, he said something that made me feel… not good. He thinks he knows what happened, but…” She trails off and bites the inside of her cheek. “He doesn’t. I don’t think.” The moan she lets out before she covers her face with her hands is one that resonates with me, just as her smile did.
She’s upset. Wolf upset her. The latter of which is unsurprising; he’s an asshole through and through. The former is more noteworthy to me because of the simple fact that I care. I care that she’s upset.
I don’t know why. I don’t know her. This is the first time we’ve spoken. The only thing I can think of is that smile she gave me—how it stirred something deep within me. How I want that smile to come back. She can’t smile if she’s upset.
“I don’t know,” she mumbles. “Everything is just too complicated.”
Now that’s something I can understand.
“I hated everything Wolf said when I first got here,” I admit, though I do keep to myself the fact that he was pretty liberal with the shocks. Anytime I said something, tried to do something… well, Wolf took it upon himself to recondition me—and now look at me: a broken man who lost his mind when a pretty girl smiled at him.
“Now, I… I still hate everything he says.” When I say that, she chuckles—a soft, feminine sound that rattles me to my core. Just like her smile, that laugh is like nothing I’ve heard before. When you’re in my line of work, when your family is on the Black Hand, smiles and laughter are not things you see often.
Or, apparently, ever.
“But,” I go on, though it’s much harder to continue after hearing her laugh, “he’s not wrong most of the time. He sees things most people don’t.” Because he’s a psychopath himself, but that’s something I keep to myself. Mabel might be traumatized and working through her own issues, but she doesn’t need to know her new therapist is a madman.
Mabel’s voice comes out so soft I hardly hear it when she says, “If he’s right, then my entire life was a lie. Every happy memory is wrong. How am I supposed to live with something like that?”
Her words resonate with me more than they should, but all I end up doing is shrugging and whispering, “I don’t know. You just do.”
She looks as though she wants to say something else, but a third person breaks into our conversation with a harsh, “Mabel.” We both glance to the patio door and see Wolf standing there, frowning slightly. “It seems you did not go to the restroom.” Then his narrowed stare flicks to me and he adds, “And you, Tristan. You’re supposed to be upstairs in your room while Mabel is here.”
Mabel glances between Wolf and me, and she must sense that something’s wrong, perhaps that Wolf isn’t happy with me being here, because she hurriedly says, “He just came out here to make sure I was okay.”
Yet another thing I’m not used to. First a smile, then a laugh, and now she’s defending me when she has no reason to. I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.
The severity on Wolf’s face lessens when he addresses Mabel once more, “And are you okay?”
She nods, but she does look at me before she gives the affirmative, like she’s checking to make sure I’m okay or something. “Yeah,” she whispers as she stares at me. “I’m good.”
“Wonderful,” Wolf muses dryly. “Now, we should get back to your session.”
Mabel meekly gets up, listening to Wolf, and I have to fight every instinct inside me to leap up and stop her. I want to, God how I want to, but I let her go, and I watch as she walks past Wolf and disappears inside the house.
And just like that the sky seems darker, the world a little more gray.
“Give me a moment to speak with Tristan,” Wolf tells her. “I’ll be with you shortly.” He must wait until she’s no longer nearby—no longer in earshot, in other words, before he strides over to me.
I don’t get up. I know if I do, it’ll be seen as an act of aggression… and at this point, considering the fact that he’s the only reason Mabel and I aren’t talking more right now, it might actually be aggressive on my end.
“She has her demons, as you do, but your demons are a different type than hers. I don’t think you’re ready, Tristan. Do you?” His current doubt in me makes me wonder if there will ever come a point where he’ll claim that I am, in fact, ready, or if he’ll always come up with some excuse as to why I must be a prisoner in this house and on these grounds.
My jaw grinds, and in the end I don’t say a single word. How can I, when Wolf has a thousand retorts ready to prove me otherwise?
I’m not ready. I might never be ready, it’s true. A huge part of me is dead. That part of me died in Cypress when my beloved Shay shot me three times.
Wolf takes my silence as his answer, and he turns away from me and goes to presumably return to his session with Mabel, leaving me outside in the grayish day all alone, as I typically am.
The wind brushes past me, touching my cheek like an invisible lover. I close my eyes and remember that smile, that laugh, how she defended me without hesitation even though she doesn’t know me and I never asked her to. When I open my eyes, I realize something.
She looked at me. At me, not at the scars. When she met my gaze, she did so in the full definition of the word. Her stare never once fell to the many thin scars scattered across my face. Mabel looked at me like I was a man, not a man wearing a face full of scars.
Such a short encounter, so short it would be hardly worthy of note to most people. Completely forgettable to some. But not to me. My conversation with Mabel and everything therein will keep me up tonight, I just know it.
And that smile… it will haunt me until I see it again.
I need to see it again.
I need to see her again.
That need overtakes everything I am and forces me to wait inside. I sit near the window on the second floor, the same window I watched her leave in before. Time crawls by, but if there’s one thing I learned in the past, it’s that patience is truly a virtue. Sometimes you need to wait close to eternity to get what you want—and sometimes no matter how long you wait you’ll never see your dreams achieved.
I don’t know what, if anything, could happen here, but I’m going to find out. My need to see Mabel’s smile again feels just as strong as the obsession that ultimately led me to be here in the first place.
My obsessions never end well.