61. Harlow
HARLOW
S itting on the boarding house window seat, I don’t feel a shred of guilt for what I’ve done. I feel more cleansed from my anger than I did from my bath.
Ever since my magic showed up twenty-five years ago, I’ve stuffed my rage down and allowed it to rot away at me.
Now that my violence is spent, and I’m alone in the quiet waiting for Henry to return to our room, all I feel is soul-deep sorrow.
Grief is not an absence. It’s a presence. I feel it in every silence, in every breath.
I’ve lived six months without the other half of my heart—so bereft that my mind fractured and summoned a world where she was still with me. Remembering is like losing her all over again.
I don’t know how to survive without this. Saving her has been my singular purpose—the last thread of hope I clung to for the last year. Without it, I’m nothing but a woman with a mind as shattered as her heart.
Killing my parents didn’t change the fact that I’ll never see Aidia’s face again.
That I’ll never hear her say my name in the annoyed tone that used to make me feel triumphant.
I’ll never fall asleep with her playing with my hair.
And I’ll never see who she could have been living somewhere beyond the mountains, far from my parents’ control .
I’m not just mourning who she was. I’m mourning her potential. I wanted to get to know Aidia unburdened from the life that broke both of us.
And still, I know I’ll continue as I always have, putting one foot in front of the other.
To know you will always be okay alone should be comforting, but really, it’s just terribly lonely. I am so unbelievably weary.
The bedroom door swings open, and Henry walks in. He stills when he sees me, studies me for a long moment, but he does not ask me how I am. He locks the door and removes his jacket, tie, and vest.
“I can’t apologize enough for today. I grossly miscalculated and I’m sorry,” he says. He looks genuinely contrite.
“You didn’t know. How could you? I didn’t know,” I say.
He studies me for a long moment before he speaks.
“It’s the shock when you realize you cannot quite picture their face perfectly, when you can’t remember the pitch of their laugh, when you see something beautiful and all you want is to run home and tell them all about it, but instead, you’re left to whisper it to the wind. ”
I swallow thickly. “We spent our whole lives wanting to leave the city walls. Now she’s gone and I finally left and all I want to do is tell her about the way the stars look over the fort at night.” I don’t know what possessed me to share it. It’s just comforting that he knows what I mean.
He crosses the room and sits down on the window seat beside me.
“Holly was an early riser. No matter how early I woke up, she always managed to beat me and she loved to gloat about it. She slipped a note under my door every morning. After the attack, we were stuck in the caves for a while, but when I was finally able to move back into my room after a year, I woke up every morning looking for it. It took me almost two years to stop. I still do it sometimes.” He rubs a hand over the back of his neck.
“Waking is the worst. For a few blessed moments, you don’t remember, and then you do and it’s like reliving it.
I don’t blame you for seeing her everywhere.
This world can be cruel. You were just trying to survive. ”
I stare into his dark blue eyes. “I’m so tired and this is such a Divine-damned mess. I think I could lie down and sleep for a year.”
“Is your grief so gentle?” he whispers .
I clench my hands in my robe, afraid and exhilarated that he can see me so clearly.
“No,” I rasp. “It’s not. I am sick with rage. My grief is monstrous.”
He reaches out, tentative at first. When I don’t flinch, he tucks my hair behind my ear and cups my cheek. “What do you need, Harlow?”
I can’t remember the last time someone asked me that and meant it. I’ve been asked so infrequently, I’m unpracticed at even assessing my own needs.
The temptation to let go and fall into this—lose myself, my purpose, my desire for vengeance—is so strong. And all for what? Some good sex and sweet words. Men lie. It’s what they do.
It would be nice to trust him with this—with me —but I’ve never just had fun. I’ve always had to think about consequences.
Maybe I could this one time, as a treat for surviving this day and every other one that came before it.
I kiss my husband. Not to shut him up, or to try to kill him, or even to taunt him. I kiss him because I want to.
Henry tastes like whiskey and cherries and a hint of sugar, and it’s all I want to taste.
He wastes no time. He breaks the kiss for a moment, pulling me to my feet and then down to straddle his lap. Then, he kisses me again more urgently.
His fingers tangle in my hair, and he tilts my head back, and even though I have never kissed anyone else for longer than a second, I know it doesn’t get better than this.
I feel myself plunging into some deep dark water.
I’m afraid of the ways we are alike—Henry and I.
It’s terrifying to be understood. He knows what it means to turn a grave into a home—to live inside this hollow like a hermit—to fumble in the dark, but still crawl out the other side of the pit and rise to demand blood for your blood.
I’m afraid of the way he understands the empty places in me like halls he’s been haunting for years instead of weeks.
In the deepest, darkest corner of my heart, I have always wanted to be known. But now that he knows me, I want to run.
This is something uncharted. I stopped wanting to be understood so long ago—made myself into a tight bud that only Aidia could coax open. But the more Henry challenges me, the more I feel myself unfurling into something new and more natural.
This will end poorly. I’ll be forced back into the old version of myself, and it will feel like trying to squeeze back into skin I’ve shed.
I can’t forgive myself for the weakness of irrevocably changing.
I know the way Kellan scours the entire city to bring Libby a new book every week, then takes the children out for a full day so she has time to read it. I’ve watched the way Bea and Josie sit behind the counter at the end of the night, heads bent together as they laugh and kiss in the empty pub.
I’ve seen good examples of love, but I’ve never seen a good example of someone loving me.
Not like that. Until now.
For so long, I felt certain I wouldn’t recognize love even if it slapped me across the face. Then, I worried that was the only way I’d recognize it.
But now I see that love is not letting the person you care for be caught with their guard down. Love is someone who helps you put your armor on, who knows how and when to help you take it off.
I told myself I was trying to avenge Aidia’s hurts, but I think I was trying to remind myself how easy it was to become one of those women I protected. As long as I didn’t let someone close, I couldn’t become one of them.
Until now, men’s wanting has never been something that could sate me. It always felt a meal devoid of substance. No matter how much I consumed, it left me feeling empty.
For the first time, I feel how Henry’s desire could fill me up, scatter shadows from my aching hollows, and thaw my frozen heart. I see how staying could heal me as much as ruin me.
I’ll never forgive Henry for this. I can’t afford a weakness.
When I finally pull away, I’m breathless and shaking.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispers against my lips.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re forgetting to hate me.”
I can hardly breathe around the lump in my throat. Because I don’t hate him at all.
“I do hate you,” I rasp.
Henry tilts my chin up and brushes his lips to mine so gently. “No, lovely. I don’t think you do.” He kisses the corners of my mouth so tenderly. “It’s scary, isn’t it?”
“Scary?” I laugh bitterly. “Scary is too small a word. This is world-rending.”
I don’t want this. I want to toss the revelation in the nearest well and watch it get swept away in the current.
“Beautiful, wretched wife. You will be my undoing.”
That was always the plan, but I didn’t expect to wreck myself in the process.
He kisses me again, and I want my robe off. I want his shirt off. I want nothing between us.
Henry slides his hands under my ass. He lifts me as he stands, crosses the room, and sits down on the edge of the bed with me straddling his lap.
I unbutton his shirt as he yanks on the sash of my robe. There’s too much between us. I don’t want to talk or even think about how I feel. I just want him inside me.
But Henry doesn’t want to go fast. When I reach for the button on his pants, he grabs my hands.
“I will let you do a lot of things, Harlow, but rushing me when I’ve waited so long to take my time is not one of them.”
He twists to lay me on the bed beneath him. He kisses me slowly, his hands tenderly stroking my hair.
I don’t know why my heart is racing like this.
We’re only kissing, but I can hardly breathe.
He brushes his lips along my jaw and down my neck.
His teeth skim down my neck, and I have never trusted someone like this—enough to bare my throat without a hint of hesitation—enough to be hurt beyond repair.
Some part of me is forever braced for pain. I keep waiting for the sharp slice of his teeth, but it never comes.
Henry places kisses along my collarbones and down the valley between my breasts. This is homage. It feels like he’s trying to make up for the lack of touch in my life. He cups my breasts, chasing each caress with his mouth.
So often, I’ve felt fractured between who I am and who I pretend to be. But this is the first time I feel whole again—with him touching me.
He works his way lower, down the lines of my stomach and over my hips. Then, he lowers himself to kneel on the floor, wraps his hands around my thighs, and yanks me to the edge of the bed.