38
Pandora
I don’t wonder about Kit once. Whether he’s roaming Mosacia alone and under the cover of nightfall, evading tribunal scouts and fanatics hellbent on collecting his monetary reward, or actively making his way back to Andromeda House—it doesn’t matter.
Kit Andromeda is the least of my concerns.
Instead, I think about Marzipan. How she recorded each of my heart’s lamentations, and in my terror of what transpired, I didn’t think to grab any of her other transcriptions. How, at best, they will collect dust in her hostel back in Vesta. At worse, they’ll be cleaned out and discarded to make room for future travelers. I think about the man that fought tooth and nail to bring Mother and I together—the one whose name I don’t know but the one whose heart so clearly captured Geneva Deragon’s that he was prepared to take a beating to let her escape with me.
And then, I think about Mother—about how close I was to finally having her back, and how hollow I felt as the boat sailed away from her.
How will I survive this? How are all these atrocities supposed to settle into place with enough time? How long will it take for this gaping soul-wound to heal over?
Being back under the same roof with Andie is a start. Madman takes some time to clean up the rubble of his lair before designating some space for me, and I understand why the second Andie opens the door and cages me in her arms. Her embrace isn’t quite like my mother’s, but it’s close.
I come apart right there on the doorstep, spewing out every terrible heartbreak I’ve endured since I left. Every loss of life, trust, and hope all spills out on the floor, and Andie just . . . lets me unpack it all. My tears taste like acid and fall like unforgiving sleet, but amidst it all, Andie’s arms hold firm. No bout of despair sways her—and that, too, makes me break down.
When my hyperventilating spell starts to ease, Andie leads me to one of the couches in the sitting room. She boils a pot of tea and offers me something to wipe my face with, and when I regain full control of my faculties, I start to apologize for the scene I caused, which bleeds into a confession that, “I’m in hot water with Kit. Deep enough that, should he come back and find me on my own—”
“You listen to me,” she says, pointing a stern finger at me. She clearly doesn’t care to entertain any of my apprehensions. “My son made his own choices, and rest assured, he will answer to me for them before he gets the chance to even look your way. But do not start telling yourself that his choices translate in any way to you deserving this fate. None of what you have experienced is on your head.”
“Not even—”
“ None of it,” Andie stammers, her hands crashing down on the side table. “I know you’re hurting, and you might feel fragile because of it, but you are strong . I’m not here to tell you that your pain will pass, nor do I know how long it’ll take, if it ever does, but you’ve fought your way to this point, Pandora. Keep pushing forward. I’m here for you every step of the way.”
I note the silent implication of why she adds that last statement. She knows that my return here is a result of no one coming to claim me, and this is her way of doing just that.
“Why?” I croak, my body too weak to summon more tears.
“Because the minute I got a look at you, dear,” Andie returns, “I stared into the mirror of a pain I felt firsthand, one that I tried to put to rest a long time ago. Knowing what it’s like, I won’t let you endure it alone.”
And she doesn’t.
For the rest of the day, Andie and I find new diversions to keep the horrors at bay. We read our way through the House’s bookshelves. We play lewd card games over uncorked bottles of white wine. And when the alcohol finally catches up with me, she lets me tell endless stories about my shiny life in Broadcove, when I wasn’t studying or training or being told to behave like the future monarch I was destined to become. I recall the days when Flora and I were more like friends than cousins, how we’d play practical jokes on Samuel and gossip about noblewomen. I tell her about all the times I snuck into Queen Merrie’s revered greenhouse in search of the same divinity Venus found there. Then, I come clean to her about why I don’t call Venus “Mother,” and oddly enough, it eases something in Andie’s mind.
We eat sweets for dinner because we’re too tipsy to properly cook, and by the time our conversations run out of steam, it’s nine o’clock. Andie retreats into her room for the night, and for a moment, I consider letting the sugar coma take my body hostage and lure me to sleep. The dull throb in my chest lies buried beneath all the food and wine Andie and I stuffed our faces with, enough to where I don’t feel its vicious intensity. I cannot cope like this forever, but for tonight, maybe it’s enough.
Then, as I close my bedroom door behind me, I find Madman hiding in the corner, waiting for me.
A brief curse escapes me in surprise, and I draw a hand through my hair to calm down. “Sorry. You scared me,” I explain quickly. “What are you doing here? I figured I would meet you down by the—”
“Pandora.”
His voice . . . there’s a quality about it that deeply unnerves me. “Yes, Madman?”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
I can’t remember how to breathe.
“About what?” I squeak.
But I know what.
Still, Madman says, “Everything.”
Suddenly, I feel the weight of everything I ate, and I feel it rising in my throat. My brow begins to bead with sweat. Every happy memory I’ve ever made escapes my head, leaving me with the dregs of my depleting sanity.
This can’t be happening.
“I can’t see you anymore,” Madman tells me, but his voice sounds muffled, like I’m hearing it from underwater. I blink, and he repeats himself, firmly this time.
“You’re lying to me,” I say.
“I’ve never lied to you.”
“Then you’re lying to yourself ,” I snarl, feeling like I could spit fire.
“Don’t make this harder than—”
“ No . Don’t you make this harder than it needs to be. Nothing needs to change here, aside from figuring out what has you so scared . What changed between last night and now, Madman?” My voice sounds like an entirely different woman, one under such great duress that she comes off completely warped. “Are you feeling bad about all those soldiers you gunned down? Bogged down by the prospect of having to help me gather up all the broken pieces of myself until further notice?”
Madman says nothing, his lip curling with frustration below the rim of his mask.
“Or was it seeing my mother in the flesh that did it to you?” I take a guess, and I realize instantly that I strike a nerve. The recognition of it makes my throat tighten. “Oh, I understand, now. You saw the way I was with her, and in the wake of her picking that man over me, you thought I wouldn’t make the same choice, didn’t you? Even though you know I have before. I picked you over her once, but it wasn’t enough to convince you, was it?”
“Stop. Talking.” He grits his teeth. “You aren’t helping.”
“And what about what she told you, huh? What about taking care of her daughter? You think leaving me here to collect dust until Kit comes back is taking care of me , Madman?”
“That’s enough!” he hisses. The only thing keeping him from outright yelling at me is the fact that he doesn’t want to alert Andie’s attention, and he barely maintains that control.
Madman turns his head to look away from me, as if the movement helps him catch his breath. His dark hair remains gelled against the slope of his neck like always, and just when I think he’s going to say something else, he moves. He prepares to walk out on me.
I set aside my anger to beg him, this one, final time. “Don’t go.”
“We both know I’m not good for you,” he whispers.
“And since when has that ever stopped you?”
And then, before the spontaneous rush of courage and clarity fizzles out, I tell him on a shaky exhale, “I love you.”
I don’t expect him to say it in return. Knowing how volatile this situation has become, he might believe that I’m saying the words just to rile him. And yet, it wounds me even more than I anticipated when his first words in response are, “You don’t mean that.”
“You think I’d waste such words on someone I don’t truly feel them for? You think that just because you memorized my routine from the Broadcove tunnels, you’re headstrong enough to believe you know how my heart works, too? Well, I’ve got news for you Madman. I fell in love with you without you even being around for it! My soul sought yours across cities, across seas. It hunted you down in my dreams and twice in sacred temples. My love for you defies reason just as it does duty—both of which are unimaginable standards for someone like me. And even so, you want to look me in the face and tell me it’s not enough?”
Again, he says nothing.
Hurt crawls its way up my throat, and I dig into the feeling rather than run away from it. “I thought that you wanted me at least half as badly as I wanted you, but perhaps I was only ever pouring my heart out into a corpse.”
Madman grimaces at the final word, and in a last-ditch effort to keep him here with me, I shut my eyes and confess. “I love you with no reservations, even though parts of you remain a mystery to me. I don’t care if I never get to lay eyes on the face beneath your mask, if I never get to know all your secrets—I love you. Even if you disappear forever like you’re threatening to, I love you. I’ll love you my whole, miserable life. And when Kit comes crawling back here and kills me for all the lies I told him, I’ll die knowing I didn’t go to my grave scared. But you? You’ll live with regrets. You’ll come to realize that you were too afraid to let me love you, and by the time you do, I’ll be gone . . . and the memory of what could have been will haunt you for the rest of your days.”
Sadness, true and undiluted, pierces through me like a knife as I will myself not to look away from him. I memorize the structure of his mask, the strength of the muscles usually covered by his dark cloaks, the full mouth no longer surrounded by stubble—expecting him to turn on a heel and abandon me forever.
Instead, he strides closer. His anger magnified.
“I would never—” he chokes out, unsure of how to form the remainder of his phrasing. He starts over. “I would never harm you like that, Pandora.”
“I didn’t say you . I said Kit.”
There’s a long pause before he says, “I know.”
And then, with one fluid movement, Madman removes his skeleton mask to reveal his true face beneath—a face I’ve seen many times before. The face I ran like hell from.
Kit’s face.
The silence that descends over the room grips us both like a vice, and my knees nearly buckle in the wake of it.
Kit waits for me to make the next move, his mask still in his hand. I take note of the white-knuckled grip he has on it, though, and I relish in the fact that he’s just as scared as I am with how things may proceed.
“ You ,” I say in a tone I cannot distinguish between hurt, wrath, and . . . I don’t even know.
“Me,” Kit sighs in confirmation. “Gods, the look on your face is killing me. I knew I should’ve told you sooner.”
Saints, this is . . . what, exactly? A nightmare? The most awestruck I’ve ever been? A relief?
My mind catapults into a dangerous thought pattern as I restlessly try to compartmentalize everything I thought I knew about my life since the night of Queen’s Feast. Immediately, things eerily begin to align.
For starters, Kit and Madman were never in the same room together. Then, there’s the fact that I only ever saw Madman at night—and most mornings, Kit slept in.
It only gets worse the deeper I dig. They stand at roughly the same height, they relatively carry the same muscle mass, at least when Madman didn’t don his protective gear, and they both have dark hair. Kit never wore his tight like Madman did, though—never smoothed it down his scalp like Madman’s always was. The sleekness always made his hair appear black, while Kit’s was more chestnut.
The minute I find a discrepancy, I blurt out in challenge, “Your eyes. The Kit I knew had green eyes, not gray.”
A heartbeat later, he’s reaching into his eyes, as if to pry them out—
“Colored lenses,” he says so matter-of-factly, his tone gentle as I squirm at the way his fingers invaded his sockets so casually.
My pulse thrums anxiously as I look for something else to deny what’s happening here. But there’s no way Madman would have a secret passageway connected through a bedroom in a house he wasn’t a resident in. It makes no sense. Kit would, though. The owner of Andromeda House would absolutely know about it, especially considering part of that passage connects to the room he first found me in. Or, rather, first dropped me in, before dropping his masquerade.
Most devastatingly, however, lies the fact that from our very first encounter, a seed of discovery was planted for me to trace my way back to him. Because even as he reached for my hand to whisk me into this mess, his hands were gloved . . .
And Kit bears a distinct scar that cuts across his palm.
“Being a monster is what I’m best at,” Kit says remorsefully. “I just didn’t think that’s the version of me you’d fall for. I thought the darker side of me would scare you into my arms, and instead, it had the opposite effect.”
“But Madman . . . he cared for me. But you told me yourself that you loathed what I was becoming to you. What am I supposed to believe, Kit?”
“That I’m rotten and confused about so many things, but not about you. That there are demons I still need to work through, but that so many of them have dissolved over the time I’ve had with you. That I still hold resentment for your bloodline, but knowing who your mother really is, I’m able to finally make sense of why you’re you and not them —and that I have no words for just how sorry I am for how long it took me to get here.”
I have yet to fully grasp why being Venus’s daughter was ever such an abomination, but I set it aside. I’ve had enough of the heaviness for one evening, and I steady my breathing before extending a hand to him. The symbolic gesture is far from lost on him.
“You’re not . . . rescinding the things you said?”
I swallow hard. “No, I’m not.”
“You still love me?” he asks, dropping his mask on the ground, forsaking it forever to take my hand in his own.
The sound of it hitting the wood panels in the floor along with the feel of his bare skin untethers something in me, and my brain bobbles in my head from how hard I nod in return. “Painstakingly so.”
His smile is radiant, but his words ignite a wildfire within me. “Then come here.”
All doubt disappears as I step into him, setting my hands upon Kit’s chest, and let his kiss consume me. It’s apologetic and reverent and disastrous—a storm that sweeps me off the ground and sends me sailing into dream. It disorients me so thoroughly that when Kit reaches for more of me, I let him have it all.
Every piece of me he asks for with shaky hands and murmured adorations, I give over to him willingly. I let him heft me into his arms and press me against the wall. I fuss at his shirt and sink my teeth into his shoulder as his hands teach me how a woman ought to be touched. I shut out the secret sadness I know I’ll face in the morning as I learn to let go of the Madman I thought lay beneath that mask—whatever it might have been—and trust that Kit won’t let me go.