Chapter 43 #2
“You don’t know what he’s like, Ellie.”
She thought of Adam’s strange reaction to Borthwick’s threats back at the Brahmastra temple. “You begged Borthwick not to send me to him. Why? What did you think your father would do to me?”
Adam’s eyes were haunted. “He would carve you full of holes.”
Ellie stilled with shock.
“Not like Jacobs,” Adam elaborated, his face drawn. “He doesn’t have to use knives. He can do it all with words.”
The enormous room shrank as Ellie felt herself draw closer to something old, dark, and rotten.
“Tell me what that means,” she demanded.
His voice was raw as he answered her. “He would take you down, one little piece at a time. Make you doubt everything you thought you knew about yourself. Everything you thought was good. He’d turn it around until all you could feel about any of it was shame, and that still wouldn’t be enough.
Because even if you tried to be the person he said he wanted you to be, he’d keep showing you all the ways you’d failed.
He breaks people like that. He breaks you until you’re nothing but a kicked dog, cringing from the next blow. ”
Ellie’s mind spun with horror at what Adam had just revealed.
She had known some part of it—glimpses she had intuited through all his careful defenses and unexpected vulnerabilities. But she hadn’t understood, not really.
Not until now.
She raised her hand to his face. It was as familiar to her as her own, still shadowed by the bruises he’d won fighting for the people he cared about. Grief and love formed an ache inside her chest. “That’s how he hurt you, isn’t it?”
Adam looked back out into the darkness. She could see the struggle inside of him.
The pain. The shame.
It tore at her like a wound. She wanted to go back in time and save him from being hurt like that by the person he should have been able to trust most in the world. Make him see his own goodness—his astonishing, unutterable value.
She couldn’t, and the scars were part of what made him the man he was—not because of George Bates, but in spite of him.
Because of Adam.
She took him by the shoulders and spoke with all the force she could muster. “You got out.”
“Not as soon as I should have,” Adam pushed back harshly.
“You were a child before that,” Ellie emphasized fiercely. “But you got away from him and built a life for yourself—your life, on your own terms.”
“I left my mom behind,” Adam bluntly returned.
“She should have protected you,” Ellie shot back.
Adam’s expression was lined with grief. “I don’t think she could.”
Ellie closed her eyes as she absorbed everything those few words meant.
“And your brother?” she asked gently.
She remembered the name he had shared with her once. It was her only knowledge of Adam’s younger sibling.
Ethan.
He looked tired. “Dad was never like that with him. I don’t know why. Maybe I should’ve been angry about it or thought it was unfair, but I didn’t. All I could think was that it must have meant there was something wrong with me.”
Ellie pressed her hand to his heart as she spoke, the words fierce. “There is nothing wrong with you.”
Adam drew in a deep, uneven breath as he met her look. “I know.”
The depth of her admiration for the man before her swept through her like a tide. For everything he had survived. For what he had built himself into in spite of all the violence that had been used to try to crush him.
He gripped her shoulders, desperate. “I don’t want you anywhere near him.”
Ellie traced the lines of his face. “Then I won’t be.”
Relief and worry mingled in his expression.
He let her go and began to pace the room. “How could we even do it? Borthwick is nothing compared to what we’d be going up against this time. Nothing.”
“We don’t have to go,” Ellie said again.
Adam braced himself against the wall, his body tense. He shook his head. “We have to.”
“Why?” Ellie demanded.
His face was hard. “Because he’s my father.”
“That doesn’t make him your responsibility,” Ellie snapped.
She was angry. The feeling seethed under her grief for Adam and her desperate desire to support him—a violent, dangerous rage against the man who had done this to him.
“Padma will have other people she can send,” she asserted.
She was certain that it was true. Constance’s omniscient grandmother would never leave herself with so few cards to play.
Hot steel flashed behind Adam’s gaze. “Nobody else knows him like I do.”
A terrible sense of inevitability closed over her. Ellie fought back against it. “How much damage could a person even do with the secret to eternal life?”
“You tell me,” Adam demanded.
Irresistibly, Ellie thought of the answer.
She imagined a world where the right to conquer death could be bought and sold. How a race of immortal men might place themselves above everyone around them.
People would be desperate to buy even a taste of that privilege, to cure their diseases or claw a few more years of life for themselves or those they loved.
They would give anything. And before very long, there would be two species on the earth—two different breeds of human.
Those who lived, and those who served, with nothing in between.
What would a man like George Bates do with an arcanum like that?
Ellie already knew.
Whatever would make him more powerful. No matter what it cost anyone else.
Adam read the expression on her face. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Fear twisted through her as she realized what that meant—and what it would demand of Adam.
Determination snapped through her with the force of a storm. Ellie spoke the words through gritted teeth. “I will not let him hurt you again.”
Adam’s voice was achingly sad. “I’m not sure that’s something you can promise me, Princess.”
Ellie twisted her hands into the fabric of his shirt. A tear broke loose from her eye, gliding down her cheek. “I just did,” she bit back stubbornly.
Adam cupped her face with his hand, his thumb grazing over her cheek. “There’s another reason we need to go to Korea. Your reason.”
“Mine?”
“Seems to me there’s a failed hermit you need to talk to.”
Ellie recalled the name of the scholar who had taken up temporary residence in Vijay’s garden.
Cairncross.
“I’m sure that fellow isn’t the only person in the world with some knowledge of the things we’ve been running into lately,” she hedged.
“He’s the only one we know about,” Adam pushed back stubbornly.
“You’re carrying a lost city around inside of you.
Your brother’s running around having visions of the past. We’ve been tripping over bloodthirsty mirrors and Biblical staffs.
It’s important, Ellie. You deserve to know what that’s all about. ”
Ellie couldn’t tell him that it didn’t matter. She would have been lying.
“I think we should go,” Adam declared firmly.
Love swelled painfully inside of her. With everything he had just revealed—all the reasons he had given for why he felt he had to do this, even though it might cost him terribly—he was still asking.
There was only one answer she could give.
“Then we’ll go.”
She set her hand to the front of his shirt, gliding it up the hard lines of his chest. “But when we go, I will be traveling with you as your wife.” She caught herself. “If you find that arrangement acceptable, of course.”
Adam’s hands tightened where he held her waist, his grip heating her skin through the silk of her gown. “It’s more than goddamned acceptable.”
The implication of what they had just said washed through her.
Adam’s eyes widened with a dawning surprise. “We just did something there. Didn’t we?”
“I… think we did,” Ellie agreed, reeling from the realization of what they had just committed to.
It meant hours in tangled sheets without shame or fear. Waterfalls and summer nights and ancient secrets. Rum and mud and laughter.
Adam’s strength at her back for all the battles to come. A united front against the myriad forces of the world that stood against them. Partnership and struggle and discovery, side by side, as the years unwound before them like a tumbled ball of yarn.
“Are you all right with that?” Ellie asked with a quick note of panic.
“Are you?” Adam pushed back uncertainly.
The answer came to her as irrepressibly as a hot air balloon. “Goodness, yes!” she breathed out feelingly.
She could hear the joy in Adam’s laugh. His arms firmed around her back. “Thank Christ,” he groaned with obvious relief.
Then Ellie was laughing too—until she caught his face in her hands and pushed herself up for a kiss.
It was tender and hungry. Ellie drank it in—drank him. Her lover and friend. Her companion in life.
Her pretend husband.
She laughed again through the kiss, tears cooling her cheeks—and then Adam spun her around and pressed her against the wall.
After that, she felt something else entirely—something that fully and blissfully consumed her for a spell of breathless time.