Chapter 35 #2
“Do you want to lie down?” I ask. It’s not suggestive, and I’m grateful when he doesn’t take it as such.
With ease, Deacon turns his hulking body to lie down alongside my ramshackle bed, tucking his balled-up white shirt beneath his head as a makeshift pillow.
I make room for him, still sitting against the wall behind us, but it’s tight.
The scent of his skin invades my senses.
His warmth too. I take the pillow behind me into my palms and hold it tightly against my chest for some kind of comfort.
“I could have gone to him,” he says, staring up at the closet ceiling.
“But the thought of asking my father for anything made me sick. I’d been beholden to him my entire life.
I feared him. I hated him. I was terrified of becoming him…
” He swallows and I watch as the column of his throat works in silhouette.
“I built everything on my own. Under a false name so he wouldn’t even know I’d made it out of hell—”
“The White Stag.”
His mouth rises on one side. “It was less theatrical when we were sailing the Indian Ocean.”
“Don’t lie. You love the drama.”
His laugh is husky and tired. “My father died thinking I was still down there, suffering. And all the while I was creating a fortune for myself and those I cared for. He never controlled me, and that was worth everything.”
Deacon had never joined the Brood. Despite Reid telling me all those nights ago how it was all their father ever hoped for his sons. I can’t imagine the strength it must have taken to refuse a man like that.
I wonder too if that was the secret Reid kept for Deacon.
Never telling their father he’d escaped.
“I kept your secret for years. Until the day he died.” That’s what he’d uttered that night back at Fever Dream.
The memory of Reid protecting me from the man lying by my side now feels like a scene from a play. Not real life. Not my life, at least.
“It’s not too late for you is what I’m saying.” Deacon lifts a hand from the floor. I wonder, briefly, stupidly, if he’s going to take my palm in his. But he only touches the corner of the pillow I’m holding against my chest. His fingers graze the tassel with gentle ease and I forget to breathe.
“You said we. When we escaped hell…” I almost ask if it was him and Odette, running out of hell together, the fairy-tale ending for Orpheus and Eurydice. But I answer my own question as soon as my eyes find Deacon’s neck. The tattoos the three of them share.
“Ward, Baz, and me,” he says.
“Were they born down there? Or banished too?”
“You should ask them.”
If they have as much trauma surrounding their time in hell as Deacon does, I can’t imagine it’s something either deviant wants to talk about. I have so many more questions for Deacon, but I can see plainly across his face how hard it is to revisit the memories. The fear that still haunts him.
I don’t ask what the gauntlet—the only way out of hell, an impossible feat that Reid had told me close to no deviants ever make it through—consisted of.
I don’t ask how long he was trapped in the underworld.
I don’t ask how he can take souls when he knows how they’ll suffer the way he did.
Turned demons, tortured down below. I know the answer to that one.
Deacon isn’t good. He’s immoral and self-serving and violent.
But he’s also protective and honest and generous.
There are no good guys, nor bad guys, as he’s told me. And he’s the proof.
Instead, as I lie down, my head next to his, I ask him something else. “Is it hard for you?”
“Is what hard, Vivienne?” His voice is silken and drugging. I wonder if his eyes are closed.
“Not to take my soul. You know, if it wasn’t for the madness.” I stare up at the ceiling until the darkness swirls. “It was hard for Reid. Something he had to fight against whenever we were together.”
“No, it’s not.” The words leave him at the lowest decibel. And even though Reid had said that to me once and it was a lie, I know Deacon is telling me the truth tonight. “It was hard for my brother because he was battling against himself. He always has been.”
“And you?”
“I don’t deprive myself. Not of souls, not of anything. I don’t crave your soul, Viv, because I know what would happen if I took it. And I wouldn’t ever do that to you.”
Send me to hell. Put me through the atrocities he endured.
I shiver, though I’m no longer cold.
We stay like that for a while. Lying down inside the closet. Staring at the ceiling and the moon in the room beyond. Wondering what we’ve done tonight that can’t be undone. Or perhaps that’s only me.
A noise wakes me, but now that I’m up I can’t tell if it was real or imagined.
I’m on the floor of the closet still, and a predawn golden blue is just barely filtering in through the frosty archive window.
Deacon’s bare chest is warm and strong, pressed against every inch of my back, and his erection is straining against my tailbone.
Heat flushes through my body. His hand is looped around my waist as his even breaths fan the sensitive skin behind my ear.
He’s sleeping. Deacon. Who doesn’t sleep.
I make no attempt to wake him. Instead, I listen closely for the noise that woke me up, but nothing comes. A dream, surely. The syrabraxa playing its tricks. And even though my skin buzzes to tell me a demon is close, I can admit the feeling is different—the demon is one I care for.
It’s a gut-punch, but one I’ve been denying to myself for too long.
And as easy as it would be to spin out in guilt and shame, I can’t help but think of what Deacon said last night.
Perhaps radical self-love is actually more worthwhile than reluctant, hard-won self-acceptance, like who I am is a nine-to-five to grin and bear.
I have looked for Reid everywhere I can.
I have fought for months to find him. And he has been free and made no attempt to return to me.
Even if he did love me once, or sacrifice himself for me once, or withstand torture to protect me, it is entirely possible—likely, even—that I will never see him again and that will be his choice.
Would it be so wrong to allow myself to be friends, perhaps one day even more than that, with the brother he hates?
I tell myself I don’t have to answer that this minute.
Who knows how long I’ll even have the ability to know Deacon, let alone act on feelings for him.
If I don’t find this ring, nothing I’m grappling with today will matter.
All that matters right now is that Deacon is sleeping.
After years without rest. And it makes me happy to offer him that.
To help him in such an intimate, human way.
We take care of people.
And Deacon was right—it’s spectacular.
The desk chair pillow beneath my head no longer smells of mothballs, but cloves and soft cotton, the man behind me like sweat and sleep and rich, dark cherries. I nuzzle back into him, pressing every plane of my body into his skin, closing my eyes, allowing my legs to twine with his…
I’m drifting off again when I hear a voice at the closet doorway.
One I thought I’d heard for the last time. Soft, but edged in fury.
“I see you finally found a way to sleep, brother.”