Chapter 46 Amelia #2
“Ivan thinks there’s something kindred between us, a bond deeper than brotherhood. It’s like he knows how to convince me of it. The hatred I feel for him is diabolical. That same hatred, that same darkness, it’s in him too.”
Another wave of worry besieged Emory as if she might see echoes of Ivan in him. Amelia tucked a strand of Emory’s hair behind his ear and kissed his cheek.
“There’s nothing kindred between you and Ivan,” she whispered. “You don’t have to inherit what he says as the truth. You get to decide who you are, not him.”
Emory nodded and, in another distraction, unspooled a bit of medical tape and affixed a gauze pad to her shoulder.
“We’ll need to keep an eye on this,” he said and kissed the bandage.
The “Royal We” comforted with endearing solidarity. Amelia burrowed into it like down bedding, another layer to keep her safe. Up close and in the light, she inspected the lesion reddening his cheek. It’d surely mature into a nasty bruise, so she fetched the ice pack and held it there.
At the contact, Emory closed his eyes. “Feels good.”
His lips parted with long, peaceful breaths, the kind that precede sleep. Amelia removed the pack and pressed her lips to his cold cheek then his mouth. She minded the cut there with kisses that still tasted faintly of blood.
“And that feels even better,” he said with a smile as his fingertips grazed her spine. “Amelia, there are things I need to tell you, things that will probably be hard to hear.”
She stiffened, and her heart picked up its beat. She couldn’t take much more bad news, and whatever Emory meant to say, he looked primed to deliver it gently. His eyes softened and so too did his words, as much as his deep voice would allow.
“Your dad isn’t in Portland anymore.”
Amelia shook her head, though she had no grounds to reject it. Richard had already delivered the news. Then again, she couldn’t discern the dividing line between Richard’s truths and lies.
“Are you sure?” she asked, faintly hopeful Richard had gotten it all wrong. Emory wouldn’t bring that to her unless he was certain, though.
“Yes, I’m sure. I wanted to tell you, meant to tell you tonight. He’s heading south. I don’t know where. California maybe.”
“If your brother is after him…”
Amelia ushered out the thought before it squatted in her mind and refused to leave. Instead, she wanted to plead with Emory and ask the unthinkable, to bring her father there and make him understand.
“He did the right thing. It’s better that he left. I do know he’s alive, and I have someone looking out for him.”
“One of your men?”
“No, but someone I trust, a good man.”
“Oh,” was all Amelia could manage as guilt bubbled up from strange depths.
Not so long ago, she’d been all too eager to blaze a path away from her father. Instead, she’d destroyed the road behind her, no home to return to. Rotten irony would say, “You got what you wanted.” She never wanted it to come like that, though.
Over his shoulder, Emory fixed his eyes to the window where a lonely moon illuminated the sky and streamed cold light through the pane.
“We’re not safe here anymore either, are we?
” Amelia asked, but tears occluded her vision and not because the bite mark stung or her back ached from slamming into the cinder block wall.
It wasn’t the phantom feeling of Ivan’s fingers clamping around her wrists or his palm running up her thigh.
He’d marked her as his own and would come again; for her, for Emory, for everyone she loved.
Emory licked a bead of blood from his bottom lip. “No, we’re not. You and I are leaving for California tomorrow.”
“Leaving,” Amelia repeated and shifted in his lap.
She glanced at the table where they’d played cards and sipped sweet wine in the golden hour. If anyone asked, she’d say it was there in their sanctuary where they fell in love and found a shred of peace.
“For how long?” she asked, though timelines seemed more arbitrary than ever.
“I don’t know. Weeks, months, maybe longer.” Emory toyed with a loose button on the flannel shirt, rubbing the mother-of-pearl between his thumb and forefinger. “Look, I know you didn’t choose to come here and now you’re not given a choice on how to leave, but—”
Amelia pressed her index finger to his lips. Stunned, Emory’s eyes widened at he stared at her.
“No.”
“No, what?”
“Don’t do that. I didn’t choose how I came here, but I can choose how I leave, and it’s with you. I choose you, Emory. Everything you are now, not what you might become one day. You. That’s it. That’s my choice. It will always be you.”
Amelia expected a protest from him but found none. She’d made up her mind and there was no talking her out of it. She would walk the path with him deeper into the underworld where, in the sweetest of ironies, she’d found belonging.
“What do you want, Amelia?”
The answer was him.
Always him.
Emory kissed the pad of her finger still at his lips. “About last night, those things I said in the parlor.”
Amelia had almost forgotten. It seemed trivial and hardly worth relitigating. Emory gathered her hands and held them to his chest. His heartbeat fluttered against her palms.
“I fucked up and said the wrong things because I have a knack for that. What I should’ve told you then because God knows I felt it well before now is, I love you, Amelia. I don’t know what my future holds, but I know I want you in it, and I know we belong together, now and always.”
“Now and always,” she repeated, faintly quizzical and dazed because love never came easy for her nor had it ever ended well.
When it came at all, it was always with a great deal of convincing; convincing herself that it felt right or convincing others that she was enough.
There’d be none of that, and she found in Emory a mirror to herself—the earnestness in which he offered his heart and the gravity of that moment when he made it known.
The path ahead would be difficult—that much she knew—but loving him, loving each other, would not be, and she took solace in that.
Soon, she’d extract from it her strength and perhaps that was where she’d derive her fearlessness; fearless enough to love a man like him, fearless enough to let him love her too.
Amelia twisted the loose ends of his hair around her fingers and kissed the scar on his top lip.
“I love you too,” she said, her body finally rid of the chill she couldn’t seem to chase away.
A devilish smile unfurled on Emory’s lips. “I know you do.”
Amelia laughed. “Okay, cocky.”
“No, it’s not ego talking.” Beneath her, the tension in Emory’s body released like a knot coming undone as he contemplated her. “It’s the way you look at me. I wish you could see yourself in those moments. Don’t ever stop looking at me that way.”
“I won’t. I promise,” she said, her lips grazing his in another soft kiss.
Emory’s tongue slipped into her mouth, and Amelia relished his familiar taste and the warmth of his body beneath her.
“What is it?” she asked when Emory pulled away enough to look at her.
“I’m getting out. We’re getting out. Together.”
“How? I thought…”
“If I see the Moriartys through war, Liam will find me a way out. This will all be over, and we’ll have our simple life together, the one we both want. I just need you to trust me.”
Wild with hope, Emory spoke on a hush the secret they’d share. He was less manic than he had been earlier but still convinced they could walk away and leave this all behind.
He entreated her to pour faith in him and endure.
But it wasn’t about endurance. It was the duality of trust. Like her father used to say when Amelia learned to drive, “I trust you, but not the loonies you’ll share the road with.
” Amelia trusted Emory implicitly, but not the organization where snakes and rats and other duplicitous creatures lurked.
While he might escape his blood oath, who was to say the Moriartys would survive the war?
Perhaps that was what her father meant by big death.
The institution was doomed to fall eventually.
She let that go unsaid. It’d only spoil the moment where Emory wove their wants together and offered an escape.
Buried in his flannel and safe in his arms, Amelia nodded. “I trust you.”
With a deep sigh, Emory relaxed against her and Amelia rested her head on his shoulder. He caressed her back and spoke slow, his breath humid against her forehead.
“You know, Liam calls you my queen.”
“I do. I think it’s sweet.”
“I need you to know that you’ll always be my queen. In here and out there.” Emory tipped his head to the window and the world beyond. “It’s going to get hard for a little while. There will be no shortage of things that try to tear us apart.”
Amelia sat up in his lap and coiled her arms around his neck.
“Let them try,” she said with determination her mother might’ve called fearlessness. “It’ll always be you and me.”
“You and me,” Emory repeated, a solemn vow spoken between them and a pillar of strength they’d surely need for the storms ahead.