Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
“Have I gone mad?”
—Hatter, Alice in Wonderland
Alice is waiting for me in the center of the maze.
I find her sitting beneath the wisteria tree, back against the trunk and legs steepled.
With eyes closed and her arms resting on her knees, she has headphones on, her toes tapping to the beat of whatever song she’s listening to.
When she opens her eyes and sees me walking toward her, she rips off the headphones, grabs her phone to shut the music app, then pops to her feet.
Why she’s glaring at me with that fucking scowl on her face is beyond me.
I’m the one who’s pissed here. “You got something you want to confess? Something you need to get off your chest?”
Stomping toward me across the chessboard, she has her phone up, screen directed at me. “Do you?”
My eyebrows shoot way up. “Pardon you?”
“Pardon me? No, pal, pardon you.”
Pal? Did she call me fucking pal? Oh, hell no. This situation did not just go sideways before it even began. “What crawled up your ass and died?”
“You.” Alice uses her phone to point at me. “It’s always you.”
“Sweetheart,” I drawl, “if I were up your ass, trust me, you wouldn’t be all in a snit about it.”
Alice has bony knuckles.
I learn this the hard way when those pointy little joints catch me square on the chin, and although she doesn’t hit hard, she has splendid aim. “The fuck?”
She jabs her phone at me, this time directly in my face again.
The face she had the gall to punch. “I won’t let you make a fool out of me.
” Then, in a disgusted mumble, more to herself than to me, “Got me meeting you here in our spot when you… Ew.” Her dramatic shiver could win an Academy Award. “I can’t even. You’re disgusting.”
“Did you lose your fucking mind?” I tap the side of my hat to punctuate the question. “Is that it? Did that big brain of yours melt out of your pretty little ears?”
“Go. Fuck. Yourself.”
I move my jaw from side to side, testing it as if she did damage. She didn’t. “What is your problem? And don’t you dare say my name again, or, Alice, I swear to God—”
“You’ll what?” The audacious woman gets all up in my face. “You’ll make a fool of me, in public, again?”
“Again? What the hell are you babbling about?”
“Oh, I’ll give you fucking babbling.” She spins on the chunky heel of her shoe, presenting her back to me. Then promptly tries to stride away. Yeah, no. I grab her arm, and she looks down at my fingers like a snake wrapped around her. “Get your hand off me before I break it.”
I release her arm because I don’t want her to get physical. God forbid she hurts herself trying to beat the snot out of me. “You will tell me why you’re spitting hellfire.”
Because let’s get her bullshit out of the way and get to the actual reason we’re here.
“You know why.” She’s got her cell phone up again with the screen pointed at my face. “Scarlett.” She barks out the name in a nasty accusation, as if I’m supposed to have some ‘aha’ revelation.
But the only ‘revelation’ I have is that Alice found out Scarlett told me what happened in Riverton, and that’s got her panties in a wad. Well, boo-fucking-hoo. Maybe if Alice hadn’t kept shit a secret, we wouldn’t be here now, both of us ready for battle.
“What the hell are you mad at her for? You’re the liar.”
Jesus Christ, you’d think I slapped her.
“Me?” Her jaw drops, and she shakes her head before yelling, “You’ve got some nerve.
Me, the liar? How dare you?” Again with that goddamn phone.
“Look! This was today, wasn’t it?” She shakes the phone.
“What game are you playing, Maddox? Are you that mad at me for leaving that you’re pretending you want me while cozying up to that… that…bitch?”
“I’m not playing any game, Alice, and I wasn’t cozying up to Scarlett.”
But she’s not listening to a goddamn word I say. “Why did you sneak into my house? Why are you watching me at school? Why did you kiss me in a bathroom—”
“You kissed me.”
“Don’t throw semantics at me,” she snaps. “Scarlett is the one person in this world who actively tries to make me miserable, and yet there you were, practically nose to nose with her!”
“The one person?” I ask quietly. “Think you might want to rephrase that, sweetheart.”
“You need to leave. Go.” She points down the cobblestone path to the break in the hedges, to the web of trails that cut through the maze. “Get the hell off my property.”
“Oh, no, Malice, I’m not leaving. You’re not getting rid of me this time.”
“I hate you,” she growls.
“No, you fucking don’t,” I counter. “If you hated me, you wouldn’t have come here prepared to go to war with me over Scarlett McQueen. Yet here we are, and you know what I think, Alice?”
“I don’t care what you think.”
“Yes, you damn well do.” I destroy the space between us in only a few angry strides. “It was you who made a fool of me, not the other way around.”
Oh, really?” she shouts in my face. “How in the world did I make a fool of you? Please, Maddox, do tell me. I’m dying to hear this bullshit.”
Cold fury simmers to the surface, begging to be released. “What happened in Riverton, Alice? I want the truth. I demand the fucking truth.”
All that fiery rage flies right out of her. Just. Like. That. And when she drops her phone and steps back, I follow, not allowing her to put any more space or walls between us. “She told you, didn’t she?”
I slowly nod, adding, “But I want to hear it from you.”
“Scarlett had no right to tell you my business.”
“Like I give a shit about her talking about you behind your back. Question is, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because Rook was my problem to solve, not yours.” Her tortured wail rips a hole in my heart.
I grab her by the shoulders and yank her even closer, until our noses practically scrape. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to me.”
She swallows hard enough for me to hear the torment skid down her throat. “I was handling it.”
“Really?” I scoff. “How well were you handling it when you had to run back home?”
“I didn’t have to,” she declares. “I chose to return. Big difference.”
“Bull. Shit,” I growl. “You came back because you were scared.”
“I did have things under control,” she insists, the last word breaking on a sob. Goddamn it. Her tears instantly siphon the anger out of me. “Until I didn’t.”
I wrap my arms around her, her body trembling against mine. “What happened, Alice?”
“Things spun out of control,” she confesses.
Smoothing a hand over her hair, I rest my chin on her head. “You should have called me, Alice. I would have protected you. I would have put that piece of shit in the fucking grave where he belongs.”
“I didn’t think I needed protection. I didn’t think the situation was as bad as it was until everything spiraled.
” She leans away and wipes the wet from her cheeks.
“And I was going to call you. I thought about it at least a thousand times. But…” She lowers her voice.
“I didn’t want to be the reason you killed a man. ”
The air I drag into my lungs is saturated with her floral shampoo, exhaling it with a bitter laugh. “You act like I’ve never taken a life before.”
Probably not the best thing to say right now, but Alice already knows the worst of me. She knows my ugliest secrets.
“Never because of me.” Her whisper is soft, brittle.
It crumbles around us. “God, Maddox, you have no idea how badly I wanted to call you. I wanted to tell you what was happening, but so much time had passed since we last talked, and then I came home and… Seeing you made me remember… It brought it all back, all the pain and all the grief. I got mad all over again, not at you. God, Maddox, never at you, but at life, and how unfair it is that every time I looked at you, I had to be reminded of the night my dad died.”
The last time Alice was this vulnerable, this raw, was the day after she tried to commit suicide, when she begged me to understand and not be angry with her.
I left my heart at her feet that day, and now, in our maze, I feel like we’ve come full circle.
Her eyes shine with more unshed tears, and in those haunting blue depths, a world of hope is buried beneath the pain she’s been carrying all these years.
“Do you still see death when you look at me?”
“No.”
Thank God.
“Don’t ever shut me out again.”
She shakes her head again, and this time, when fresh tears flow, I’m the one who wipes them away. “I’m sorry.”
“For what? Being human? Fuck, Alice, you’re allowed to grieve and to hurt and to have to work through your shit.
” I take her hand and lead her to the juniper tree—our tree—and sit under it, pulling her between my legs, her back to my chest, to cradle her in my arms. “Tell me what happened in Riverton, baby.”
She pulls in a trembling breath, settling against me. “Everything was a whirlwind. Professor Duke’s work was part of an exhibit at the Godstow Gallery. His students went to see it, of course, to lend him our support. Rook was there. Rook Knavish.”
Hearing the fucker’s name twists my gut into a tight fucking knot.
“He was handsome and charming. All the girls noticed him.” She pauses.
Shrugs again. “I wasn’t impressed by his charisma.
It felt fake. Everything about him seemed off, and not in the stereotypical eccentric artist way.
” Her small laugh doesn’t hold a trace of genuine humor.
“After that night, I saw him everywhere. The first time was at the grocery store. Then I bumped into him while leaving a movie theater. Riverton is small, so I didn’t think it was weird.
But when he started popping up at Krobes, that’s when I knew. ”
“Knew what?” The question is raw, pulled from a primal part of myself that has the overwhelming need to kill this motherfucker.
“He was stalking me.”
Fuck.
“I sought a restraining order after he…”
“After he what, Alice?”
“He left a painting of my severed head on my easel at school.”
“Jesus Christ,” I growl.
He’s a goddamn dead man.
“When Officer Monroe went to serve the restraining order, Rook was gone, but the damage was done. People saw it and the rumors started. But I was determined not to be run out, until printouts of it were slipped under my dorm room door. I’m sure it was just some assholes who thought it was funny.
It wasn’t.” She shrugs. “That’s when I decided to come home. ”
“You should have called me.”
Alice falls quiet, bows her head, and fidgets with her hands.
I hold her tight in my arms, sitting on the ground, like we’ve done a thousand times before when we were kids.
But this time, it’s different. It feels like so much more.
I wish I could drain every last drop of sorrow from her little body. “I know.”
“You shouldn’t have stayed away from me.”
“I know that, too,” she whispers. “But it just hurt so much to be near you.”
“Does it still?”
My heart sits in my throat waiting for her answer.
“No,” Alice finally confesses after a painfully long beat, and her whispered admission lights me up. She leans her head against my chest, her hands settling on my thighs, and I squeeze my eyes shut as I ride out the wave of bliss that washes through me. “Maddox?”
“What is it, Malice?” I pop open my eyes and cover her tiny hands with mine. Our fingers automatically intertwine.
She toys with the thin silver chains on my pants. “Now you understand why I freaked out about you sneaking into my room.”
“Now I understand,” I echo. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
Her chest rises and drops on a soft sigh. “Once I knew it was you, I wasn’t scared.”
Only this woman can pull a smile from me when all I want to do is rip that motherfucker’s throat out—with my fucking teeth. “I won’t be a creeper anymore,” I promise her.
She’s quiet for a bit, then, “I wouldn’t mind it if you were. But I should, right?”
“No, Alice, you shouldn’t. It’s me, and I may be a giant pain in your ass, but I’ll never hurt you or do anything you don’t want. That’s why I stayed away when you asked me to.”
“I listened to the playlist you made for me almost every day.”
“So did I.”
Her small smile is devastating. “I do have one question, though.”
I draw in a breath, bracing myself for the worst because I’m not too proud to admit that this moment with her feels too damn fragile. “Fire away.”
“How did you break into Tiger Lily?”
I exhale a relieved sigh. “I stole the key to the little door of your old playroom in the basement.”
“Oh, my God, Maddox, seriously?”
“It was that or scale the side of the friggin’ house, and yeah, no. I’m not spry enough to attempt parkour.”
Her laughter floats around us before she falls quiet again. Then she shocks the hell out of me by saying, “I love you, Maddox. I’ve always loved you.”
The world beyond the hedge walls drops away.
Wonderland might as well be a million miles out of reach.
Right now, it’s only us—Alice and me. We’re all that matters in this perfect, blessed moment, with the words I’ve been waiting years to hear hanging around like the sweetest notes of my favorite song.
I swivel Alice around, turning her so she’s up on her knees and facing me. Cup her exquisite face and lean my head against her forehead. “I’ve loved you all my life, Malice.”
Then I kiss her, the most tender kiss I can, and when she wraps her arms around my neck and hugs me tight, I lock this moment away inside my soul because…
…I’ll need to fall back into it to remind myself I’m a man, not a monster—even though I’m already dreaming about all the horrific things I intend to do to Rook Knavish.
“Are you going to sneak into my room again tonight?”
“Do you want me to?”
Her smile is pure evil. “I dare you to find out.”