Chapter Twenty-Nine #3
I want Julian too. Every inch of my soul swiveled in his direction when he left, every thought either engineered to avoid thinking of him or consumed by questions of “what if,” “where,” “why” that I couldn’t let go until I ended up at his side again.
I want to be with him more than I’ve wanted anyone, and I’ve stopped caring whether it’s because of some supernatural hold he has over me or because he sees me so completely.
But not at the expense of the life I’ve worked so hard to build. Not at the expense of me.
“I’m working something out with Ritika,” Julian says, pensive.
“Leila doesn’t have the assets I do. Her income has mostly consisted of funds she’s inherited from her victims. She never really held an interest in investing like I did, and she doesn’t have Rose’s art to funnel funds into.
Because she avoids aging, she can’t easily pretend to be her own descendant, and her protectiveness over her identity has meant that she doesn’t have a clear agent for an estate.
Given that she’ll need to relocate soon, I—” He clams up abruptly, and I sit up, alarmed by his sudden reticence when we have been so open.
“Relocate?” I ask. “Why would she need to relocate?”
Julian doesn’t respond. He’s squinting into the distance, his lips curled against his teeth as if to keep his words from escaping.
We steep in an uncomfortable silence, stuck at an impasse until I finally step boldly over the line. I surprise myself by not being angry, only resolute. I have nothing to lose here anymore.
“I have spent the last six months thinking that I was losing my mind because of secrets you withheld,” I remind him. “If you and I are going to work, you can’t hide anything from me. Not anymore.”
The old home’s radiators groan awake, adding a howling gravity to my words. And if I find out you have, I hope he hears, I will leave you.
I can see him processing—or perhaps more accurately, stewing on—my words. He doesn’t want to tell me this part, but I take the gamble that he wants to lose me less, and win. Julian rolls, with a sigh, onto his back.
“Brandon’s dying quicker than Leila thought he would,” he admits. “His diagnosis threw her for a loop. I don’t know whether he’s still alive or not right now, but I imagine that it’s not long before she finishes with him and prepares to move on.”
Leila, he explains, has the fewest moral qualms about her lifestyle.
She prefers to stay young, perpetually living in her twenties, and amasses her fortune like a black widow: by targeting working rich men, well respected in their professions but not particularly well-known, marrying them, draining them of their means over a period of ten to fifteen years, and moving to a new place to start over with a new identity.
She keeps a few other extramarital partners in her thrall as well for protection, finding highly susceptible targets who are content with getting rare attention from a beautiful woman in exchange for managing her more unsavory tasks—“like the shooter,” Julian explains.
It’s a gambit that has gotten more difficult in the last few years with the advent of digital databases and anti-counterfeit technology, but it’s one she intends to continue.
“I have resources that can make the transition easier for her,” Julian continues. “If I offer them to her, help her cover her bases and forge a new identity…there’s a good chance she’ll let us be.”
There are too many ifs in Julian’s solution for my comfort.
“I watched Leila slaughter a room full of people for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’m guessing that wasn’t her first rodeo,” I say. “Do you really think negotiating with her is the answer?”
“Leila is my sister,” Julian tells me. “And we have been through so much together. At the end of the day, even if she grumbles, she wants me to be happy.”
I’m not so sure. I think of the painting in Julian’s living room, hundreds of miles away.
Together. Leila, grinning into the sun as Alphonse looks down at them with bemusement.
If they are truly like siblings, she has already lost one brother to his human lover.
Will she be so willing to lose a second?
Or would she think the way I quietly do—You found someone to love once. You will find another.
“And what about Brandon?” I ask.
Julian gives me a glum look.
“To be honest, I don’t give a damn about Brandon,” he says.
A chill goes down my spine. Watching Julian interact with the Ghoshals, hearing him proclaim his love for me—all of that led me to briefly forget that he’s not a man who holds human life in high regard.
That my life is far from the first he’s taken pieces of.
If I hadn’t meant something to him, he might have left me on the floor of Ulrich Corridor, watched Leila carry out her atrocity, and done little more than cluck his tongue and offer his services to make her sins disappear.
“She’s already taken so much from him. She can let him at least have a fighting chance with whatever time he has left,” I insist. A lucid moment with Sophie.
A final few steps on his own. “He didn’t deserve this, Julian.
If you plan to talk to her anyway, can you at least ask about him? ” If, I wonder, he’s still alive?
I can feel Julian’s stare burning the side of my face.
“I don’t understand why you care so much,” he says. “He wasn’t a good friend to you. He was a terrible partner to your best friend. He might have been a good doctor, but there’ll be another one in his position in three months. What does it matter if he’s dead? He’s already served his purpose.”
His last sentence flash freezes the blood in my veins.
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this primordial fear around Julian, like I’m a common mouse who was meant to be dinner dropped into his snake pen, waiting to be consumed by the glittering, gorgeous creature that curls lovingly into my warmth but still opens his jaws wide every night for my brethren.
I want to ask what Julian thought Brandon’s “purpose” was.
Caring for patients? Fathering Sophie? Or feeding his praying mantis of a sister?
Suddenly, putting my life in Julian’s hands feels reckless.
I’ve done this before, I think, trusted someone I loved long after they showed me who they were, and I already know how that turned out for me.
Bleeding, alone, my world fading in and out of existence, I wonder how long it’ll take for someone to find me—
“Sean,” Julian interrupts, and I jolt back into reality. He reaches for my hand, and when I twine our fingers together, I realize that he’s trembling. “Please. I’m sorry. That was insensitive. Of course I’ll ask about Brandon.”
His panic grounds me. Julian might not care about most human life, but he does care about mine, and for now, that may have to be enough. I trace the paths of the veins curling in the back of his hand, drop my head to his shoulder.
“I’m the one whose life is in danger, so why are you stressed out?” I murmur.
“Because you’re a smart woman, and we both know you should be running far away from me,” Julian says. “And I think I’m waiting for you to wise up and do just that.”
I sigh. It is agonizing, what I feel for this man. Sometimes I wonder if he’s wrong, if I’m at least partially in his thrall, because I need him to the point of distraction. To the point of destruction.
“Love is reckless at baseline,” I murmur. “I would just prefer if it didn’t regularly put me in mortal danger.”
“I’m sorry—” Julian starts again, but I cut him off.
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry,” I say. “Involve me. Reassure me. Tell me that there’s no stone you’ll leave unturned to make this right.”
“Of course,” Julian says. “I’m willing to do anything—everything—to keep you safe.”
I lift my head to look into the face of my beloved. His features are darkened with conviction. He means it, and I know that.
“Would you kill her?” I ask. “If it came to that? Would you kill your sister to save me?”
Julian’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t hesitate with his answer.
“She’s lived a long time,” he whispers. “You haven’t.”
It’s exactly what I need to hear.