Chapter 15
fifteen
I married him.
I’m not sure what shocks me more, the fact that I’m married or that it’s to a man that I’ve never even had sex with.
When we get to the end of the ceremony, before the priest can tell Cassius to kiss the bride, he squeezes my hands and lightly shakes his head no.
It’s only his brothers in attendance, so it isn’t all that embarrassing, so why doesn’t he want to kiss me?
The garden behind his house smells like rosemary.
Adrian’s cane ticks on stone. Caleb stands with his hands behind his back like an expensive bodyguard.
Atlas is the only one who smiles at me. And at the very edge of the lawn, where shadows start, the man in the dark Bolo-Hat leans against an olive tree and tips the brim at me.
Beside him, another figure holds his chin at a wrong angle, as if a hand still has him by the forehead; a darker stain spreads down his shirtfront that wasn’t there, couldn’t be there.
Wyatt showing up to my wedding might be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
He hangs in the corner like a stain the room can’t scrub out, the gash at his throat still working, breath whistling through a pipe that isn’t there.
The blood on his shirt blooms, slow as mold, and when I look too long my own collar feels damp.
His lips shape words the air refuses to carry, but the space learns them anyway.
Steam beads, then strings, then spells out fragments in my head: London. Girls. Ask him.
Cold settles on me in fingerprints—five points along my shoulder, a thumb at my jaw—showing me how a head is held still.
My breath fogs; I count three, then five, until the prickling in my scalp lets go.
When Wyatt leans closer, the temperature drops hard enough to ache in my teeth.
Turn him in, his mouth says without sound. Before you disappear too.
The Bolo-Hat ghost doesn’t bleed. He doesn’t mouth accusations. He just tips his brim, and the cold thins to a tolerable hush. When Wyatt crowds me, Bolo-Hat slides into my periphery and the lights steady. Wait. Trust him.
The first two nights here were excruciatingly lonely.
I cried until there wasn’t an ounce of moisture left in my body, but once I got all that out, I longed for him to come back.
I wanted so badly for him to pull me into his arms every time he came in with food.
I prayed he’d open the door at night and slide into bed next to me.
Instead, Wyatt’s chill kept pressing me toward a phone and a badge and a story that will end us.
Bolo-Hat’s quiet kept telling me to keep my mouth shut and my feet where they are.
The words find me anyway, no matter how I fight them.
In the rattle of the vent: missing girls.
In the click of the lamp: ask about London.
In the way the window fog sketches an outline of a hand at a throat.
I pull the duvet straight and breathe on threes and fives.
If I betray Cassius, I become the woman who hands over the only person who chose me—and did it in blood.
He may be unhinged, obsessed, built wrong in ways that would terrify a saner girl, but nothing in him hums through me with the eerie voltage the dead that follow him carry. I can live with this. I think I can.
But if I choose him, what does that make me? A wife who swallows secrets until they calcify? A woman who learns to breathe around knives and sleep beside a man who calls himself a Machine and brings home new ghosts God knows how often?
I don’t know how to reconcile this cluster of feelings. I never once imagined I’d ever be in a position to have to decide whether I can accept someone taking another person’s life, but it seems my brain is accepting Wyatt’s fate just fine.
Shock is the wrong word. Thinking back to Cassius palming Wyatt’s forehead, the knife flash, and then skin, thinner than you’d think, parting with an obscene unzip.
The cut isn’t a line. It’s a mouth. Arterial spray, hot and rhythmic, paints my lashes, dots my lips.
Blood smells like pennies left on the Vegas sidewalk in the heat of summer and salt.
It slicks down my throat, beads along my clavicle and gathers in the hollow like a garnet.
Wyatt tries to breathe through a pipe that no longer works.
The sound is a wet kettle trying to whistle.
His hands scrabble at air that won’t stick.
He slides, smears, knocks his shoulder on the door with a dull thud I’ll hear in my nightmares.
My shoes slip. The world tunnels down to the flutter of his pulse bulging, then emptying, then nothing.
I don’t scream. I don’t faint. A drip hangs from the tip of my hair. A streak on the window is crooked and I have the insane urge to wipe it straight. I press my lips together instead and swallow the copper.
And in that crimson hush something inside me molts.
Melinda, the girl with even edges and careful rules, peels back.
The part of me Cassius calls Lindy steps forward, bare and reckless and brutally clear.
The thing that plagues me is the rape would’ve been worse.
Wyatt forcing me in a parking garage…even thinking about it now brings a vile taste to my mouth.
I’d rather live with his death on my conscience than wake up every day his victim.
If that makes me an awful person, I can be okay with that.
The tax for my breath is Wyatt’s blood on my skin.
I can live with that. I have to live with that.
I should feel ruined. Instead I feel chosen.
Claimed by a violence that bent itself around me instead of into me.
I’m going to have to learn what that means.
I’m going to have to decide what I’ll accept, what I’ll overlook, and what I’ll insist on.
But standing in that parking garage that smells like iron and oil and the end of a life, I understand two things: monsters are real, and the one I chose is the reason I’m still standing.
At the edge of my vision, a brim dips once and the cold thins.
And the dead are watching, waiting to see what kind of woman I become.
We eat dinner with his brothers following our quick ceremony.
They’re all so put together and serious, it’s intimidating.
I sit to Cassius’ left, his hand on my thigh.
I have no idea what to say, so I stay quiet unless I am asked a direct question, which isn’t often.
I line my fork parallel to my knife. I count my sips of water in my head, four, then have to take a fifth so it won’t start itching under my skin.
Afterward I ask Cassius if it’d be alright if I came back upstairs to rest, really I just want to take off my fake wedding dress and wash off my makeup.
He leans into me and kisses my temple before whispering in my ear, “You never have to ask me for permission Lindy girl,” before sitting back in his chair.
After my dress has been removed, along with my makeup, there’s a knock on the master door.
“Come in,” I say, feeling weird because it’s his room.
Cassius walks in, undoing his cufflinks and removing his suit jacket.
He places it on the back of the same chair I draped my wedding gown over.
I so carefully aligned it so the hem falls straight.
I dig my nails into my palms to fight fixing his jacket to match.
He sits on the bed beside me and unbuttons his shirt.
His ring catches on a button, a light metallic scrape, a bright flash.
He said he’ll never take it off. I look at my own band and wait for panic.
There’s no itch to twist it, no impulse to slide it free.
“You looked gorgeous today, darling.” Cassius smirks and I swear the sun lives in his eyes. He’s such a contradiction. Ruthless killer. Relentless flirt.
“You cleaned up pretty nice yourself.” I take the shirt once he’s shrugged himself out of it and add it to our growing chair pile, taking a few extra seconds to line the seams, and then sit back down.
He’s magnificent. I try to fight the urge to touch him, but my hand disobeys me and traces the slope of his shoulder, the hard line of his bicep.
His knuckles are wrecked ridges, silvered scars, a fresh crack blooming under his wedding band.
I thread our fingers anyway, my thumb skimming gently over the ragged skin.
Before I can shut myself up, I ask, “Why didn’t you kiss me today? Did you not want to?”
He looks down at our hands before turning to face me and cups my jaw.
“Kissing you is all I want to do,” he says, and slams his lips to mine.
The force of it makes me think he’s trying to prove something to me, or maybe to himself, that he can have this and not ruin it.
I know falling in love with him will be dangerous, but this feels worse, like he believes falling in love with me would be dangerous and he already knows the end of this story.
It’s desperate. It’s careful. It pours every unspoken word, every restrained emotion.
His hand, warm against my jaw, anchors me to the moment, to him, and I melt into the kiss, letting go of every doubt, every fear.
When he finally breaks away he rests his forehead to mine and our breaths find each other, in-out, same rhythm.
The world seems to stand still, suspended in the aftermath of our connection.
His forehead rests against mine, and for a heartbeat, we're two souls caught in the gravity of each other, the rest of the world fading into insignificance.