Chapter 9 #3
“You need to rest.” She yawns, as if her body has decided to betray her argument before I can. “See?” I murmur. “Come on, rest. I’ll be back soon.”
“Tristan.” Her lips form my name, and I am done for, because those syllables on her mouth are stronger than an enchantment.
She signs again. Tell me. Her signing is smooth and instinctive, each movement belonging to her so naturally it seems less like a language she learned and more like one her body always knew.
Mine is different. I still translate English in my head before my hands can follow, reducing a complete language to a slower, clumsier version of my own thoughts, and the inadequacy irritates me.
I should be better by now. I should have learned more.
Practiced until ASL became a language of its own inside me, not a scattered collection of signs stitched to English syntax.
“You can talk to me,” she signs delicately, raising her eyebrows in that endearing, devastating way of hers.
I should sign back. I know I should. But since she disappeared, signing has become a wall between us, something left behind with her in that cell, a piece of us I have not managed to retrieve and return to her yet.
I do not know why my hands refuse her now. Why can I just do it?
“What if I’m breaking everything I touch?” I mutter under my breath. She sits straighter, fighting the exhaustion carved into her bones since she came back to me. Her hand lifts, and she signs with a faint frown, “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. I…” My palm runs over my face.
When was the last time I got a full night's sleep?
“I used to… I used to work.” My gaze fixes on the edge of the living room table, on a slight impact in the squared wood, as if something had caught there once and left a permanent scar.
Not unlike the small bump on the bridge of my nose, left there after my father broke it twice and years of fights made sure it never healed quite straight.
“Work?” she signs.
“I don’t know how to explain. I used to be…
my work. That was all of me. Morning to night.
Work, rinse, repeat.” Since I met her, long before the captivity, a breach had already formed in the clean architecture of my life, though I had not been able to name it before.
Or perhaps I had refused to. Perhaps I had no desire to examine my life closely enough to notice the obvious absence of living.
Human beings, my mother had told me on my last birthday.
You’re a human being, Tristan, not a human doing.
I did not understand it then, or I pretended not to, but now the meaning seems to seep into me whether I want it or not.
“I’m so sorry,” she signs, her brows drawing together as one hand covers her trembling mouth.
“I’m the one who’s sorry, Ella. I’m the reason you suffered.
I’m the root of the problem.” She shakes her head with the horror of someone being asked to accept an impossible truth.
Because she knows there is some truth in it.
I am the reason she was in danger. Denying that would be insulting to both of us, and I would be more frightened if she tried to absolve me completely.
“What are you afraid of?” she signs.
“Being like my father.”
“Wasn’t he a good man ?”
“No, Ella, he-” I meet her dark pupils, where innocence still manage to exist. “He wasn’t, at all.”
“Then you have nothing to fear. You’re everything he wasn’t.”
“I’m not sure.” I wince because the confession is already pressing at my teeth. “What if- what if I kill Cole ?”
“You won’t,” she signs. “You won’t because it isn’t who you are. You’re a good man, Tristan.”
“Sweetheart, you have no idea what lives in my head right now. I’ve done things, terrible but necessary things, and you need to understand that. There’s a world of violence in me that I’m trying to keep away from you.”
“Show me, then,” she signs. “Show me the worst part of you and watch me stay anyway.”
“You would be disgusted.”
“Have faith in me.” My throat tightens around the ugliest part of the truth.
“Every now and then…” I stop myself and press my tongue against my teeth.
“No, that’s not true. Once a month, for the last five years, I fight in an underground club where anyone can enter, and the winner stays for the next match.
A cage match. I don’t know if you have ever heard of MMA, but that is close enough.
It is bloody and brutal and satisfying because…
” I hesitate. “Because I need it,” I admit at last. “If I don’t destroy someone regularly, I feel like I’m losing it, like there is something beneath my skin trying to claw its way out.
It helped a ton, even at work. My attention improved.
I found a way to…cope.” My voice drops. “I am a violent man, Ella. I do not deserve you.” She shakes her head, as if she is watching a scene unfold incorrectly.
“Maybe, but…you use violence in a place where it’s contained and valued.
I think… I think it’s okay, Tristan. There’s nothing wrong with that.
” She blinks slowly, so close to passing out and still trying to reassure me with hands that can barely stay lifted.
Trying to be my what? Girlfriend? Partner?
Soulmate? The list keeps lengthening, and every possible outcome ends with the word wife, which should terrify me because it is far too soon, except I have never been more certain of anything in my life.
Her hands lower to the blanket, weakened by exhaustion, but her eyes remain on mine even as sleep starts to claim her.
I move closer, carefully enough that she can refuse me. She does not.
“Rest,” I murmur. She frowns, stubborn even at the edge of unconsciousness.
“Sign it,” she signs, the movement faint but unmistakable.
My hands go cold. I see her lying barely clothed on the floor, covered with dried blood and the fresh letter V etched into her shoulder.
I see myself entering my bedroom where she used to be, almost watching the scene from the window, breaking the fourth wall of my life, watching a horror movie happen live.
With heavy eyelids, her lips form a hard line.
“I…” I straighten. “If you consent to it, I’ll carry you upstairs to my bedroom once you’re asleep.
” She scans me, and I have the distinct feeling she can see past my fake confidence and coldness.
Still, she nods before sleep wins over her, and she lets out a tiny sigh as her face shifts deeper into the cushion.
Like I warned her, I carry her upstairs in my arms, step by step.
When she is safely sleeping on my side of the bed, snuggling into my pillow and inhaling it, I tuck her in and walk out backward, soaking in every last second before closing the door.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
She is safe. Matt will be guarding her, and the house is surrounded by new security staff.
This is not like last time. I corrected it.
I did things differently. Yet the bitter taste of fear lingers in my mouth as I head outside and start my car.
Brenton’s call interrupts my chain of thought halfway to Ashford Building.
“Sir.”
“Brenton.”
“There’s been a development.” He cuts through the small talk and gives me an update on Cold’s hunt.
After finding the guards I killed, the police attributed the deaths to a “potential internal rebellion.” Which is exactly the kind of spin you can buy when you know the right people.
I did not intend to spend the rest of my life in jail for killing Cole’s men, so I made sure I would not, greasing the right hands at the police department and holding thick, devastating pieces of dirt over the right people.
And that was it. With mine and Ella’s depositions, and the large number of hostages they managed to exfiltrate, they now have enough evidence to arrest Cole Vodianov.
He seems to be hiding at one of his uncle’s manors, some sort of fortress on the east side of the city.
Brenton, the police, and the district attorney’s office are working to put him behind bars.
It takes everything in me not to get my gun and handle things myself.
But I need to let the police work and focus on Ella and my company.
The police will only let me do so much while turning a blind eye.
I need to let them do their job now. My schedule is packed with meetings, employee representatives to reassure, journalists to spin the story for, and a ship I have to keep from diving straight into the financial abyss.
Still, I look at my phone, at the surveillance app open to Ella sleeping.
My heart is walking outside my body now.
I thought love was supposed to feel light and reckless.
Instead, it feels like standing guard behind a door hiding the most precious treasure in the world, knowing I would risk my life over and over to keep it safe.
* * *
“Thank you for coming,” I say as Dr. Elias Keller steps into my office. “I know how unusual it is to see you outside of our appointments.” He removes his yellow, rain-darkened coat with the same precision he brings to everything, then folds it over the back of the chair opposite mine.