Chapter 35
I stiffened. Wife. He called me wife. I licked my lips as bile burned up my throat.
“How? You didn’t…when?” I glanced at his closed-off expression for a clue, our height difference stark without my high heels on. Not this morning—he must have already known. Last night was perfect until… “Brody. He recognized me?”
Cillian’s pinched lips curled up in disgust, and he jerked around to the bathroom, bag in tow.
“Wait.” I ran after him. “I was going to tell you.”
Vicious laughter scraped out of his throat. “No, you weren’t.”
He slammed a fist against the men’s changing room door, and it banged open.
“I was,” I said as he disappeared inside. I knocked on the door after him. “Tonight. Cillian, listen.” My forehead fell against the door. “I promise. I planned to tell you tonight. I just wanted one more perfect moment with you. Believe me. Chéri, please.”
The door sprang open, and he dragged me inside, then clamped it shut.
“You lied to me,” he snarled, forcing my arms over my head. “Now you expect me to believe you. That’s rich.”
With a gentleness that didn’t match the anger crackling off him, he untied my scarf and eased my turtleneck off. Then he slipped the thermal shirt over my arms and head. His tenderness made my head spin.
“You avoided me for years,” I told him as he crouched at my feet and took off one tennis shoe, then the other. “As your wife, all I did was get close to you. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
He slipped the thermal socks on my feet, followed by the pants over my leggings, and tugged them up taut.
Next came the gaiter, which he adjusted with special care not to put pressure on my bruises.
Lastly, he bundled me back up in my sweater.
All done, I expected the moment to end, for him to step back, and for his cruel edge to return.
Instead, he kissed my forehead. His mouth lingered with warm puffs of breath. This was the Cillian I knew and loved.
“It’s good that you know,” I whispered. “We can move forward from here.”
“I kill liars in my own ranks, síbhean. What makes you think I’d accept it of you?”
“I didn’t lie to you.”
He shoved himself away from me with a sneer. “You just don’t let up.”
“I never denied being who I am. I never told you any differently.”
With quick tugs and pulls, he undressed, then refitted his athletic wear over a layer of thermals.
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. Even your damn name was a lie.”
“Was it?” I was prepared to die on this hill because I’d been cautious about what I told him since the day we crossed paths on our seventh anniversary.
“You’ve always got something to say. Always needing the last word,” he jeered as he walked me up against the door.
“Ever wonder if maybe we’re here because I’ve chosen to end it?
It’s so easy for a chute to get stuck. For a small tear in the fabric to rip wide open.
And so difficult to investigate when all that’s left is a bloody pulp. ”
“You wouldn’t.”
He bared his teeth. “Watch me.”
The backs of my eyes burned. A phantom ache of Brody’s hand around my neck throbbed, as if my husband were squeezing the life out of me with his words.
After fetching a heavy-looking broad-pocket brown envelope from his bag, he forced the door open and scooted me aside, but I wasn’t one to be shooed away with a few harsh words.
“Do you know”—I slipped my shoes back on—“how many times I’ve been called Alice here over my many visits to the US?
Apparently, pronouncing a zé instead of a ce is too foreign.
Don’t tell me you don’t understand. How many times have people pronounced Cillian with an S instead of a K?
How does that make Alice a lie for Alizé? ”
He staggered to a halt just past the doorway, his back to me.
“And your surname?” he spat. “You going to find some subterfuge to explain away Marine for De Villier too?”
The words whipped out of him and slashed at me. The brutal angles of his shoulders rose and fell with each of his serrated breaths. There wasn’t even an edge of understanding in his bitter tone, and it snipped away my last fragile threads of hope. My heart crumbled into a paper ball.
“Your brother tells you something, and that’s it, you condemn me. You don’t check. You don’t talk to me. It’s that simple for you to get rid of me. Again.”
“Alice,” he growled.
It was better that he couldn’t see me right now. I didn’t think I had the strength to stay composed if I felt his contempt and saw it.
“Did you ever look through the first page of our divorce papers?” I wrestled with the neck gaiter and its constricting feel, with the need to get away from this small space and away from him.
“Marine is my middle name. Alizé Marine De Villier. All the divorce papers I sent you list it. You would know that if you took even the smallest amount of time to look me up. But you never cared to. Not even when you were told the truth.”
I wiped-patted the foolish wetness trailing down my face and walked through the door to face the man who made me believe I was worth more than scraps of affection, only to steal it all back.
“Everything I ever told you about myself was true. What I do for work. My history. My likes. My dislikes. I revealed things to you I’d never said to anyone. I trusted you with them.”
Now he reached for me, but I stepped out of range.
“Did you spend even a moment thinking that maybe I wanted you to know who I was? That maybe every day we had together, I hoped you would realize who I was on your own? Did you never think that it hurt me that you cared so little about who I really was? It did. So much.”
“There was a reason behind my avoidance.”
“I don’t care. I deserved better. I’ve been patient with you, but now I’m done. Let’s see if you really have the stomach to kill the woman you supposedly love.”
I shoulder-checked him and strode back into the hangar-turned-lounge and gear facility. Somewhere, since him threatening my death, I lost the stomach for his crap. When he tugged me back around to face him, I twisted out of his hold with a sneer.
“What?” I snapped. “Not quite ready to send me to my death?”
If I’d been expecting any softening on his part, I’d have been in for a sorry disappointment.
“You should’ve stayed away.”
A throaty, humorless laugh cackled out of me. “Why? For you to ignore me for another eight years? To keep my life on hold for some narcissistic jerk who never spared me a thought? No, thank you. None of that serves me. I deserve to be thought of. Especially by myself.”
“So it was all a ploy? I should have known.”
My seduction plan stopped feeling like a ruse long ago, but I didn’t correct him. He was going to hear whatever fit the narrative he had spoon-fed himself since last night.
I sidestepped him, ignoring the curious glances a couple of employees threw us.
“After seven years, why now?” he growled, his stomps hammering after me.
“I got tired of waiting.”
“For what?”
“What do you think?”
“The divorce?” Again, he jerked me to a stop, and I glanced longingly around his shoulder at the athletic brunette waving us closer from ten steps away.
“Yes, what else, Cillian?”
A hiss of pure venom shot out of him, and I rolled my eyes.
“Oh stop. After the number of papers I sent you, did you really think I would forever stay in the shadows?”
“You didn’t seem to mind it for seven. Fucking. Years.” The menacing bitterness of his tenor ricocheted across the hangar.
“I minded it. I just had better things to do because I never was the spoiled little rich girl you imagined,” I deadpanned back. “You might be happy living a life empty of anyone, but I’m not.”
“Happy?” He scoffed.
His hands itched at his sides, probably with a need to snap my neck or finish the job Brody started. I half expected him to try.
We finally made it to the brunette named Molly, who handed us our equipment with a strained smile. We made quick work of suiting up in the jumpsuits and harnesses. The slow demise of our relationship was reflected in every ragged jerk of our harness straps.
“I know it’s hard for your cynical heart to believe, but I was never going to accept being ignored for the rest of my life. You don’t know what that’s like. You never understood what it felt like to be abandoned.”
“That’s what this was about? A sick, twisted form of vengeance?”
His fingers wrapped around a strand of hair that had escaped my ponytail and tucked it behind my ear and into the neck gaiter with encroaching slowness.
The action was adoring in a way his voice, words, and the tension in his jaw weren’t.
The feel of his fingers tingled against my skin long after he pulled away.
“You need the validation of your self-importance that much, sweetheart?”
And there he went and ruined it. My teeth grated back and forth.
“No, what I want is a happily ever after, and you never would have given me that.”
“You so sure about that?”
“After today? With you so quick to snap away any chance at the first sign of a struggle?” I stepped out of his reach and out of the hold he had on my emotions.
“What else am I supposed to think? Tell me I’m wrong.
” I gestured between us. “Tell me you’re not ending us all because of a name.
Prove to me your love is not paper-thin. ”
Why couldn’t he see that a name didn’t define who I was as a person?
After a few more security checks, Molly and the instructor escorted us outside to a single-engine, turboprop airplane under a chilly breeze and the whistling drone of the engine. The videographer captured on film the scowl on Cillian’s face and my hollow gaze.
I tramped up into the aircraft first and shuffled over to the bench opposite the door.
“The irony galls me,” Cillian said over the engine’s hum.