Chapter 29 Maeve
Maeve
As the night deepened, Maeve’s anger, the prowling insecurity, had only sharpened its teeth.
Jude was with Bethan. She heard them only a few doors down.
The murmur of voices, the scrape of furniture on naked floorboards.
Bethan had said his name, a gasped exclamation loud enough for Maeve’s breath to catch in her throat.
Hours had passed since dinner, but he would take his time.
She’d seen enough of his intensity, his single-mindedness, to know that.
Still, she wasn’t quite sure why she had come to the library.
The book she chose was bound in scuffed black leather; the runes inside indecipherable. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t read it. All she needed to do was open it, and the magic would do the rest. It vibrated in her hands; the pages edged in the gold that would consume her as soon as it opened.
Maeve stood at a crossroads. Continue, and she’d have a piece of Jude he might never have given her. Stop, and the rejected beast inside her would remain hungry.
She placed the book on the floor and laid shaking hands on the cover, deliberating.
It pulsed with its own heartbeat. Underneath her closed lids, gold swept into her vision like the unending tide from the sea, staining all it touched.
Even with the cover still shut, distorted memories pulsed against her lids.
Pain and stifled weeping. Cries smothered into a fist. Blood leaking from slender gashes.
With a choked gasp, she pulled back.
She couldn’t do it.
Beneath layers of muscle and bone, her heart fought to be freed from her chest. She had nearly looked at it. She had been so close to opening the cover. Her shaky exhale broke the silence as relief coursed through her. She hadn’t done it. She hadn’t betrayed his trust.
Around her, the library shifted, drawing breath.
Her eyes snapped open, and suddenly, he was there.
Hands were against her shoulders, pushing her forward towards the book. Maeve’s head fell against his chest as she struggled against the movement. ‘No. No, wait, Jude—’
‘Do it,’ he hissed. ‘You came in here for my secrets, so have at them. Read it.’
He pressed against her back, surrounding her, gripping her wrists to draw her hands to his book. She had barely more than a heartbeat to fight back before her palms were against the pages.
Nausea surged up her throat as the memory swept her into its fold.
Damp walls pressed in from all sides. Seawater slapped against the window in a rhythmic pulse. The iron frame rattled, water straining through the edges where fogged glass met stone. Maeve recognized the sound of the sea, the shade of the stone.
She was back at the Abbey. It smelled of brine and blood.
Kneeling on the floor, illuminated by a shaft of weak sunlight, was Jude.
Alone. Young – just barely past childhood.
His body was frail and shaking, naked from the waist up.
One hand was braced on the wet stone floor underneath him, the other banded over his mouth.
Tears dripped off his nose and mixed with the salt and reddish stains already coating the floor.
His exposed back leaked blood.
Her head spun, and her tongue felt unwieldy in her mouth. As she moved closer, unable to look away from the horror of Jude’s childhood, she wondered if she would pass out. Her vision wasn’t quite right. Hazy, blurring at the edges.
Scratched into his pale flesh, from armpit to armpit, was the word DEVOTION.
Blood slunk down the hollow of his spine to collect in the waist of his trousers.
The skin around the gashes was purple and bruised.
Jude braced both hands on the floor, grunting as he stood.
His collarbones were like twin knives, every rib visible, caging the hollowed expanse of his stomach.
His face still had some childhood roundness around the cheeks and jaw.
Tears streaked down it in messy lines. He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist, taking a deep breath and wincing when the movement pulled at his ravaged skin.
The air around him stilled, dust motes freezing in the light, lit with every shade of gold.
His eyes met Maeve’s.
She fell backwards out of the memory.
Maeve opened her eyes to Jude standing over her, a spectral figure of pain and embarrassment. His chest rose and fell in rapid, uneven breaths. ‘Are you satisfied? Now that you have what you came for?’
‘Jude—’ Maeve heaved. She couldn’t stop her tears.
Who would put a child through that, tearing a word into his skin? Devotion? She felt despicable, the lowest sort of human to think she could claim his nightmares for her own. To even call herself his friend was an abomination. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so—’
‘Enough.’
She couldn’t read his expression, as though an iron mask had descended over every area softness had begun to creep into. ‘Why, Maeve? Why would you come here?’ his voice cracked thickly. He pressed his lips together. ‘I would have shown you if you just asked. Why did you do it?’
He didn’t give her time to speak, crossing the room to the window and bracing against it like he couldn’t bear the sight of her face.
He opened the lock with shaking fingers.
A bracing flush of icy air streamed in. His jumper clung to his back, outlining the wings of his shoulders and the shape of his ribs.
The scored word there flashed across her vision.
‘Who did it to you?’ Maeve whispered.
She could see little more than the side of his jaw, the quick flutter of his lashes.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, carefully emotionless.
‘There’s a man in many of my memories who is always blurred.
The same person who was behind the door in the memory of my final day at the Abbey. My mentor, most likely.’
‘Do you remember anything about him? Was he the one who marked your sainthood?’ Maeve asked, rising back to her feet.
His mentor had been behind the door – not a nurse like she’d originally thought.
She felt a sick need to keep him talking, as if things would return to normal between them if he continued answering her questions.
She caught a whiff of something unfamiliar as he turned to face her. Sweet, like crushed roses with the undercurrent of fresh-cut wood. At her wince, Jude cocked his head. His mouth parted on the precipice of speech, but he seemed to change his mind at the last second.
She wanted him to ask. Give her the chance to find out the truth about him and Bethan.
‘Why come here without me?’ Jude asked in a low voice.
She raised trembling hands in front of her, palms raised. Jude was a saint, and everything in her screamed to confess. ‘Do you want me to beg? Is that what you want? Me begging you to tell me what you were doing tonight?’
Jude stumbled back as his looming anger was replaced by confusion. ‘What?’
But she’d already started speaking, and it was far, far too late to stop.
‘Bethan. I know you were with her. I don’t begrudge your connection, and she’s lovely, truly, she is, but I wish—’ she hesitated, throat growing thick with unshed tears. Through it all, Jude stared. Maeve ploughed on, ‘I wish you would have told me before you had a lover over.’
Horror washed across his face. ‘What?’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have broken in,’ she wrenched out.
‘But these secrets you’ve kept, Jude. They hurt.
I… I’ve come to view this place as somewhat of a home to me, and seeing Bethan with you, how you were with her – so open, when you’re not with me.
When every inch of give still feels like a battle.
’ She laid both hands over her heart. Felt its pounding rhythm.
‘I thought if I saw some piece of you that you’d kept hidden, it would distract me from whatever was happening in your bedroom.
It’s wrong. I know it is. And I’m sorry. ’
The silence after her words was deafening.
Jude’s hand twitched at his side, an abortive reach for her. ‘Bethan isn’t my lover.’
It was her turn to stare. ‘She’s… not?’
He barked a hoarse, almost disbelieving laugh. ‘No. Never.’
‘Oh.’ She worried the end of her braid.
The guilt worsened. It wasn’t as if her feelings of rejection were an excuse for breaking in, but they offered some weak form of justification, however misguided.
Now, with Jude studying her like he was suddenly privy to a new side of her character, she had nothing.
She’d overreacted, grossly so, and fractured something between them that couldn’t be remade.
‘Mm.’ Jude paused. ‘And you were jealous. When you thought we were…’ He palmed the back of his neck and looked down. ‘In bed.’
‘Jealous?’ Heat stole up her neck. ‘I… no. Of course not.’
His lips compressed tighter. ‘Bethan and I have only ever been friends. She’s like a sister.’
‘I see,’ Maeve replied, studying her socked feet.
The wool on her right foot had worn thin, a bit of skin peeking through the weave.
Guilt and shame banded tightly around her chest, making breathing difficult.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured again. What more could she say?
‘I… I could hear you in your bedroom, and I assumed – but that’s not an excuse. Nothing is.’
Jude didn’t reply for a long moment. Maeve met his eyes, seeing only cool detachment in his gaze.
‘I think I need to show you something. Address your concerns about my… openness. You’re right, Maeve.
’ As Jude stepped towards her, she realized she’d been wrong to think his anger had abated.
Hurt played out cleanly across his face, and she feared it was a deliberate choice to let her see it.
‘I have kept things from you. Perhaps more than you know. And maybe I haven’t trusted you with everything. Maybe I was right not to.’
The air in the library thinned even further.
She didn’t have a reply, could only watch as Jude moved across the room to a narrow bookcase tucked into the corner and withdrew a book.
He pulled something from between its pages before replacing it on the shelf.
When he turned back, something murky lingered in his eyes.
Like whatever he held would hurt, like giving it to her wasn’t a kindness.
He took a step closer. Held out an envelope. ‘I’m sorry, Maeve. Truly.’