Chapter 117: How cliche
ÉTIENNE
I tried to inhabit her skin, to let the world filter through her eyes instead of mine.
That was the mistake. I had told myself I would not do it, that the exercise was pointless and sentimental and led nowhere useful, but sitting at the desk with the file in front of me and the sound of her breathing behind me, I did it anyway. I imagined being her. Sixteen years old, standing in front of a cell with her mother’s voice in her head and the weight of her entire family’s decision that she was not even fully aware of pressing down on her chest. I imagined being told that the boy she cared about had to be sacrificed for the pack to keep flourishing, because said boy descended from the worst of criminals, and her holding that boy’s hand would send the wrong message, and I imagined believing the people who told her that because they were the only people she had.
The guilt arrived before I could stop it.
It crept in, small and unwelcome, a shadow that made no sense.
I forced it away.
What was I supposed to do with it? Bury my parents and my brother in my head a second time? Tell the boy who had spent years being passed between strangers that, actually, the girl who helped put him there had been scared, so everything was even? There was no version of forgiveness that I could construct that did not require me to diminish what had been done, and I was not capable of that. I was not even sure I wanted to be.
She did mention justice, my wolf said.
"I know."
In place of revenge. She kept drawing that distinction.
"I know what she said."
Do we think there is a world, my wolf continued with the patient persistence that made him genuinely insufferable, where we have her mother’s head in a box, and she still wants to be with us?
I set my jaw. "There is no world where I should care about that."
If that is the case, then why is the bond still open? Neither of us has closed it.
"She has not closed it because I threatened her."
My wolf was quiet for a moment. Then, with the particular quality of something that knew it was right and was willing to wait for that to be acknowledged said, all three of us know that is not true.
"Shut up," I said. "You are a rabid animal."
He retreated, which was not the same as agreeing.
I pulled the file toward me.
The cover was worn at the corners from years of handling, the brown paper had gone soft with age. I opened it. My eyes found the top of the first page.
Archambault.
I closed it.
The sound of the cover hitting the desk was too loud in the quiet room, and Margaux shifted slightly behind me, and I sat there with my hand flat on top of the closed file and understood exactly why I had shut it.
I did not want to open it.
That was the heart of it, lodged in my chest with the stubbornness of something that would not be argued away. I did not want to read what waited inside. Not because I feared what it might prove, but because I feared what it might unravel. Whatever delicate, half-formed thing had begun to grow between us in kitchens and corridors and the electric hush after an unplanned kiss, it existed in a space the file could not enter without destroying. And I was not ready to let that space vanish.
I stood up and pushed the chair back harder than necessary.
I should be better than this. I had spent years being better than this, constructing the exact version of myself that could stand in a room with her and feel nothing except the clean, useful fuel of hatred. That version of me had plans and contingencies and a list that was getting shorter by careful increments.
But that version of me had also kissed her in a kitchen without his mask on.
So clearly, the scaffolding had started to crack.
I walked to the bed.
She had stopped crying. Her face was still in sleep or the near-sleep of someone too exhausted to remain fully conscious, and her lips were swollen from it, and there were tear tracks on her cheeks that had not fully dried. I stood there looking at her for longer than I had any practical reason to, and then I reached out and wiped the last unfinished track away with my thumb.
"I did not quite think this through, did I?" I said quietly. It was not a question. It was more like an inventory.
I brushed her hair from her face and let out a sigh that came from somewhere deeper than tiredness could reach.
Because my mind had gone to Séverine.
I could not sidestep it any longer. I had been circling the decision since the kitchen, convincing myself there was still time, that clarity would arrive if I waited. But clarity had already arrived, and I had simply refused to name it. Tonight was not a lapse. It was not the bond hijacking my judgment or old wounds clawing for escape. It was a choice my heart had made long before the rest of me stopped fighting.
Séverine deserved better than a man who kissed someone else and told himself he would figure it out later.
She deserved to hear the truth from me directly, and it would hurt her, and I was going to have to live with that. But playing both of them at once was a cruelty I was not willing to carry. Not anymore.
I did not know when it had happened. The thawing. I had been so certain the cold was permanent, that the trafficking house had done something irreversible to the parts of me that could want someone without armor around it. And maybe it had. Maybe what I felt was not the same thing other people felt when they used words like love, maybe it was messier and more damaged and came with considerably more complicated luggage than most people brought to these situations.
But it was only pointing in one direction.
She was the exception. That was the plainest way to say it. She had been the exception since I was fifteen years old, and she had not stopped being it despite everything that had been done by both of us to make it otherwise.
I wished I could go back. Not to undo it all, necessarily, because some of it had made me the person standing here, and I had made a kind of peace with that. But I wished I could have one version where my parents were alive, and the people who loved me had not been torn apart by the ambitions of other people, and I was just a boy who got to stand in a kitchen with this girl without the weight of everything else between us.
That was a fantasy. I knew it was a fantasy.
I pressed a kiss to the top of her head and lowered myself to the floor beside the bed, my back against the mattress frame, and I stayed there.
Her hand was near the edge of the bed. I slowly put mine over it, expecting her to pull back.
She did not pull back. Her fingers closed around mine with the instinct of someone reaching for something familiar in the dark.
The memories slipped in as they always did when my guard faltered. The pool shimmering in summer. The sunlight tangled in a field of forget-me-nots. Her voice at fourteen, laughing at a joke I barely remember, convinced I was funnier than I ever was. Small, vivid, untouched by time.
Then the other kind.
My mother’s voice cutting off mid-scream. The smell of the rain mixing with what rain could not put out. My brother’s hand reaching through fire toward a gap that closed before it could be crossed.
I looked at her face beside me in the dim room, the tear tracks and the swollen mouth and the particular stillness of someone sleeping from pure depletion, and I could see the orange hue of those flames reflected in the space behind my eyes, no matter where I looked.
I closed my eyes and pressed my head against the side of the bed.
"This was so much easier," I said, very quietly, "when I hated you."