by Am Hudson
“A kind, loving man, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You wouldn’t like me that way.”
I thought about Jason’s journals—all the mushy love notes and poems. “I like a little bit of it.”
“Yes. Small increments of romantic drivel. Not an entire chapter.”
***
If David’s eyes drifted away from me, his hand stayed tightly wrapped around mine, even though Drake assured us he’d lifted the spell. Neither of us was willing to trust it.
When I went back to my room to pack my things, David stood in the doorway, watching me pull everything out of the drawer and dump it carelessly in the suitcase Drake gave me.
“I see he made you quite comfortable.”
I looked up at David, then followed his eyes to the yellow roses on the windowsill. “He’s been very accommodating.”
He unfolded his arms and shut the door as he came into the room. “I was worried.”
“That he’d hurt me?”
“Yes.” He jumped up onto the bed and laid back on one elbow, watching me still. “Or that he’d be unkind to you.”
As I turned around to put my glorious new silky pyjamas in the suitcase, I shook my head at David. “You don’t really know him, that’s all.”
His brows moved up on his forehead. “And you do?”
“I’ve spent two weeks with the guy. I’ve come to know a lot about him.”
“And let me guess, he has you convinced that he’s good—deep down inside?”
I laughed. “I’m not that naïve, David. But… I don’t believe that we have the full story. And before we kill him, I just want to be sure we’ve got the right bad guy.”
David pinched the bridge of his nose and fell back on the bed, groaning. “Ara, you have got to stop sympathising with every monster that gives you a sob-story.”
“Don’t look away,” I reminded him; he sat up again. “And don’t underestimate me, David. I’m not stupid. I know a lie when I see one, and Drake is telling the truth.”
“About what?”
The zip on the suitcase caught for a second. I yanked it hard and it gave way, closing up my worldly possessions into one small bag. “I can’t talk about it here. But I think you need to stop believing what you see on the surface, and look a bit deeper.”
He stayed silent for a while then, as I packed up his journals into the safe and closed the book plate, making sure it was secure. When he spoke, it startled me a little.
“He was a friend once, you know.”
I stopped and smiled softly at him. “Was he?”
David nodded, looking down at his hands. “We had a lot of fun together—within the bounds of the Master to Subject relationship, but…”
“But torturing your wife kinda ruined that friendship.”
He laughed.
“I went to the southern wing,” I said, sitting down on the bench at the foot of the bed.
“Why?”
“The tour.”
As if he’d forgotten all about that, he grinned widely. “Did you see the show?”
“Yes.” My own grin spread to match his. “It was… amazing.”
“He’s a creative bastard,” he said, laying back again, “I’ll give him that.”
“And a wonderful performer. I was completely taken by it.”
“And you say you went on the tour?” he asked, with a hint of worry in his voice.
“I saw the chamber where Jason tortured me,” I confirmed.
A layer of guilt and dread changed David’s aura.
“But I was okay,” I said before he could sink into a pit. “I decided to look at it all from Jason’s perspective—think about what he would have felt when he did that. And it helped—I didn’t feel so much like the victim anymore.”
He rolled onto his belly and looked right into my eyes, showing me for a moment what life might have been like if we lived here once—also filling that void I’d had for weeks, wishing he was here. “I wish I could have been there with you—on that tour.”
“I don’t,” I said simply. “Not that I don’t wish you were here, because I did so badly I could hardly breathe. But I think sometimes I’m stronger when I don’t have anyone to lean on.”
That blank face stared back at me for a moment until his eyes warmed and his lips angled up into a soft smile. “You’ve changed so much.”
“In two weeks?”
“Since we broke up.” He rolled off the bed and came to sit beside me. “I’m jealous of the person you’ve become without me, as if I feel you could have become that with me—if I were a better husband.”
I scooped his hand up and ran my fingers over every inch of it, committing his smooth, golden skin to memory. “If it makes you feel any better, it was you that made me this way.”
“But with cruelty and isolation.”
I shrugged. “Tomayto—tomarto.”
David laughed.
***
On the way out the door I grabbed Jason’s journal, then we walked hand in hand through the draughty corridors he used to call home—a home he was never allowed to bring his human girlfriend to—and out the front doors to the waiting black car on the drive.
Drake handed David the keys and tapped the hood. “She’s been kept well,” he said. And only then did I really pay attention to slender lines of fine craftsmanship and the soft-top roof. My jaw dropped.
“Oh my God!” I said, running down the last two steps to the car. “I wondered what happened to this.”
David smiled back at me, holding up the keys like a teenager that just got a new car for his birthday. “It’s been here—safe in the underground lots.”
I ran my hand over the black paintwork. It had been kept well, brought to us clean and polished and gleaming like a new car. “This brings back so many memories.”
David leaned in and slipped his hand around my waist. “And we’ve yet to make a few more, I would say.”
I eyed the tiny back seat, then my belly. “Does this mean we’ll be sleeping in the car?”
Drake and David laughed.
“What I had in mind involves very little sleeping.”
“And that would be my cue to go,” Drake said, stepping back. He stopped and took a good look at me, his head cocked to one side. “Amara, my darling, it has been a pleasure having you. And I trust that you will be safe with David but, should you find yourself in trouble again, I am only a phone call away.”
“Thank you, Drake,” I said.
“Uncle Drake,” he corrected.
But I would never call him that, so I just nodded once politely.
“David.” He faced him and offered the hand of friendship. “As I said earlier, consider my army yours should you wish to reclaim Loslilian. And the guards accompanying you have been instructed to follow your orders.”
“I am forever in your debt,” David said with a bow, shaking Drake’s hand as he stood tall.
“Call me when you get settled, and should you need more funds, please do not hesitate to ask.”
“I won’t. You can be sure if it.” David pulled his hand free from Drake’s and opened the car door for me.
“Funds?” I whispered to David as I hopped inside. “Why would you need Drake’s money?”
“The Order has frozen all our accounts—and they’ll be tracking the use of credits cards.”
“Oh,” I said as he shut the door. And as I waited for him to circle the car and climb in, a huge surging wave of nostalgia washed over me. I tinkered with the air-conditioner and the radio—touching everything as if reliving a memory.
When the door opened on David’s side and he hopped in, his face broke into a smile seeing mine.
“You ready?” he said.
“Where are we going?”
He started the engine, revving it a little before slipping the car in gear. “Home.”
***
No one I’d ever known in my life ha
d eyes like David. We left Drake’s castle behind and drove for a while, and as evening drew near his eyes turned the colour of sunset on summer foliage, the light reaching right through them, making them look almost transparent. I found myself stealing glances at him like he was a stranger I’d never seen before.
My eyes traced a line my finger wished it could up the square bend of his jaw to his ear. He always looked so much older and so dangerously sexy with that thin spread of dark stubble. And I never really noticed it before, but his earlobe sat perfectly beside his head—not joined and not completely disconnected. They were nice ears.
I touched my belly, hoping our baby would inherit them.
Every now and then, as I lost myself staring at him, those striking, urbane eyes would turn on me in slight confusion, and I would look away. He didn’t have the courage to ask me what I was thinking. He was either afraid I was appraising him, trying to decide if I’m still attracted to him after so long being at odds, or he was afraid I was going to bring up the journals. I knew he didn’t want to talk about what I may or may not have read, but we needed to eventually, because I also knew he thought I was disgusted in him.
I looked down into my lap and breathed deeply to build up some courage. “You haven’t said a word the whole drive.”
When he opened his mouth, turning his head slightly in my direction, he clearly saw the tension all over me, because he shut his mouth and swallowed hard—hard enough for me to hear.
“When I was a child,” he said, “it was not considered manly to cry.”
I waited to see if this story had a point.
“We could be spanked, sent to bed without food—any number of things, Ara, and we were never allowed to cry.”
He didn’t elaborate.
The auburn sunset beamed through the trees alongside us then, creeping across the dash and making the edges of his brows and the ends of his hair red. I suddenly went back to a day like this when we drove to his lake. Now, I guess, our lake.
Looking at him, seeing his face as he went back down his own memories, clearly not good ones, I just wished, for a moment, that we were in the past—ditching school and going to the lake—which made me want to run back to my past self and say, “We did it, Ara. We got him. He’s ours.” And yeah, I had to go through Hell and back again to finally have him by my side—finally my husband—but if I could do it all over and it had to be done the same, I would. Anything to be in the car right now, an arm’s length away from him, married to him, with every right to touch him.
Whatever his concerns were right now, he had nothing to worry about. I would make it all okay.
“And?” I prompted.
“We know now that I’m the impure soul. That I am born off all the evil in man—”
“Not evil, David—”
“You don’t think?” he said humbly. “Ara, you read my journal. You’ve seen into my monster. I know you think me a beast for what you’ve read, and I just need you to understand something.”
When I went to defend my own thoughts and opinions he cut me off again, so I just sat back and bit my tongue.
“There are so few situations in my past that brought tears to my eyes,” he said, taking a moment to exhale after. “You were the cause of many of them. But for the love of all that is holy in this world, Ara, please don’t hate me for what you read—”
“But—”
“Just listen. Just hear me out,” he snapped. I shut up. Again. “I’ve not been able to speak a word to you this entire drive, for fear I might…” He seemed to stop himself from going on.
“Might what?” I put my hand over his on the steering wheel.
“Might… cry.”
My hand swiftly moved away from his and covered my mouth.
His eyes flicked sideways onto me. “Do you mock me?”
All I could do was shake my head.
“Then, say something. Don’t just sit there looking at me like I’ve lost my damn mind.”
“I…” I put my hand forcibly in my lap. “Is that really what’s been bothering you all afternoon?”
“What did you think it was?”
“Um, maybe the fact that we’re being hunted and have nowhere to go.”
He laughed once. “Ara, we have somewhere to go—I told you that.”
“Then where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise. You can just be patient and find out when we get there.”
I folded my arms and turned my knees to face the door, looking out the window.
David stayed quiet for a while. I took a little glance at him every ten seconds and, each time, I noticed his knuckles getting whiter on the steering wheel. He was either intensely angry or…
I sat all the way forward in disbelief when the headlamps from another car lit up a tear on his cheek, and all the weight of my guilt pushed my lungs inward around my heart. “I didn’t know what to say.”
“What?” he said, half distracted. He wiped a thumb down his chin, pretending to scratch it, but I knew he was really wiping a tear.
“I was… I think maybe I got a bit angry at you—at the you from the past—when I read your journal. But I had no right to feel that way—”
“Ara, of course you do, you—”
“No. I’m your wife.” I spun around in my seat to face him, touching his arm. “I always knew what was in you—the monster. And seeing it for real should never have come as such a shock to me. But it did, and I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.”
“But I am. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you right away that…” I didn’t really know what I wanted to say. Nothing in my vocabulary could truly express how little any of that really mattered, or how sorry I was that he thought for so long that it did—enough to bring him to tears.
“That?” he prompted.
“You wouldn’t show me the monster—be the monster around me—because you were afraid of it yourself, right?”
He wet his lips, focusing harder on the road.
I took that as a yes. “But you enjoy it—when he comes out? You like the way he makes you feel?”
“Sometimes. And other times it… it worries me—what I’m actually capable of.”
“And I guess that’s what I should have told you.” I sat back again and took a deep, relaxing breath. It was clear to me now. “You and your brother have done a lot of damage to me in the past,” I said, and David gave me an awkward, kind of apologetic smile. “And maybe it left me a bit twisted,” I continued. “But what you need to understand about me, David—something that has been there from the very beginning, before I ever even met you—is that your monster doesn’t scare me. And the real truth—the dark, deep secret of mine is… I enjoy the way your monster makes me feel.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that… reading that journal put a knot in my stomach. But… it wasn’t necessarily a bad knot.”
David shut his eyes for a moment, gripping the steering wheel a little bit tighter than before. “I’ve tainted you—”
“No, David, you’ve awakened me.” I put my hand on his thigh. “I’m not saying I want to go out and kill innocent girls or torture them while you have sex with them or anything, but the part of you that wants to do that… he excites me. And I can’t really explain it. And I don’t really want to. I just want you to know that I love you no matter what you’ve done and no matter what you do.”
He took a long jagged breath and tilted his head back against the seat. “I hate you, you know that, right?”
“Why?” I said with a little squeak.
“For leaving me in anguish this entire afternoon!” he said with a gentle laugh. “God.” He banged his chest. “I think my heart maybe even started beating with worry for a while there.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” I punched him softly. “You should’ve said something earlier.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t… I
felt like I might… I just…”
“Didn’t want to cry?”
His shoulders sunk.
“David.” I waited until he looked at me. “If I can love the monster, what on earth makes you think I can’t love you when you cry?”
“The monster is a representation of strength. Tears are weakness.”
“No, they are a tiny piece of your soul for me to hold onto until you’re ready to feel all right again,” I said with a cheeky grin; he grinned back, then reached over and scooped up my hand, squeezing it tightly.
“Then… you don’t want to leave me—for all the wrong I’ve done?” he asked. “For beating Arthur and getting you arrested? For leaving you at Drake’s castle for so long on your own? The offences are endless here, Ara, I—”
“You need to shut up about it,” I said, squeezing his hand back. “You burned down the Training Hall for me.” I laughed, and he burst out laughing too. “I think we’re even.”
“You… you heard about that, huh? I wondered.”
“I saw the smoke,” I said excitedly. “I was… to be honest, I was humbled and I felt… really loved.”
“Loved?”
“Yeah, that you cared that much about me—that you were so sickened by what had happened, that you had to burn down the place it happened.”
His thumb moved anxiously over my hand. “Falcon assured me that you understood. That you knew I—”
“Didn’t hate me for what I did with Arthur?” I said, nodding. “He did. And I believed him.”
“I wasn’t sure you would.”
“It would have been easy not to. But I figured you deserved a little faith—after all we’ve been through.”
“After all we’ve been through, I deserve a soundproof steel room a hundred miles underground, with nothing but a bed, a bath, and you.”
I smiled, looking down at the raised veins on the back of his hand. He had a way of being so accidentally sweet sometimes that I wondered how he could be the impure soul. “Wanna know something?”
“Sure.”
“Driving down this road—so close to my old home—to the place where I met you, and where all of this began—I’ve seen a new shopping mall, a few new houses, and there’s some traffic lights that weren’t there before. A lot has changed. But there is one thing that hasn’t in all this time.”
