She’s not alone. David is there. That’s what Jason wanted to say. David is still here. He always comes back eventually, because he loves me. And if I thought about it, he’d never really been gone when he’d been missing from my life. He’d always been there—lurking in the shadows; a warrior in the background, either watching over me or doing something to keep me safe. Sometimes, staying away to keep me safe.
That dark figure wasn’t the absence in my life; he was my knight in shining armor. He always had and always would be. I just needed to wait—to be patient until he felt safe to step out of the shadows and meet me by the water’s edge, where everything was always okay.
I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and texted Jason: It’s beautiful. But where am I supposed to hang it?
The canvas was bigger than me in both height and width, not that that was hard, so I couldn’t really think of a wall, except in the library, where it could hang without touching the floor. I wondered just how long he’d been working on this and what prompted him to paint it.
As I sat down on the bed and checked my phone, something hard stuck into my thigh. I rolled off it and pulled the leather-bound book from under the silky folds of my dress.
David’s journal. The one he threw at me earlier today.
It was smooth to touch, the leather warm as if it were still a living thing, with the date of this year carved out in its front—the same markings on the spine, too. The pages looked old and worn, but as I brushed my fingertip along the edges, I realized they were just recycled and made to look old. Probably so this journal would match the pile he kept from his first days as a vampire. I’d only ever seen a small pile, maybe thirteen or so journals, and I’d always always wanted to read them. So it truly was an honor and a privilege to be given this one. I just wished it were dated a hundred years ago. I’d be fascinated to know what made him tick before he met me.
The big hand on the clock across my room pointed to the seven—a warning to hurry up. So, without much more consideration, I cut the pages and opened them toward the last quarter. After reading down a few lines, it was clear he wrote this right after the argument we had outside his room—the night before he left for Paris. He had a very formal writing style usually, but this was all scribbles and thoughts written in his ‘voice’. Half of it was nonsensical gibberish and the other half had been smudged into a smoky cloud by what looked like droplets of water or something.
I didn’t want her to know, was the first line I could clearly make out. How can I ever let her look at me again now she knows?
My greatest shame has come to her knowledge and worse, she forgives me. Forgives me.
How can she? What right does she have? What could it possibly help for her to forgive me?
And yet, for some reason, I feel released.
I have lived in fear all this time that she would see the monster inside me and turn away. But she didn’t. And there is something oddly satisfying in that.
I drew my thoughts back from the pages and smiled. Was this what he so badly wanted me to know earlier—that he felt released by my forgiveness?
Right back to the middle of the journal, the pages were messy and chaotic, with sentences scratched out and some even blackened out so no one would ever read them, while the first thirty-to-forty pages were all thoughts centering around me in a mostly positive way. It made me feel kinda special. David could be so cold and cruel that, to be loved by him kind of meant belonging to a secret club. And I was the only member.
Well, I used to be.
I quickly flipped through, reading random bits: he thought I looked like an angel on the day he swore his oath as king. He laid and watched me sleeping many nights when he was supposed to be dead, gently tracing my cheek or running his fingertip across my lashes, just waiting for my lip to crease in the smile he adored, like I knew he was there. He couldn’t believe how amazing I was with a sword, and he was very impressed with the one his uncle had commissioned as a gift for me—the one still sitting under my bed in its wooden box. He loved the way I was changing, shaping to become this queen; this powerful girl that surprised him but, at the same time, didn’t. He felt like he always knew it was in me but just never expected it, or needed for it, to come out. He was happy with me as I was, but happy also to see me grow and take control of my life and change the monarchy he’d grown up in.
When I reached a paragraph under the date of the argument he and I had when I threatened to sleep with Arthur if he left to use the dagger on Drake, I stopped and read it carefully rather than skimming it.
A wife is not meant to fight for her husband. I need to fight for her—to keep her safe. Doesn’t she see that’s all I’m trying to do? Why can’t she respect that and let me die gracefully, peacefully, knowing she’ll go on?
This is hard enough for me as it is—knowing I have to leave her, knowing she’ll fall, heartbroken and once again hurt by the world, into someone else’s arms. And I don’t want that. I don’t want her to be with another, but I don’t want her to be alone forever either. She’s too young, and so lovely. Someone will steal her heart eventually. I’ve made peace with that. Deep inside. I truly have. Hell, I’ll even survive if that man turns out to be my brother. At least I know he’ll love her and respect her.
But I need her to understand and to accept why I’m doing this. I need her to lay with me, talk with me, hold me until the end. I don’t want to fight with her—waste this time arguing with her. She is all I ever wanted, all I ever searched for, yet here she is, and I can’t even enjoy her because she’s too darn inquisitive and had to figure all this out. Can’t she see this is why I tried to keep it secret?
Can’t she see how much it means to me to just enjoy my last few months with her in peace—not thinking about death or the future?
Ah, naive David, I thought, breaking away from the pages with a sly grin. To think I would ever just sit back and cozily enjoy a short period of time that would, tick-by-tick, lead to our last moment. Then again, if I’d never tried to fight for him, I would never have slept with Jason, and the whole truth about Drake and the dagger might have come out eventually anyway.
But the past is not for looking upon and wishing for change. It’s for learning and moving away from.
I read on a few more pages, slowing when I came to the day he rushed home from freeing prisoners at the Castle of Death to have his world pulled out from under him. His heart, as he put it so elegantly in calligraphic scroll, ‘propelled through the nine fiery circles of Hell in one breath’.
If I could have recorded my feelings in that exact moment or any of the minutes that followed, they’d have burned a hole in these pages. Instead, I sit here days later, a pen in my hand, and nothing to say due to a numbness that set-in hour by hour after I left that room.
A lion awoke in me when those words came from her lips, and he reached out a singular claw to tear her into pieces, but something else, something deeper, reached out only to hold her and tell her it was okay. It was okay. Why was it okay? Why was my first instinct to wrap her up and protect her from the beast that wanted her death? Why, when she told me she loved my brother, did I just want to step back and give her a life with him? What madness has she driven me to that I could feel that way?
I reacted with anger to these thoughts. I said things, did things these past days that I cannot undo. Not ever. She loves Jason, and I know she wants to be with him—I know now that she always has. But I don’t want to see her go lovingly into his arms hating me. Or thinking I hate her, because I don’t hate her. I hate what she did. I hate that she____
The ink faltered here into a flat line across the page before the entry ended. I flipped over to the next, but this one was dated weeks later.
If I do not write this down, if I do not expel the rage in some way far away from her, I may do something I never imagined myself capable of. Revenge, delivered with great brutality.
I know, and even she knows I can do her harm. She expected it. But I never though
t, until today, that I would ever actually hurt her. I watched it all play out in my mind, though—saw it frame by frame—saw my arm swing back, saw it connect with her face and knock her to the floor. But it didn’t stop there. I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. I landed on top of her with my hands around her throat, and it still was not enough. I needed to hit. I needed to make her bleed for the agony that ripped through me when she … I saw it. Saw just a flash in my brother’s mind as he sat at the table tonight, reliving what he did to her. Reliving it right there in front of me. Carelessly. Stupidly.
Or maybe… cruelly. I’m not sure he realized I could read his mind. But I saw it. Saw him take her lips against his. Saw her look up at him with those pretty blue eyes. Saw those same blue eyes move down his arm before she kissed the Mark there. Saw his lips travel the length of her body, her naked body. My wife. My darling, delicate little wife. Naked. Under him. Under his lips. Under someone else’s lips. But he didn’t just kiss her skin. He…
I can’t write it down. I can’t make it real by documenting it. It never happened. I will never write it down and it will never happen.
Ara. Why?
And that was it. The next three pages were blank and the entry after that was dated over a week later.
I’ve suffered many grievances in my unnaturally long life—enough to know that anger soon turns to such an extreme sadness you come to wonder where the rage even began.
But, sorrowful as I may be tonight, I know too well that the fury will return and, in that moment, I won’t remember how I felt now. I need to remind myself that no matter what she’s done to hurt me, I do still have a heart and that nothing inside me wants to see her hurt.
She’s suffering right now. I can see that. Any fool can see that. Hell, I want her to suffer, but it kills me to be the one causing that pain sometimes. The anger just takes over again though, almost like a reflex action, an automatic defense, and I suddenly believe that it is just. She hurt me, and I need to hurt her to make her understand. When did I become this kind of man?
A good question. But, in truth, he’d always been this kind of man—for at least as long as he’d been a vampire. I never wanted to see it. I was once afraid, so afraid I denied the thoughts that I wouldn’t love him if I understood just how deep the evil inside him went, and how easily that evil showed on the surface. But I’d seen the evil. He’d inflicted it upon me, and somehow, someway, I could still see the good in him.
There’s no going back now, I read on down a page written two weeks later. I have to let her go. She’s unhappy without him—without the fight to be with him. But it is far easier to know what I must do. Much harder to do it. I can’t. I just can not see her with him. No matter how I try, every time they even look at each other, I just want to lock her away in a tower and throw away the key.
Is this because I still love her, despite her betrayal? Maybe. Uncle Arthur seems to think so. I, however, am not so sure. I don’t see how any self-respecting man can still love a girl after that. And yet, when she walks past, something inside me holds onto a hope that she might look my way and I’ll catch a smile. Just one smile.
I looked up at the painting, leaving the page unfinished. He certainly wasn’t as hateful in his journal as he was in person. But why?
As I read on, that question answered itself. He wrote about the days that had passed, how he’d come to hate me so furiously that the sight of me sickened him. He talked about the things he’d said to hurt me, how every time he saw the tears in my eyes, it eased his soul. He started using my pain as medicine to heal his heart. And then he wrote about the day he met my threshold—the point that I could take no more from him, and he almost lost me for good.
It felt like acid in my veins to watch Jason lift her off the ground and cradle her naked body to his chest. The blood dripped from her head so thickly I wondered for a moment if she would wake at all from what I’d done to her.
But I had to knock her out. Or at least that’s what I have to tell myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have used a rock. Maybe… No. I had to. As it was, I should never have pulled her back from the spirit realm when she was so deeply embedded. The pain … it must have been…
I can’t think of that. I did the right thing. She had no right to take her own life just because it would save me from taking my own. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl.
It ended suddenly there, and the next page started with a date at the top—the date I found out I was pregnant.
I hate her. I hate every breath she takes, and I wish I’d let her die last night. No. In fact, I wish I’d never loved her.
Wish I didn’t still love her.
I tried. I looked at her, with her pink cheeks and her body full of life, and I tried to let that hate transfer to the unborn child. I said things to her that … well, that I can never take back. I was angry. I heard the news this morning and I was so overjoyed that my uncle nearly fell over backward when I smiled.
But I couldn’t let Ara see that. I couldn’t tell her how badly I wanted to pick her up and spin her around and say I was sorry. Tell her I forgive her and that we needed to mend the bridges now before our daughter arrived. Lilith made damn sure I knew about Ara’s fate before I got anywhere near forgiving her. And when I looked at her looking at me, waiting for me to share in that joy, I couldn’t. Not knowing she would share every day of our daughter’s life after that single moment with my brother—the man who was fated to be her husband. I hated her for a fate she had no control over. And I hated that child for being hers, knowing that, because Ara is who she is, my own child will never call me Daddy.
I shouldn’t have said those things to her. I just… I went into default and I guess, if I analyze my own behavior, I hurt her so she wouldn’t see me hurting more. I never wanted a child. I never wanted any life such as this until I met Ara. She gave me hope. She showed me this human life—this life of love and living.
And now, she’s the one taking it away, all because her fate and mine travel different paths. If I have to suffer for her fate, then she can suffer along with me.
Maybe I’m wrong. In fact, I know that when I wake tomorrow, I’ll feel nothing but the cold sting of regret for everything I said to her, but if I don’t push her away now, I’ll get close.
I want to get close. So badly, I—
No. God, help me. I can’t make sense of it all. Anger and responsibility mingle evenly in my mind as some sick form of justification. I know, after today, she hates me now as fiercely as I hate her.
But, unlike me, she has no love left underneath all of that. And it’s for the best. I will never take her back, just as she will never again look at me like I’m her entire world. The best we can hope for now is a future where we pass each other without feeling anything—not hate, not love, nothing. Nothing.
I am not her husband. I am not that child’s father. I am nothing to her and she is nothing to me. She can’t be. I can’t let her. I can’t…
I can’t get hurt like that. Ever again. And if I let a child bring us closer, that is exactly what will happen, because fate will see to it that we fail. I won’t lose her all over again. She’s not mine to lose anymore as it is.
And if I never think of that baby as my own, I’ll never lose her either.
My heart shook in my chest, making my hands tremble. I flipped quickly through the pages then, knowing I had very little time and I still hadn’t cleaned the flour off my face.
In the last thirty or so pages, a clearer-headed David wrote a short, compacted version of his own thoughts and feelings on everything. And judging from the date, it was written on the night of the ball—the one that ended in me being locked in my room.
I searched a hundred years for her. When I found her, I refused to let myself believe. But day after day, seeing her, talking to her, I couldn’t help but think maybe love was real. That maybe I could be happy.
Yet so many times she was torn away from me. We had to fight against unimaginable odds to be together, and when we finally f
ound peace, she threw it away. For my brother. For the man who kidnapped her, tortured her, bound her to him in a dream disguised as another man.
How could she lay with him? How could she stand the feel of him inside her? How can she have let herself fall in love with him when she knew how badly I needed her?
She knows me better than anyone—better than I know myself, and yet she did the one thing. The ONE thing that would completely destroy me.
Until now, I didn’t understand. I thought it was to hurt me, maybe for leaving her after she woke from the coma or maybe as revenge for not being there the night my brother kidnapped her.
But it all made sense tonight when she finally opened up to me. It changed everything. And it doesn’t make sense. Why would she leave that vital piece of information out of her confession? Why didn’t she just tell me that she slept with him to bear his child in the hopes she could save me—be with me forever? Doesn’t she understand what this means?
She said she realized she loved Jason in allowing him inside her, and she didn’t want him to die for me after that. But my hatred, my anger was more toward her reasons for sleeping with him in the first place—not what she felt after. I imagined them hiding behind bookshelves, kissing and giggling like teenagers, whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears then waiting until I left to do my duty as king before fucking in my bed.
But it wasn’t like that. She was tortured for having slept with him. Enough that she walked out to the lighthouse and, in her grief, she jumped. My sweet, beautiful girl actually jumped. And no one was there. No one saw it. No one caught her. No one held her and told her she didn’t need to do that.
She didn’t tell me she jumped. She didn’t tell anyone. In fact, she planned to take the secret to her grave, but I saw it. I saw her remember the way the rocks felt as she hit them. I saw her remember the feel of the locket slipping from her hands. I saw how much she needed to keep that from me, and I understood why. She’s scared of me. She thinks I’ll hurt her if I know the truth.
Echoes & Silence Part 1 Page 52
