He raises my chin with his knuckles, so I have to meet his eyes. “I meant it. Don’t ever doubt that you’re loved. Don’t doubt I’d do anything for you.”
“Then be with me,” I whisper. Both in body and spirit. He’s shutting me out like this, and he knows it. It hurts. It hurts more than the lashes of Byron’s belt.
He swings his legs back over the balcony so he’s facing me. A hand runs down my arm. “You really should be in bed. Not my bed either. You should be far away from me.”
“You keep warning me away. But I know the kind of man you are. The man who wanted to help me when no one else did. The man who saved my life. And you gave up the bounty to do it—”
“Fuck the bounty,” he says, harsh and loud. The word bounty echoes off the brick and wood of the porch. There’s a lake beyond the metal fence. I see it peeking from between the trees, winking in the moonlight, beckoning. I feel suddenly tired, as if the only rest can be found underwater. I remember the poem, about the key being underground. I understand it more now, better than I could have before, how someone can want death. Not in a desperate scrabble, not violent or quick—just a slow drift to the bottom of a pond.
I look at this man in front of me, so intense, so angry. At himself?
And my sister inside, relentlessly cheerful after having lost her entire life. The father she knew. And the one who abandoned her before birth. She’s lost everything.
I’ve failed them both, Kip and Clara. I’ve failed myself. I thought I was looking into the barrel of a gun before. I counted each breath as I took Clara and ran, knowing any one of them might be my last. I faced down a lunatic and got shot in the process. But none of it hurt as badly as this desolate peace.
Kip’s eyes search mine, dark and knowing. “You deserve better,” he murmurs.
My voice is raw when I answer. “You’re all I want.”
He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, I see his determination, the new openness. There are no brambles, no thorns. There is only a wide expanse, an endless earth.
“You were there,” I say softly. “How?”
“I told you my father worked security for yours. I was just a kid, roaming the grounds when I wasn’t allowed to. I saw you playing. You looked lonely. You looked beautiful. Even then, I think I loved you.”
“When did you realize it was me?” I ask. It hurts a little that he didn’t tell me. We both look different now, older, but at some point he clearly realized.
“I always knew,” he says. “That’s what I meant up in the room. I always knew it was you. That first night when I saw you onstage and in the private booth, I knew exactly who you were.”
My stomach turns over. Maybe it shouldn’t matter that he knew who I was. He could pull my hair and make me fuck his boot if I were a stranger. That would have been easier than this. Knowing what I was to him—almost family—and letting me debase myself in front of him.
“I hate what I had to do in that motel room, but I don’t regret doing it. Byron has always been…off. As he got older, it got worse. Complaints from other kids. Dead animals in the yard. We got him some counseling, and I went off to the military, too busy with not getting my ass shot to worry about what was happening back home.”
“Oh, Kip.”
“Then I get back to find out he’s part of the fucking family now. I was fucking proud when I heard he’d become a cop, and then I find out he’s as corrupt as they come. He always had a fucking thing about those jewels, thinking they were ours, that he deserved to have them.” Kip runs a hand over his head. “I should have put a stop to him sooner. I should have put him down, like the fucking feral animal he’d become.”
“You did,” I say, feeling light-headed, like my world is crashing down around me. Like my father’s stories. Delitto d’onore. “An honor killing.”
It’s one thing to think he planned to use me when I was a stranger to him. Another thing to realize he knew me all along, that he came for me and let me be afraid. I’m desperate now. Desperate enough to make excuses. I don’t want to lose what we had in the bedroom. Fuck, I love you.
He laughs, unsteady. “So you’ll pardon that too? Forget the fact that I didn’t tell you who I was, forget that I didn’t protect you from day one. You’ll let me get away with anything, won’t you?” He takes a lock of hair into his hands, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, just like he did in the old outdoor ballroom. “My own personal martyr.”
I pull back, stricken. “I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”