His grip on me tightened, and I couldn’t quite breathe, but at that moment, I would rather have suffocated than deny him comfort.
“I failed her,” he said, his voice cracking. “I failed her so bad, and I could never stop trying to make it right, even though I know it’s too late.”
I wrapped my arms around his neck, holding him to me. We shifted slightly so that his head lay on my chest. I wondered if he could hear my heart race, and I struggled to calm myself as if that could calm him too. At length, his breathing evened out, though small shifts in his body told me he was still awake.
Pulling himself up, he faced me, solemn and determined. His eyes were streaked red, though they didn’t look nearly as bad as mine probably did—puffy and swollen from tears unshed.
He brushed a tear that had remained on my cheek. “I owe you an apology. The things I said were unforgivable.”
“You were upset.”
A ghost of a smile touched his swollen face. “I think you would excuse me from murder if I tell you I had a bad day.”
“I forgive you.”
His voice grew husky as he said, “I don’t deserve that.”
“Forgiveness isn’t about whether you deserve it or not. It comes freely or not at all. Like love.”
He swallowed. “You do love me, don’t you, Shelly? And I don’t deserve that either.”
He was more deserving of love than anybody I had ever known, but it wasn’t even relevant to how I felt about him. Love wasn’t a choice; it was an accident. Not a climb but a fall. I had slipped somewhere along my prickly path and down, down to the murky depths, hurtling ever farther, ever faster, and the only question left was whether he would meet me at the bottom.
Chapter Fourteen
I crouched behind the flat of the table, which had been turned on its side, wondering how Luke had talked me into this.
It was a suicide mission. His.
The plan was chillingly simple. Luke waited, prone on the floor and armed with our crude and blunt weaponry. He would lure the men to his side and fight them, distracting them long enough for me to escape through the door. I had argued vehemently at the beginning, flat-out refused. How could I leave him to his death? I could go for help, but we both knew it would be too late for him. But then he had pulled me tight and said that if we did nothing, we would both die. Let him do this much, he’d said.
Live, he’d told me.
I understood about guilt, however undeserved, and how it would eat at him in these final minutes if he believed I would die. So I agreed, still unsure whether I could run away. There were moments that defined a person, choices that separated me from my mother. Could I leave him to suffer in my place? Could I live with myself after? It was the same as when Henri had given me that gun. Could I become a murderer? I would save myself, but there were things worth more than my life.
My ankles ached, cold from the chill of the floor. I missed his body warmth, the way he breathed.
It felt like days passed before footsteps sounded from outside the room. I strained to make them out, to separate them into parts and count how many men were there. Two, maybe three.
They paused outside the door. I heard the faint sounds of two men conversing—arguing. That gave me hope. Maybe it wasn’t Henri. No one would argue with him.
I heard a creak, and yellow light flooded the room from the hall, stinging my eyes. A single man walked inside, to Luke. Clop, clop. I recognized his gait. Henri’s gravelly voice muttered something from the center of the room. He always sent his men in first. What was different this time? Who still stood outside the room? This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
There was a thud, as if he’d kicked Luke, and an exhalation of breath.
“What’s wrong with him?” came a voice from outside. My pulse beat a rapid tattoo in my temple, though I struggled to place his voice. Low, male. Unsurprising in our current situation. There were women who held power in this industry—Jade, for example—but they were rare. Confident, impatient. Those also were hallmarks of a man in power.
“How should I know?” Henri snapped.
The strange part was the power dynamic. I had never seen Henri before with a man more powerful than himself, at least without a full-fledged power struggle. But in Henri’s voice, there was a tremor of uncertainty. A bit of subservience, which was why it took me so long to place. The Henri I knew would never submit, but now I wondered if that undaunted power was as much a mask as my own limitless capacity for subjugation, as if we had both played our parts to the fullest. As if we were each consumed by our roles. A social experiment, indeed.
The other man came into the room. It felt like déjà vu, like I should know him just by the way the air shifted at his presence. One of Henri’s men? An old client? But this felt older than that—ancient, like I had heard this story in an old fairy tale.