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It’s almost two o’clock in the morning, and Hush is silent as I pack my violin away. He didn’t come. In spite of all my efforts, Henry didn’t come to me. Maybe it’s for the best. Perhaps he’s saving me from myself. God knows I’ve been wondering why I’m still here, even after all I know.
Surely love has its limits. Doesn’t it?
I take a sip of the cherry-and-lemonade cocktail I asked Hannah to make for me throughout the night. There isn’t a single thing I’m not clinging to. It strikes me as odd and unfair how quickly we can make beautiful memories and how much those wonderful moments can hurt you when they’re over and you might not get the chance to make any more.
“Miss Cameron.” Percival stands in the open doorway in the same suit he was wearing the night I first played at Hush.
That night he told me I was to keep my encounters with Henry’s father a secret. He said it was best no one knew that he and Lord Sterling are the reason I am at the conservatory. I traded my blood for a chance to do something I love. Something that I could live without the constant looming shadow of death over me.
“Allow me to walk you out,” he tells me with a regretful smile as he looks over his shoulder.
Pulling the order of service from my backpack, I hold it out to him. If I can’t get to the mountain and the mountain won’t come to me, then maybe it’s time for a last-ditch try. Perhaps he’ll listen to Percival.
“Tell him I don’t care, please.” A flicker of surprise crosses his face as he takes the booklet from me. “I know, and I don’t care. I still…I still love him.”
A tear rolls down my cheek as he throws the booklet into the fire, and I watch it blacken into the hot cinders slowly.
“No, don’t tell him that. He doesn’t know, and if I don’t get to tell him, then—”
“It’s late, Eve.” Percival stops my babbling with a gentle squeeze to my arm that makes it feel like he’s telling me it’s too late. I’m too late. It’s all done. “Come on.”
Casting a long gaze around me, I take everything in until tears threaten to fall. If it’s too late, then I want to take as much of it with me as I can. It’s all a part of him. If I can’t get one last look at him, then this will have to do.
Percival is quiet as we walk downstairs together. He holds my violin and backpack as I put on my coat that’s been left on the reception desk.
“I brought you here because I thought you’d be good for him. James liked you, and I thought that he would’ve approved, but I’ve let you both down. I’m sorry for that, Eve. So very sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I swallow down the urge to bark and bite at him. Instead, I plaster a smile on my face as he opens the door.
A creak on the stairs tells me we’re not alone. And I feel him. His presence looms behind me in the shadows.
“Need a ride home?” Percival asks me with a flicker of his eyes to the stairs, but when I follow his stare, there’s only darkness and a pained pang inside me that wishes and prays for just one more look. A stolen glimpse or even an indifferent glower. Anything.
“No. No,” I reply with a shake of my head when I find Percival’s glance again. “I’m meeting a friend.”
Jess has texted me all evening. She’s worried after I left her place in such a hurry. After the night I’ve had, I don’t want to be alone.
As if he knows, Percival gives my shoulder a squeeze with a head-to-toe glance as though this is the last time we will see each other and he’s committing me to memory.
“I see.” He tugs the front of my coat closed. “Get home safe. Won’t you?” When I give him a smile, he adds, “Don’t look back.”
As soon as he says it, I instantly cast a long look around me. I can’t help it. Maybe I am as defiant as Henry constantly liked to tell me. Perhaps it’s just that sixth sense that tells me he’s watching. If he is, I want him to take a good look at what could’ve been. At what he could’ve had.
I pull my hood over my head, and my eyes prickle as I imagine his gaze on me now. Hope waters his eyes with some of the heartbreak he’s inflicted on me. Hope paints an awfully pained image of him, but if he’s watching me leave, he can’t be hurting half as much as me.
“Don’t look back,” Percival reminds me as I walk out into the rain, and finally, I can allow my tears to fall.
The constant drum of the rain muffles my suffocating sobs. If anyone could cure me from my fear of thunder and lightning, it is Henry, and he has done it. I wish for the bone-rattling roar and the deathly sparks. I wish so hard that, for once, it comes true. And like every time, I run. Not for cover or for fear. I run from him and this place as if the further I get from it, the less I will hurt.
But it doesn’t work, and my desperate breaths jam in my throat, making me dizzy. I have to stop. Stop. Breathe past the gust of wind that hits me, blowing my hood off as a shadow flickers in the light of the streetlamp behind me.
I feel him before I see him.
“Your Grace,” I sputter past my pounding pulse when his cold stare bores into mine.
Henry wraps an arm around my waist as his hand lifts to my face. The touch never comes, just a sharp pinch and a chill that shoots to my toes before everything starts to haze, and the only thing I can hear is his warm breath as it ghosts over my face.
