“Because you helped me?”
“Yes. It’s the price. The tradeoff.” I tilt my head. “Are you not grateful for everything I’ve shown you? If you could take it all back, would you?”
She shakes her head. “No. I wouldn’t, but I don’t know how?—”
“You will.” My hands clench into fists. “If the day comes where you have to kill me, you will.”
A horrified expression crosses her face, but it’s gone just as quickly. She’s thought of this before. She’s had to. We’re asmuch of a threat to each other as we are each other’s sick salvation.
Even if my mother’s illness doesn’t claim me, my love for London might.
Love is madness.
“If you can’t help me, then you have no choice but to end me, London,” I say, my voice a dark rasp. “Promise me that now.”
“Maybe I couldn’t…” She trails off, lost in thought. “But Lydia could.”
A slow smile curls my lips. “Then I guess we should keep her around, after all.”
“Lydia Prescott is just as important as the boy who’s still locked in that dark room under a greenhouse.” She swallows hard, wincing. “As your doctor, as the woman who loves you, I’m telling you to embrace him. He’s not your enemy. Stop trying to escape, Grayson.”
My nostrils flare. Heat creeps up my spine. Resentment singes the edges of my vision in vibrating waves of red. “Strip all the layers away,” I say, a dare. “I suppose it’s only fair. Seems these bars just bring out the honesty in us, baby.”
She nods, as if recalling her experience in the cage where I locked her up, forcing her to remember the past she tried to keep buried. “A lock and a key,” she says. “Soul mates. We are an inevitability.”
A crooked smile stretches. “Till death,mo anam cara.”
She answers by removing the scarf. I notice every nuance, slide of hand, and when she slips her hand beneath the material to free if from around her neck, she retrieves an object from the gaudy locket beneath.
The guard at the end of the hall missed the action, but I didn’t. Only I can’t focus on what she’s wrapping in the scarf—I can only see the welts, the bruises, the dark fingerprints marking her neck.
I grip the bars so hard my knuckles ache.
I will kill him.
I know this as certainly as I know the sky is fucking blue.
London reads the tension thrumming through me and says, “No. We still need him.” She glances at the guard. He’s watching us. “It’s my choice.Mine.”
Rage lashes at my insides. “Then you better get to him first.”
Despite my attempts to be more than—betterthan—mortal, I’m no god. I’m blood and bone and London is immersed in my marrow, so goddamn deep I can feel her becoming a part of me. The pain won’t ever stop. The compulsions won’t ever stop. I’m human and I’m weak, and she’s still my only chance at freedom. My need for her won’t stop.
The guard rises.
I release the bars, my palms burning. “Give me the scarf.”
Her throat bruised and swollen, London takes a shallow breath. “Did you plan this?” she asks. “Back then. Before. Did you plan all this out in such meticulous detail that every possible outcome had its own contingency? Or are we that fated?”
“Like a bad Shakespearean tragedy,” I tell her. I have over a hundred different locks memorized. The second I saw the tattooed key on her hand, I knew exactly which lock manufacturer it belonged to. From there, it was only a matter of obtaining blueprints. Getting a record of which jails and holding cells in Maine used the same manufacturer. “I chose Rockland for more than its scenic beauty,” is all I say aloud to her.
Her soft lips part. Her gaze shifts to the bars of the cell, her eyes following the iron all the way up. The cage in her cellar is made by the same company who installed the cells in her father’s police station all those years ago. I know this, too, because I made sure I knew it. And that jail cell manufacturer is the same one who installed the cell I’m in right now.
She smiles knowingly. “We’re a fucked-up kind of inevitability. Not fated. Doomed.”
She’s probably right. Good things don’t emerge from basements and cellars… Dark things do. Demons burned by the light.
“You’re still beautiful,” I say, my voice thick with the accent I try to conceal. “My dark angel.”
