Already he felt blood rushing south.
He groaned, his head dropping forward. “Do me a favor, Nina,” he said. “And don’t come any closer.”
“Why?” she asked, taking an unmistakable step in his direction.
“Because I’m a man like any other, and not a very good one.”
He heard her bare feet move closer, and he was sure she stood directly behind him, and her forehead touched his spine, and a pent-up breath escaped her, permeating his skin.
He shivered.
“I don’t want a good man,” she said. “I want the one in front of me.”
Patrick closed his eyes, at war again. Always at bloody war.
He abandoned the washcloth. “We’ll be leavin’ any minute,” he said.
She nodded against his back, and he felt her retreat. He breathed in relief, in sufferance.
When he turned, he found she had stumbled back, looking so unlike herself that it scared him. She pulsed with something, her hands interlacing before her, then clutching her rib cage as though holding it together.
Here it was, the breaking. Right before his eyes. Nothing to do but let her. She would crumble and rebuild.
“Breathe,” he said.
And she did. “I think I would have sent the entire building into a crater,” she said, her voice quieter than he’d anticipated. “I would have killed every person trapped inside. What does that make me?”
“Heartbroken,” he said immediately, watching her face. “Only that. You don’t need to look any further.”
He watched her eyes oscillate from collapse to rage with astonishing speed. “They’d deserve it,” she said, words shaking. “Wouldn’t they? They’d deserve it. They stand by and donothing—”
“Yeah, Scurry girl,” he said. “They’d deserve it. But that hole inside you? You won’t stitch it up that way.”
She turned from the window to look at him, eyes burning. “Then how?” she asked.
He was tempted to lie to her, to tell her something beautiful waited beyond all this, that her struggle would all find its end.
He shook his head. “When I figure it out,” he said, “I’ll let you know.”
Tears filmed her eyes. From between gritted teeth, she said, “It hurts.”
“I know it does, darlin’.”
She closed her eyes, struggling to give voice to the thing gnashing at her insides. “I’m furious,” she said. “I feel I’m going mad with it.”
He knew the feeling well. Knew that people in the brink sated it with bluff or fists. What other way to curb generations of anger?
God, but he wished he could take that from her, even now. But all he could do was win a war. Make it so she’d never feel powerless again.
“Better to let the madness come and go as it pleases,” he said. “No point tryin’ to stop it.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Definitely not,” he said, smirking slightly. “I bottle it all up, then unleash it on hawkers at the market.”
She laughed once, but it was borrowed. She stumbled back a step, falling into a chair by the wall. The split in her dress fell to one side, revealing her thigh, far more of it than was fair.
Even from a distance, Patrick could see the ink smudged there. Could see some other hand’s scrawl.
