Page 36 of Sting of Sin

And the stone in my chest would not let me have it clean.

And I was lying to her right now. By keeping quiet.

There was a barn, four years back. There was a boy who walked her into the woods, and what he told us with a gun in his mouth before the end, and the others we hunted down one by one through a long red season, me and her brother, and buried where nobody would ever look. She didn't know. She'd processed the woods as a thing that happened to her, never knowing the men who did it had already been in the ground for years, put there by the same two hands that raised her and the same two hands that were holding her right now. I'd carried it as a kindness. She doesn't need the blood. Let her heal. But it wasn't only kindness anymore and I knew it. It was the same disease as the workman lie, the same exact sickness—me deciding what she could hold, keeping her warm and small and in the dark, calling the cage a gift.

I almost woke her. I lay there with the words right behind my teeth, Bee, there's one more thing, I have to tell you one more thing. Twice I opened my mouth. Twice I looked down at her face gone slack and easy against my chest, the first true rest I'd ever seen on her, the best night either of us had had in four years still warm in the room—and I couldn't. I couldn't be the one to put the fear back in that face. Not tonight. Not after she'd just crossed a room in the dark to choose me, not after I wanted to, not after I'd watched her take a piece of herself back that the world had stolen.

Tomorrow. I'd give her tonight whole and clean, the one perfect thing, and tomorrow I'd set the last stone down where she could see it and pray to God it didn't cost me the thing I'd just been given.

It was a coward's bargain and I knew it. One more day in the dark, dressed up as mercy. The exact thing I'd promised her I'd never do again, done one more time, because I was a man who'd finally gotten everything he ever wanted and couldn't stand to risk it for one more sunrise.

She sighed in her sleep and burrowed closer, and her hand curled into a loose fist over my heart like she was holding onto it, and I held still so I wouldn't wake her, and I lay awake a long time in the lamplight loving her so hard it hurt to breathe, with the truth sitting in my throat like a swallowed stone, giving her the night.

Just the one more night.

I'd tell her in the morning.

***

SHE WOKE UP happy.

That's the part I'll carry to my grave. She woke up in the bright morning light with her cheek on my chest and her hand still curled over my heart, and before she remembered to be afraid of anything in this world she smiled at me, sleepy and soft and mine, and I lay there knowing I was about to take that smile off her face with my own two hands, and that there was no version of doing right by her that let me leave it where it was.

I'd promised her the truth. Last night I'd held her and sworn no more dark, and then I'd lain awake making a coward's deal for one more clean night, and the morning had come the way mornings do whether you're ready or not. I could keep the smile and keep lying. Or I could be the man I told her I'd be. I only got one.

"Bee." My voice already wrong. She felt it, she feels everything now, we'd just proven that, and the softness went careful, and she pushed up on one elbow to look at me. "I told you last night there'd be no more keeping things from you. And I meant it. But there's one more thing, and it's the worst one, and I've been holding it so long it's grown into me. I need to set it down. And you're not gonna like where it leaves my hands."

"Tell me." Quiet. Braced. But she didn't pull back yet. She gave me that—she stayed.

So I told her.

"Four years ago, when me and Caleb found you in those woods. After we took you to the hospital and you went somewhere none of us could follow." I made myself hold her eyes. "Me and your brother went back out. We found the one who walked you in there. Your… the boy you trusted. We got him alone and we got the truth out of him, all of it, the whole arrangement, who he brought, what they meant to do. And then we killed him, Bee. And then we hunted down every other man whose name he gave us, one at a time, over about four months, and we killed them too. All of them. And we buried them where nobody will ever turn a shovel, and we came home, and we never told you. I have known for four years that the men who hurt you are dead by my hand and your brother's, and every single day I visited you behind that glass I sat there holding it and let you think the world still had them in it."

The quiet that came down was the worst sound I've ever heard.

She'd gone still. Not the hawk-stillness, the fear-stillness I knew, something else, something I'd never seen on her, the stillness of a person whose floor has just been pulled up to show them the whole house was built on something they didn't know was there.

"You knew," she finally said. Barely a sound. "All those visits. All those years I lay in that bed sure they were still out there, sure they'd come back, jumping at every door—" her voice cracked clean through "—and you sat across from me knowing they were dead. You could have told me. One sentence. They can't hurt you anymore, Bee, they're gone. You had that. You had the one thing that might've let me sleep, and you kept it in your pocket for four years."

"I thought I was sparing you." It came out like ash. "The blood. What we did. I thought a girl who'd been through what you'd been through didn't need to know her brother and his friend, that we'd done murder for her. I told myself I was protecting you from it."

"You were protecting yourself from telling me." She was right and it gutted me. "Same as the workman. Same as all of it. You decided. You always decide. You and Caleb sat on the one truth that could've reached me down in that dark, because you couldn't stand to be looked at as the men who did it." She was crying now, and she swiped at it angry, like the tears were one more thing being done to her. "Last night. Last night, Eli. You swore to me. You held me and you said no more dark and you—" her breath broke "—and you were sitting on this the whole time. Even then. Even after."

"Yes." I didn't reach for her. Everything in me was a fist wanting to pull her in and I held every bit of it still, because she hadn't said I could, and I was never going to be a man who took from her again. "Yes. I was. And I hate myself for it, and I'd do almost anything to take it back, but I can't, so all I've got is this, I'm telling you now. No more. You know everything I know. Every last thing."

She didn't answer me. She'd gone still, not the betrayal-stillness now, something deeper, something that took her somewhere I couldn't reach. Her eyes went far off and inward, the way they go when her body's reaching back for a thing her mind spent four years burying.

"How many," she said. "How many men."

"The boy and four others. Five."

"Five." She wasn't with me anymore. She was back in the trees. "Five men. Hands on me. Carrying me." Her voice had gone low and flat and far away. "I've spent four years trying not to remember the hands. But it was never the hands I was afraid of." Her hand came up and pressed flat between her eyes, like she was pushing on a bruise to find how deep it went. "You're going to tell me I can't know this. That I can't prove it. And I can't… I never saw a face, there's no name, there's nothing I could put in front of you. But I've been dreaming it for weeks, Eli. The same dream, over and over. The woods, and the hands, and behind all of it, back in the dark where the dream won't let me turn my head and look, somebody standing there. Not grabbing. Not carrying. Just watching. Still and patient, like he'd set the whole thing down on a table a long time before and walked out to the trees to watch it happen." Her eyes lifted to mine, and they were terrible, and sure. "There was someone else in those woods. Someone in the shadows. And you didn't get him."

The room went cold.

"Bee." I could barely keep it level. "We got everyone the boy named. If there was somebody he never—"

"He was never going to name him." Certain. Certain the way she'd been in the yard, pointing at one man out of nine, the certainty I'd sworn on my life never to doubt again. "A man who stands back in the shadows and lets other men carry the hurt doesn't hand that boy his name. The hands were the ones you could find, Eli. He made sure he'd never be one of the ones you could find. That's the whole of what he is." Her voice dropped to almost nothing, and the nothing was worse than any scream. "He's still out there. He's been out there the whole time. The one in the dark. And you can't kill a man you were never even allowed to see."