Page 118 of Juniper Unraveling

Licking my lips, I drop my gaze to the plate in my lap. “I know that place.”

“He says it’s the only place where you can sleep beneath the stars all night.”

Squeezing my eyes shut hardly keeps the tears from welling, and I give a nod. “That’s what I’ve heard, too.”

I hand her my plate of fruit. “Take mine.”

She accepts the food with a grateful smile. “Thank you.”

How could I be so stupid?

Rhys strides past us, through the crowd, toward the entrance of the cavern with the bottle still dangling from his fist, and I jump to my feet to follow after him.

When I reach the guard, I wait for him to deny me passage, but he doesn’t. Instead, he steps aside, allowing me to chase after Rhys.

Once outside, I shield my eyes from the blinding sun, and catch sight of him making his way toward the warehouse.

“Rhys!”

He stops in his tracks, and I scuttle across the hot desert sand to meet him. Slipping on his gloves, he doesn’t bother to look at me, his body tense, shoulders bunched with annoyance.

“You’re …” A nervous tickle hits my throat, and I swallow past the lump. “Your name is Rhys.”

He glances back at me and nods. “My birth name, yes. But you called me Six.”

The world around me stills to a deafening silence. I can’t move at first. Can scarcely breathe.

Six.

The sound of his name crashes over me, filling my eyes with tears, and I want to hear him say it again and again. I want more of that sound, one I yearned for at seventeen, when he was the mute boy from the other side of the wall. I feel trapped in a dream, and the dread that settles in my stomach is a threat that I’m going to wake any moment.

“Tell me something only Six would know.”

His eye twitches with his contemplation, while the flexing and rubbing of his hands seems to hold his attention. “You used to sing to me. At night. Didn’t know for sure it was you, until I read some of that journal.”

I reach out to touch his face, but recoil, closing my hand to a tight fist before allowing my fingers to skate across his scarred cheek.

His body stills, stiffens. A sharp exhale passes his lips. His eyes flinch, but bloom with familiarity, and suddenly every detail, every hard edge of his face sends a phantom tingle across my fingertips, as the memories trickle in.

Six.

How could I have forgotten this face? How could I not see him behind those eyes? A gasp of nervous laughter sits trapped inside my chest, trodden on by the disbelief that I’m staring at the man I believed dead.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice breaks on the question, and lowering my hand away, I clear my throat to choke back the sob itching to escape.

A pregnant pause lingers between us, his gaze directed downward, as he tucks the bottle beneath his arm and smooths his gloves over his hands. “I’ve been dead inside. And when you’re that dead, you don’t do the things you need to do, to make things right again.” He sniffs, clenching his hands into fists with his fidgeting. “You weren’t supposed to come back.” His lips curl to a snarl, as he shakes his head. “Not to me.”

“What do you mean?”

He rolls his shoulders and looks off somewhere toward the vast desert in front of him. “The night I took off, I ran to the Juniper tree, like you said. Legion found me there.” In his profile, I catch the furrow of his brow. “They told me you were dead. That you’d been shot trying to fight a guard. So I …” He shakes his head, lips downturned. “I gave up right then. Handed myself over. Didn’t give a shit what happened to me. They could take me back to that place. Torture me. Kill me. Didn’t matter. I had nothin’ left.”

“I came for you. Saw what was left.” My mind traces back to the moment I lifted his shirt from the sand and clutched the only piece of him I had left. “I buried myself by that tree. Everything I was. And I couldn’t go back again.”

“I’m not the boy you remember, Wren.” There’s hardness to both his voice and his expression, an impenetrable shield meant to shut me out. “You were right last night, when you said I’ve become heartless. I’ve killed men in your name. In ways that no god would ever forgive.” He glides his arm across his nose and sniffs, letting his gaze fall away from mine again.

“I did this to you?”

“I did this to myself.” His jaw shifts, flexing as he grinds his teeth. “Every night I lost myself to hallucinations of your face. Every girl I save is you. Every time I go out there, I hear your voice on the wind. Your laughter. Your scent. It’s all up here,” he says, jabbing a fist to his temple. “Can’t get you out of my head. Tried to carve you out of me, but I can’t, and the blood I spill isn’t enough. It’s never enough.”