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“Did Ma know about their intentions?” he grinds out eventually, his chest rising and falling in angry bursts.
“I’ve never had that conversation with her, I won’t ever have this conversation with her,” I add fiercely. She’s been hurt too much and despite the secret she’s kept, I won’t make her relive the pain. “I believe she only found out about his illness and their suicide when she received that letter.”
“So she lied to you about it? Told you they died in a car crash.”
“Yes.”
“When did you find out the truth?” he bites out, a restless kind of energy pours from him, buffeting me. He’s angry at them, for the choice they made. He’s angry at Ma for keeping it from me. But there’s something else too… I see pity in his eyes. Pity for me. I also see regret. That’s a little harder to unravel.
“I found the letter a few years back, hidden away in a box in the back of my Grandma’s wardrobe. It tore me apart, reading it. They were so in love that they couldn’t bear to live without each other. They left me… I wasn’t enough…” My voice cracks and I turn my gaze away, concentrating instead on the darkness beyond the kitchen window. It looms beyond the walls, threatening to enter and smother us both.
“Youareenough…” Malakai murmurs, bringing more unshed tears to my eyes. Tears I won’t allow to fall.
Neither of us move. All I can hear are Malakai’s steady breaths and my heart cracking, the sound just like the door creaking closed on the wardrobe I’d found their suicide note in. When I’ve tempered my emotions enough to look at Malakai again, his face is a controlled mask. “Their story is just one in a long line of heartache. Grandpa died and left Grandma heartbroken. She’s never loved another man, Malakai. Never looked at anyone.” He doesn’t say a word, just nods, waiting for more. “My great grandma’s husband was lost to the ocean. He drowned in a violent storm… The stories go on and on. We find the love of our lives and they are ripped away from us.”
“It’s a coincidence, Connie. A story that has got out of hand. Curses aren’t real. They don’t exist. This world is full of heartache and tragedy. People die all the time.”
“That’s true, they do. But there’s no denying our history. I knew what was in store for us the second you stepped onto Broken Shores. Despite knowing that, I begged for your kiss. Selfishly I wanted to experience what it would feel like to be held in the arms of the man my heart had chosen. I thought, perhaps, you’d stay once you felt what I did, what I still feel…” I swallow hard. “I truly believed that I would’ve been enough, that somehow we’d find a way to beat the curse, together. Stupid, I know. Foolish.”
“Connie…” he warns, a tightness to his voice that has my skin prickling, but I continue on regardless.
“In some ways Ma telling you to leave, keeping us apart, was as much about keeping me safe from harm as it was you. Loving you is dangerous. More so for you than it is for me. Ironic, no, given the reason you refuse to acknowledge how you feel about me? You’ve been so busy protecting me from the King, when all along you should’ve protected yourself from the one person who has the power to hurt you the most.Me.”
“Connie, you don’t know what you’re saying. You can’t loveme,” he laments brokenly, a tiny fissure cracking in his wall of armour. He’s not referring to the curse. No, he believes that he can’t be loved because of who he is and the darkness that litters his past and taints his soul.
“It’s too late for that now.” My heart hiccups inside my chest, my own soul crying out for him, for the both of us, and the inevitability of this damn curse, and everything else that seems against us. It looms, a fate neither of us can escape.
“No, you don’t understand. This stupid fucking curse is irrelevant. Your belief in its power, unwarranted, Connie, because it can’t hurt a man who’s already dead inside. I’mdeadinside.”
“You’re not. How can anyone who’s dead inside make me feel so alive.”
My throat constricts with loss and pain as he rears upwards, the chair scraping over the tiled floor, tumbling backwards as he stands. “I need you to leave. You have to go. I can’t do this with you here. I can’t. My life means nothing. Yours is worth so much more and I cannot see you hurt. Do you understand me, Connie?”
“I do.”
“And yet still you remain, why?”
“Because if this is all I can have, if this curse is going to take you from me anyway and you die at the Palace, then I can’t live a life not knowing how it felt to be loved by you, Malakai. Ma warned me not to love you, she warned me, but I fell anyway. We’re already cursed, so why not be with me, completely with me, for one night, then I promise you I will go.” I realise what I’m asking. I understand the finality of it more than most. But I ask anyway.
His fists clench and unclench, his jaw grinding as he considers my offer. Every sinew, every muscle is tense, pulled taut. I wait, a calmness settling over me as he fights the connection between us. It’s almost visceral, the pull, the intense lust and desire, the love. He might not be able to admit it yet, but I know that’s what he’s most afraid of, because it scares me to death too. He was right when he said he couldn’t give me roses and romance, love songs and happily ever afters. What we have isn’t a fairytale with a perfect cliched ending, it’s dark and possessive, intense and damaging,fragile. So very, very fragile. Just like the moon and the ocean, one has no purpose without the other.
“One night. That’s it,” he agrees.
Then just like two stars colliding we obliterate each other.
