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“That is because you have seen too many people die, and you let it take over you. I understand that, believe me, but you cannot allow it to continue defining you. You must not,” Hudson insisted, his tone firm. “There is only the here and now, and good and evil, and what you do against the latter.”
Dorian lifted his hand to Rose’s face and caressed her bloodied cheek gently. “Will you stay with me, Rose? Please… say that you will stay. Say that you will not leave me.”
Rose murmured in her delirium, though he could not make out the words. Still, it was enough to give him faith that she might pull through and that, just this once, they would triumph over the shadows that had plagued him for twelve years.
Hudson stood. “I will go and greet the physician and direct him here. I have done what I can for her, but he will have the medicine that may help her further. I suggest you take this opportunity to think about what I have said, Captain.”
He turned without another word and left Dorian to his own thoughts.
“I believe he is right in part, my doe.” Dorian raised up so that he might perch beside her on the chaise. “I have allowed past misfortune to make me fearful of the future, and of allowing myself to… simply live my life as I desire, when people I cared for cannot.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “It has embedded a deep-rooted guilt within me, that I have called my ‘curse.’ More than anything, that guilt and fear has served as a moral whip to keep me chaste, because of a mistake I made so many years ago. I think that is why I allowed it to have power over me, so I would not make that mistake again.”
He watched her face for any sign that she might be listening. This was his opportunity to tell her his darkest secret, yet he could not bring himself to speak it, in case she would remember and think ill of him.
“The truth is, Rose… I seem to have forgotten that, if curses exist, in any sense of the word, then so must blessings,” he whispered. “And you are my blessing. Do not leave me, my doe. Now that you have come into my world and changed everything, I cannot be without you. I do not want to return to the shadow and the solitude that once enveloped me.”
And yet, as he listened to that weak beat of her heart and the increasingly shallow hiss of her strained breath, he could already feel the crawling tendrils of sorrow and misery creeping across the bed-chamber floor toward him, to snuff out the only joy he had found in all these years. Unlike the rider who had flung the knife, of corporeal form and being, he could not combat darkness itself.
