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Saint drags the wooden chair from the corner of the room and places it a few feet away from me. I’m sitting on the floor with my back pressed to the bed and have no intention of getting up. He winces as he takes a seat.
I wait for him because I don’t know what to say. Even when he kidnapped me, there was never this silence between us. I opted not to speak to him, yes, but I had a million things I wanted to say. But now, there is nothing.
“How are you?”
I merely shrug in response.
He shifts slightly, cradling his bandaged hand. Images of it bent back at a grotesque angle assault me, and I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Look at me.” When I refuse, he adds a pained, “Please.”
I slowly comply.
We are both so badly wounded, both physically and emotionally. Our relationship, which was once a constant, is now unknown.
“I don’t know what to say,” he confesses, shaking his head. “I don’t know how to make this right anymore.”
“There is no right,” I whisper, tears clinging to my lashes. “There never was.”
Saint sighs, beyond exhausted. “I wish I had never met you.” My heart constricts, but I know what he means because I feel it too. “I wish you could have lived a normal life away from this.”
“Well, I can’t,” I reply. “It’s too late. What has been done can never be undone.”
He casts his eyes toward the floor.
“On the island, you said to me your hands have done some unspeakable things. Do you remember?”
He nods slowly, his hair shrouding his downturned face.
“Well now, so have mine.” I turn my hands over and over, and although they are now clean of blood, there was a time they weren’t. “But I don’t have any regrets. I would do it all again. I am so sick of feeling scared all the time. It’s easier if I don’t feel.”
Saint’s chin snaps up. “Don’t say that. Don’t switch off your humanity.”
“I don’t want to feel,” I repeat, suppressing the vacant screams of the men and women I’ve wounded and killed.
“?????.” Saint wearily rises from the chair and lowers himself to the floor. I want to touch him, but I don’t. “I’m sorry for everything. I—”
I cut him off, shaking my head fiercely. “Don’t you dare apologize to me. I’m the one who’s sorry. For everything. Back at Oscar’s—”
Saint’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows deeply.
“I never chose Alek over you. I need you to know that. But when I was about to tell Oscar everything, why did you stop me?”
“Because I had to trust there was a reason you protected him.”
“There was!” I exclaim, beseeching he believe me. “Pavel said he was our ace in the hole. But I shouldn’t have allowed it to get that far.”
“You didn’t allow anything,” he counters sharply. “Besides, revealing Alek’s whereabouts wouldn’t have made a difference. We were just pawns to them.”
He’s right, but that doesn’t alleviate this guilt.
“You shouldn’t have come for me,” he says with regret. “You should have left me.”
“Never,” I affirm, shaking my head. “I protect the things I love.”
I’ve said this to him once before in reference to Harriet Pot Pie. Back then, I never, in a million years, thought I’d be referencing it to him.
He appears saddened by the fact. I don’t understand why that is until he speaks. “What happened with Ingrid—”
