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Now I know that no matter the array of colors we try to paint into her life, there will always be black areas that absorb the pigments just to feed her demons.
She puts the gun down in front of us and turns around. She’s wearing her glasses and probably ditched the contacts before falling asleep. Those round, golden-rimmed glasses that make her look so much younger and more innocent than she actually is.
Blocked between me and the counter behind her, she barely has any space to breathe. Something I’m never quite sure she wants to keep doing anyway.
Her forehead comes right to where my lips are, and it takes all of me not to drop a gentle kiss there.
“It’s a nice range you got yourself.” She’s talking into my neck, raising goosebumps across my whole body. With these casual words, I feel like she’s trying to reassure me that the world keeps spinning no matter what I learned tonight. She doesn’t understand that my world is her, and that it can’t spin as long as she’s not okay.
I don’t want to remain silent. I want to tell her how much I love her, how I will avenge her, and that I will protect her for as long as I live. But my throat is tight, and my brain is struggling to push vowels and consonants past my lips.
She brings a hand to my cheek, and I realize she’s gazing up at me. I was looking ahead at the target, imagining Aleksei Volkov’s bleeding body.
“You’re beating yourself up over something you had no control of, Sam,” she tells me. “What happened, happened.” She smiles softly. A sad smile for such a beautiful woman. “If I can live with it, so can you.”
“You’re not living with it.” It comes out as an accusation because I know she’s lying to herself, though I regret my tone anyway. “You’re attempting survival and very close to failing.”
She sighs, knowing I’m right. Rose doesn’t face problems. She shoves them deep, deep down so she can ignore them. Only they end up profound inside her, poisoning her soul and taking away her will to live so slowly she barely notices. She just wakes up some days, sick of living and ready to end it as indifferently as she lights up her cigarettes.
“You told the doctors you weren’t raped,” I accuse without meaning to.
“You looked into my files,” she fights back calmly.
“You lied,” I insist.
“I lie all the time, Sam. Don’t pretend otherwise, that would only make you naïve.”
She’s right. She’s always lied to protect herself. To bury her head in the sand and pretend the things that hurt her didn’t happen.
“It’s hard,” she admits, to my greatest surprise. “And I’m sad…and scared.” My eyes lock with hers. “But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s my wounds to heal, no one else’s.”
My hands come to rest on her tiny waist. Acid burns the back of my throat thinking how the Wolves touched her, their filthy hands abusing her soft skin.
“Let me kill them.”
“No,” she replies coldly, her confidence back in full force. Her vulnerability never lasts too long, she doesn’t like that look on her.
My hands tighten around her waist, and I am lifting her up on the counter before I can control my gesture.
“Let me avenge you, Rose,” I let out in a strained voice. I bring my face closer to hers. “Let me put their dead bodies at your feet and let you rejoice in the blood flowing around you. Let me do it. Just…just help me find them, and you will never be scared again.”
“Like when Nate put Bianco away and no one was meant to be in touch with him again? Like that? Because that was also a promise that I should have never been scared again,” she says gravely, her accusing tone pinching my heart. “Traitor,” she adds in a murmur.
“You—”
“Your excuses for what you did don’t mean shit to me. You better not attempt to throw them my way again.”
“You chose Viktor…”
“Because you chose Bianco,” she hisses.
We both stand on different fences when it comes to this issue. We have parallel opinions that will never cross. We won’t see eye to eye, and tonight is not the night to fight on it. Another time maybe I can try and explain to her yet again why I did what I did. Betrayed her as she said. What led her to turn her back on me when I finally found her.
I glance away.
“Why did you come downstairs? To tell me to just forget something you know I never will?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she admits. Her eyes burn holes in the side of my face, so I turn back to her to watch something dark lingering in her eyes.
