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“She deserved so much better than this,” I whisper. “She could have been so much more.”
“There’s still a chance—”
“Ilarion,” I plead, my voice cracking darkly against the shimmering afternoon glow, “please just say the things you really mean, instead of what you think will make me feel better. I’d rather have cold reality than false hope right now.”
“People always say that. They rarely mean it.”
I square my shoulders and look him in the eye. “Well, I mean it. Do you really believe she’s going to wake up from this?”
His eyes flicker over my face, quick and cold. “No,” he says shortly. “I don’t.”
I know I asked for it, and I don’t regret doing that. I’m just not expecting my reaction. Those invisible snakes are slithering over me now. Cold and scaly and devastating. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone before.
All the people who made up my childhood are gone. I won’t get to speak to Celine or Mom ever again. I’m quickly losing hope that I’ll ever see my father in this life. It’s all so cruel, so inhumanely cruel, a nightmare I’m screaming and screaming through but I can’t find a way to wake up from.
That’s the only explanation I can come up with for how deeply terrible everything is—this isn’t real.
Imustbe having a nightmare.
“None of them even knew about my pregnancy.” A single tear glides down my cheek. I feel Ilarion’s warmth as he inches closer to me. I hate that it makes me feel better. “I know Mom would have been thrilled. Dad would have come around the moment he saw the baby. And Celine…” I glance up at him, wondering if I should give voice to certain thoughts, or just leave them floating around in my head.
“Tell me,” he says.
His lips are shaped like a bow. The one feature on his face that gives some levity and warmth to what is otherwise as cold and alien as a mountain ridge.
“If I’d told her the truth from the start, she would have hated me at first…but I think she would have come around. She was always quick to forgive.” I shake my head as my voice wobbles and breaks. “God, I’m horrible.”
“Why do you do that?” It’s almost a growl. Twilight crashes over us, blurring the world into mottled shades of black and indigo.
“Do what?”
He meets my gaze and holds it. “Punish yourself for being human.”
I frown, wondering just how much of my thoughts are written across my face, and just how much of them he can read. He’s not supposed to be able to read anything at all. He doesn’t actually know me, one vulnerable night in his car notwithstanding. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself since I arrived at his home. Thus far, it’s been a comfortable belief to cling to.
Until he says things that make me feel like he’s ripping my chest open and running his fingertips over the scarred grooves of my soul.
“It’s okay to admit you want things that you shouldn’t want,” he continues. His hand lifts to my cheek, and he uses the backs of his knuckles to brush away my tears.
He’s dangerously close. So close that his scent is crowding out every reasonable thought in my head. So close that my sense of self-preservation has taken flight.
“Ilarion…”
His lips hover mere inches from mine. I’ve been fighting to maintain that distance, but God help me, I’m getting so weak now. How many hits can a person take and stay standing? I’m weak enough to need something to hold me up. To keep me on my feet. To keep me moving forward.
My lips part as if they have a mind of their own. “No…no… I have to…”
I don’t finish my barely intelligible sentence—I just turn and trip my way away from him.
“Taylor!” he calls after me, but I run away from the sound of his voice. I had the right idea earlier. Nothing good can come of us being near each other.
Celine is still lying up there in that hospital bed. She may not be fully alive, but she’s not dead, either. And yet here I am, staring at her fiancé’s lips, imagining a different future than the one that exists.
It isn’t right. It isn’t—
I cry out as my foot catches a loose stone and my ankle twists. It’s not enough to be truly painful, but it’s enough to take me down. I hit the earth hard, and when I do, I stay down. I lie sprawled on the grass, my fingers combing through the blades, as I try to find a way out of the fogginess in my head.
Ilarion’s shadow emerges from around the bend. I watch it stretch along the footpath as he approaches. As it consumes everything in its wake: the gravel, the grass, and, eventually, me. It feels appropriate to be swallowed up by it. By him. For his darkness to devour all of me.
