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I’m coming...
The sea.
I need the sea.
I’ll swim—
“Neri. Stop. Baby. Please, stop!” Mum landed beside me, all while hands wrenched me from the floor and shoved me back onto the bed.
I screamed harder. Louder.
I’d lost the ability of speech.
I forgot how to speak words.
I couldn’t tell them how I burned inside.
How I stung and seared and shattered.
This pain wasn’t describable.
It was utterly indescribable as it tore through me, snapping every bone, scribing its excruciating autograph onto my soul.
I would always wear its mark.
Always belong to the devil.
This was hell.
And I couldn’t survive it.
I didn’t want to survive it.
I was poisoned.
Infected.
Diseased.
I was dying.
My bones were rotten.
My blood just ash.
I had nothing left.
Nothing.
My screaming stopped.
My tripping heart seized.
I lay blinking on the bed, gasping for air that wouldn’t come, blinded by lights, crushed beneath the weight of agony.
Down and down, it pushed me.
Tearing me apart.
Shoving me into the crust of the earth.
Gagging me, choking me.
My body rejected life.
My ribcage flew up as I clawed at my throat as devil’s nails wrapped tight.
I can’t breathe—
I don’t want to breathe.
So why did I fight?
My heart split down the middle.
My skull cracked with pain.
I screamed.
My mother cried and my father yelled and the sharpest prick of a needle stabbed my arm.
The sigh of relief from those around me acted like a blanket as the icy, sickly drug blazed through the mania in my veins.
I went limp.
Lost.
Alone.
So, so alone.
He’s...gone.
The pain was different now.
Heavy as a mountain.
Colder than an iceberg.
A landslide covered me, burying me beneath sludge and stone.
A tomb.
A cache.
A blissful, blotting ending.
I sighed into it.
I was swept away.
And the final thing I heard was a worried doctor’s question. “Did you know? Did you know she’s pregnant?”
Lights snuffed out.
Darkness bloomed.
I let go.
Chapter Thirty-Three
*
Nerida
*
(Love in Dutch: Liefde)
TEARS DRIPPED SILENTLY DOWN MY CHEEKS. MY head pounded with a familiar headache. A headache that I’d often suffered ever since that horrendous night.
I trembled where I sat, sinking into the present moment and leaving the past behind. I stiffened as I noticed my fingers linked ever so tightly with Dylan’s.
He sat braced beside me, his gaze full of pity, our palms sweaty where we gripped.
My chin tipped upward as I glanced at Margot. She didn’t speak where she sat opposite me. Wetness tracked down her cheeks as she shook her head. Over and over again.
Wiping at her tears, she breathed, “He died? Truly? He’s dead?”
I flinched and pulled my hand from Dylan’s.
The conservatory with its pretty palms and lush greenery mocked me with vibrant life, all while I hovered in the death that I’d begged for so often when I was twenty.
I looked back now and pitied that girl so much. I was embarrassed by her and sad for her. I’d hated her and cursed her. But most of all, I was thankful that she’d survived. Against all her wishes to die. Despite all her despair and remorse and the insidious voices in her head to end it, she was strong enough to stay alive.
Without him.
I wished I could say that I found that inner strength because I wasn’t a quitter. That I loved my life enough to brave the horrible emptiness and eternal loneliness, but...I couldn’t.
I was still here.
I was still breathing...
Because of her.
My daughter.
“You were pregnant?” Dylan asked softly, ignoring Margot’s question about Aslan’s death. “Did you know before that night?”
Swallowing hard, I did my best to slip back into the dissociation of recounting my life. When I’d been enjoying the first flush of love and delicious ache of lust, I was more than happy to trade my decades and become a teenager once again.
But now we were no longer in a romance, we were in a tragedy, and I wanted to tell the rest of my story with that barrier in place of narrator not main character.
“No. I didn’t have any idea,” I said almost coldly. “When I fainted after Aslan was run over, they blamed my pregnancy. I remember feeling a strange kind of flutter in my lower belly that night. I remember the slicing pain as I screamed my heart out after hearing Cem shoot his only son, but it wasn’t until a few days later, when I’d been discharged from the hospital and prescribed drugs to help my catatonic depression, that I fully understood what that meant.”
“That you were carrying Aslan’s child?” Dylan asked softly.
“I’d lost him, but a small piece of him remained. I hated that as much as I was grateful. Deep within me, life existed. Life created with my soulmate. I wasn’t as alone as I thought, which meant...I couldn’t be weak. I couldn’t give in to the temptation to end it all. I had to live.”
My hands shook as I swiped at my tears. “It was that gift alone that gave me the strength not to take those mind-fogging drugs. To endure the agony of loss. To do my best to eat when my parents brought me food and to shower when they guided me into the bathroom. I stopped living for me...but I survived for her.”
