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Her eyes widened as fear swam thick. “Wait...how are you here? Are you safe? How did you come back? I thought you were banished from ever stepping foot in Australia again.”
I clasped my hand over hers, pressing her palm to my chest. “I’m legally allowed to be here and to stay.”
“How?”
I kissed her nose. “I’ll tell you, but it’s not a simple answer. And...I feel the same way. There are things I need to tell you and things I need to ask. But...none of it truly matters because it’s done, it’s gone, and for the first time in my life, I can honestly say...I’m okay. I’m truly, incredibly okay, and that’s all because of you.”
Ducking at my knees, partially aware of the strangeness of my bracing prosthetic and the ease at which I’d grown used to it, I kissed her again. It was too easy to love her. Too easy to want her. Far, far too hard to pull away and whisper, “I-I need you to know, I’m not expecting anything tonight. I understand if you need time, canim. I’m happy to do whatever you want as long as I get to do it with you.”
She smiled softly beneath my lips. “Here I was afraid that dragging you into my room was too soon. That you’d think I only wanted you for your body.”
I chuckled and hid my slight flinch. “My body—what’s left of it—is yours. It always has been. Always will be.”
Her eyes tightened with questions. I waited for her to ask, but she swallowed them down and turned on her heel.
Taking my hand, she tugged me toward the corridor. The wide space was lit by a strip of lighting along the skirting board, revealing doors equally spaced. “That’s Ayla’s room. Family bathroom. Eddie and Teddy’s room. And this...” She pulled me over the threshold of a grey-walled, beachy space. Coral chandelier, shaggy cream carpets, and the scent of salt and wind as if she’d washed her white sheets in the sea. “This is mine.”
I drank in her room.
I imagined her here, thinking of me while I thought of her.
But then, I froze.
I tripped to the side of her bed and snatched up a photo.
A photo of me in a lion onesie when I was a baby. I’d seen the same one on Cem’s desk. Spinning around, I demanded, “How do you have this?”
Fucking hell, he’d been playing games with her too.
What a bastard.
What a lowlife fucking bastard.
If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him all over again.
For a few weeks, while I’d waited in prison to find out what sins I’d be charged with after my arrest the night I’d shot him, I’d actually felt guilty. My fractured mind tried to lay the blame squarely at my feet. That I’d misread his intentions. That he truly did love me. That he wasn’t toxic or manipulative or dangerous.
But now, I saw the truth.
The only truth.
He was the worst creature alive because he could use truth and twist it into lies. He could use love and make it hurt worse than any weapon.
He deserved to die.
She hunched and rubbed her arms. “I spoke to him. Every year.”
“I know. He told me.”
She reared back. “He did?” Anger lit her crystal-blue eyes. “That asshole told me every year that you were dead. I screamed at him that I didn’t believe it. I never believed it. My heart knew. My heart knew all along that you weren’t gone.” She rubbed at her chest. “It acted so strange, Aslan. I even went to a doctor to be checked out because I’d wake up with palpitations and suffer at such random times. But the cardiologist assured me I was fine, so I just assumed it was symptoms of a broken heart.”
I lowered the photograph, trembling. “Y-You felt that?” My eyes suddenly locked on the other item on her bedside. A tiny keepsake from the deep that’d been my good luck charm before I lost it.
Snatching the spiny, peach-and-cream shell, tears clawed up my throat.
She kept it.
She—
“I spoke to you every night,” she whispered wetly. Coming toward me, she rested her hand over mine as I clutched the gift she’d given me all those years ago. “Every night I felt my heart skip and double-beat, I begged you to feel me. Each time my chest pounded with an irregular rhythm, I rubbed that damn shell, begging to know if you were alright.”
“Fuck, canim.” I raised her hand and kissed her knuckles.
I should be used to her by now. It shouldn’t shock me that her heart had scrambled like mine. That the fraught pain and terror I’d endured had transmitted through whatever connection we shared.
This incredible, sensitive girl.
My all-knowing, intuitive soulmate.
She stood there in her yellow bikini, with all her beauty on display, and I fell to the bottom of my affection.
