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“Lance, they would never hate you,” I said, unable to stay silent. “Never.”
His eyes were cruel and vulnerable at the same time. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
I didn’t break his gaze. “I don’t need to know what you’ve done. I know who you are.”
I wanted to go to him. Needed to. The last two months, my anger, hurt. It was nothing in the face of this. But I sensed a distance. He was still in the past.
I couldn’t reach him there.
He had to keep going.
“There wasn’t anyone to punish,” he said, his voice a whisper. “I don’t know if that’s what set me over the edge. The fact that there was no one for me to blame for it all. No evil. Just life.”
Just life.
Fuck.
“I was weak,” he admitted, something I knew he had never said out loud before, something he told himself every day. “Worse things have happened to better people and they were able to pick up. Carry on with a life where they don’t turn into monsters. But that wasn’t me. Isn’t me. I couldn’t find anyone to punish for ruining my life, so I decided I’d punish people who did ruin others. Found out I excelled at it. Punishing people. Killing them.”
He threw these words out like weapons. I knew he was trying to scare me off, show me how ugly he was.
I jutted my chin up, refusing to turn away from him as he was trying to get me to do.
“It wasn’t for a noble cause, the killing,” he continued with a glint in his eye. Maybe hope. “Like everything I do in my life, it was for selfish reasons. That’s why I came back. Not because it would be better for you, Nathan. But because it would be better for me.”
“Lance,” I whispered.
“Still not done, Elena,” he replied.
I waited. Braced.
“I can’t stand snow,” he said, looking out the window at the cloudless sky. “The look of it, the feel of it, the sight of it. Everything about it covers me in the fucking memory of that moment. That exact moment when the door opened in the diner with the men that were about to tell me my world was destroyed and I didn’t even look up from my fucking phone.” He sounded angry now. Furious. With himself.
I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault. None of it.
But I couldn’t. Because I was a mother. I knew that if anything happened to Nathan, I would find a way to blame myself. I had done that. Nothing that anyone could say would stop that. It was an ugly truth I despised with all my soul at this moment.
“I learned ways to cope. To survive,” Lance said, no longer looking out the window. “A stockbroker descending into the underworld and learning everything about death and killing would be classified as the worst way to cope, wouldn’t it?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer the question.
“I surrounded myself with death in order to trick myself into thinking I understood it. That I had faced it. Fuck, if I delivered it, didn’t it mean something?” He ran his hand through his hair again.
“Seeing someone take their last breath, bein’ the reason for that, it doesn’t bother me. But snow. Fucking snow unravels me. Hence the relocation to one of the few states where I’m never gonna have to feel the bite of the worst day of my life ever again.” His eyes were even on me now. “Didn’t tell you all this for your pity, Elena. Didn’t do it for any other reason than so you knew everything about me. Everything that’s wrong and there’s a lot of wrong. Almost all of me. I’m doin’ this ‘cause I want you. I want Nathan. There is no way I can have you, truly have you like I want unless you know it all. Unless you make the decision to let me into your life, your son’s life, despite what I am. I’m not gonna change. The cut is too deep. Too permanent. Fuck, if I could, I would. For you. For Nathan. That’s why I walked away in the first place, ‘cause I knew I wouldn’t and I wasn’t gonna ask you to let a monster into your life.”
“Stop,” I whispered, the word a plea and a command.
He blinked, and stopped talking, obviously hearing something in my voice.
“I know monsters,” I said. “I came out of one. Was raised by two. Married another one. Made an angel with a monster. I’m sure this cruel, evil world has produced so many different kinds of monsters that there’s no way to truly know what one is. To define one. Because the world turns us all into different kinds of monsters. It doesn’t matter. Because the kind of monster you are, it’s one I’m in love with. One my son is in love with. One I know that would cut himself to the bone before he saw either of us take a scratch.”
