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“Did I? I wasn’t sure that was what I really wanted.” I’d roll my eyes, but for once, she isn’t being snarky. I grab her face with both my hands, gently cupping her cheeks and running my thumbs against her smooth skin. She holds my gaze and there are so many emotions swirling it grabs my heart in a vice. So much uncertainty and insecurity.
“Who are you lying to right now? Me or to yourself?”
She groans and thunks her head against my chest. Giving me and herself the answer.
“That’s what I thought,” I tease her lightly, wrapping my arms around and pulling her in tightly. “I know you were having a hard time admitting it, even to yourself. Forgiveness was never a part of our plan. I know that better than anyone.”
The last few weeks flash through my mind to the soundtrack of Declan chastising us. “I know that Kade and I made this harder for you because of our visceral anger towards him. I won’t lie to you and say the idea of you forgiving him still doesn’t make my skin crawl. Whether he really did try his best in the past or not. I’ve hated him for decades, jealous he had the right to you before I ever thought I’d have a chance to and he ruined it. Ruined you. I can’t promise to ever like the guy, I know Kade can’t either, but we will at least stop trying to kill him.”
She looks at me skeptically, weighing my words and debating how real they could possibly be.
Fair enough.
“Probably,” I tease. “But really, Kade and I would do anything for you. We’ve watched you struggle the last few weeks and it’s been one of the hardest things to realize we added to your struggles. We never want to be a part of the problem.”
Her features soften at my words, more emotion bleeding into her expression with every moment that passes. Her hard edges are smoothed over to reveal more of the young and naïve girl she once was. More and more frequently I have seen that girl lurking in the shadows of Scar’s eyes.
I never dared to hope to bring her back. I love the girl in my arms too much to wish things were different. But maybe there’s always been a phoenix in the ashes of her past, just waiting for the right time to rise once more. To finally heal, to become whole.
“Maybe you need to forgive him, for you. Maybe you need a piece of your old life to hang on to, a reminder of Charlotte and everything you lost. Your world was filled with demons, but it had some light too. You were happy, you were loved, and as much evil as you found in the four walls you called home, you also had someone in your corner. Willing to fight for you. Willing to sacrifice for you. Maybe to move on and kill the demons once and for all, you need to hold onto a little bit of that light. If that’s Charles for you, so be it. Forgive him. At the very least, I really don’t think he will betray you again.”
“How much did those words hurt coming out?” Her grin and light words are belied by the tears shining in her eyes I know she hates.
“A lot,” I admit with a chuckle. “I won’t ever be his biggest fan, but I can’t not be thankful for him. He kept you alive long enough for us to escape.”
“You were right,” she whispers, finally acknowledging it aloud. “I did want to forgive him. I wanted to believe in the kids we used to be. The happy moments we had to escape the bleakness of our surroundings together. I’ve spent so long only seeing the shadows from that time of my life I forgot that you needed both light and darkness to create those shadows. I had a lot of light in my life that made the darkness that much scarier when I discovered it, but now… Now he’s all the light I have left from that world. I never wanted him to be tainted by the darkness too.”
“Is that what was holding you back? Were you scared to be wrong and realize he never was the light after all?”
“No, I think that would have been easier,” she answers, surprising me. “It’s easier to throw around words like evil and demons and monsters. It’s natural to hate those things. To feel justified in your anger and your hurt. It’s infinitely harder to realize and accept that sometimes people hurt you unintentionally. Good people make bad choices. People can love you and still destroy you. Sometimes people have no choice but to hurt you. I wasn’t ready to face the fact that some of the worst wounds aren’t caused by the villains, but by the boy with the blue eyes who was just as much a victim as I was.”
I tense at those words. “I wouldn’t go that far.” He may not be the villain here, but he sure as hell isn’t a victim the same way Letty was. She had her innocence, her family, her entire life ripped away from her in the matter of hours.
“No?” she questions. “His childhood was just as destroyed as mine was. He lost his family, his best friend. He had to wake up every morning and look the monster that caused his pain in the face and act like he knew none of it. At least I got to run away, build a new life. He’s been stuck in the same cycle of torture for the last eight years.”
I roll my lips, stopping myself from arguing back instinctively as I really think about her words. Think about the emotions Charles put on display for all of us and really see what he meant by having to fight from behind enemy lines. I don’t want to understand the guy, to feel for him. I was happy to hate his guts and take the first chance I had to spill them all over the floor. But what she’s saying makes too much sense.
An uncomfortable sensation unfurls in my chest. One I don’t recognize and don’t have a name for. One I don’t want. I attempt to push them aside, to move forward in our conversation and get the focus off of him.
“What about now that you know? Does it change things for you?”
She shrugs, her shoulders lifting against my chest as she presses her cheek against me, taking a moment to think before she answers.
“It hurt when I thought Charles betrayed me, abandoned me. It was devastating when I thought he just didn’t care enough. Thought he never really loved me. But I dealt with that hurt years ago. Now all of a sudden, he didn’t do those things. He tried. He just failed.
“It’s like finding hope where I thought nothing but misery was buried. But hope can still be the scariest thing of all. It means I can’t hate him, I can’t blame him. I can’t just write him off like I have for years. It’s harder to accept someone for their mistakes than it is to just forget about them.” She gets a small grin on her face. “Or you know, just kill them.” I laugh, knowing how easily that night could have gone in a different direction had he made any indication he was a threat. Scar isn’t one quick to act on her emotions, but no one would dare accuse her of hesitating to kill either.
She nuzzles into my chest in a very uncharacteristic way. I can’t help but smile as she continues, “But the same way I decided to stop running from you guys, from my feelings, I need to stop running from the pieces of myself that survived. I’ll never be Charlotte again, but I never stopped being your Letty. I’ll never not be Marnye and Harlee’s big sister. And maybe Charles never stopped being my best friend either.”
It’s everything I ever wanted her to realize about herself while also being my worst nightmare. I force myself to smile, to focus on how far she’s come in the last year. She really has stopped running when that has been her survival mechanism for so many years. I’ll take that even if it comes with the human-shaped baggage that is Charles fucking Donahue. I hum and run my fingers down along her spine, chuckling as she shivers under my touch. She’s still Scar. Snarky, abrasive, and skilled with a blade.
This is still her comfort zone. Getting lost in the pleasures of her body when the emotions all get too big and overwhelming. She finds her safety here. Her home. I’ll always be her home.
“I love how responsive you always are for me, Letty,” I growl in her ear, grinning as she practically melts into me. She’d had enough, enough being vulnerable and talking in circles. She knows everything she needs to know and now she just needs comfort. A distraction. It’d be a lie to say I don’t crave it just as much. The reassurance I only feel when I’m buried deep in her, feeling her tight walls clench all around me.
I push my fingers into the back of her waistband and slide my hands down until I can cup her ass and pull her into me. Let her feel just what she does to me in only a matter of moments. She might be looking to get lost in me, but I’ve been a casualty of her storm for years and I never want to be saved.
She pushes against me, her breath picking up in speed and I trace the shell of her ear with my tongue before catching the lobe in between my teeth and bite down. Her gasp sends electricity through me. I tear my hands out of her jeans so I’m able to lift her up. She wraps her legs around my waist at the same time her arms settle around my neck. Our lips are stretched out into smiles as they meet and brush over each other.
