“Hell, you. This is what you looked like. It’s why I first felt the need to protect you, Ness—that first day when you came to me. I could never stand a woman with a bruise on her face—but yours, yours was horrific. It looked just like my mother’s as she took her last breath.”
Her face crumpled, horrified, her hold on his arm bruising. “What?”
His eyes squinted close as image after image flooded his mind. “But only…only after the hours—the night of the horrors of being half alive, hearing her screams, what they did to her. I could only watch through blood streaming in my eyes. I couldn’t move. When they finally let her body drop to the floor, she looked at me.”
He collapsed onto his heels, his knees hitting the ground, his shoulders dropping. “And I saw only one of her eyes looking at me. Everything was in that eye. Still blue. Crystal clear blue. She could see I was still alive. And everything was in her eye. What she wanted for me. The future. For me to live. Giving me the strength to keep breathing. She wouldn’t look anywhere but at me. Willing me to live.”
Ness’s hand, gentle, slid along the back of his neck. “And you did.”
The blackness invaded, wiping free the images.
He shook his head. Trying to get them back. Trying to banish them back into the void. An anguished roar left him, his mind battling itself.
“You lived, Talen.”
His body buckled forward, all air leaving his lungs, his knuckles digging into the dirt. “I did, but I do not know how.” His voice rough, words choked out. “The next thing I remember, I was waking up on that ship, Declan shoving a mop into my hand, yanking me out of bed because he was sick of swabbing the decks alone.”
His body swayed, his mind fighting itself with every second.
Fighting until he was numb, losing track of place and time.
Fighting until he didn’t exist, not even in his own mind.
{ Chapter 20 }
Heaven help her, what had she done?
She’d wanted—needed—Talen to remember his past, to remember her. To know that she wasn’t mad and destined for an asylum. But this—she’d never meant to sendhiminto madness.
She hadn’t wanted this. Not the horror of what had happened to him. Not for him to leave this world even as he left his body behind.
He’d warned her and she hadn’t listened. She’d let her own blasted self-doubt demand this of him.
Rain had started, heavy rain, but even that hadn’t nudged Talen from where he’d frozen in place. Poised on his knees in front of his mother’s grave, not moving, his eyes open but not seeing anything.
She’d yelled his name, over and over again, but she couldn’t get him to flinch, to move. A granite statue she couldn’t budge.
Wedging herself between him and the headstone, she bent down in front of him, her right hand fully on his cheek, her left fingertips cradling the other side of his jaw. The rain was coming vicious now, slashing across her cheeks, drowning his face in rivers that ran from his dark blond hair.
“Talen—Talen—look at me, please. Just look at me.” Not that her face could pull him from the monstrosity of what he must be feeling at the moment, reliving the deaths of his parents.
Not that anything could pull him back.
Her hands tightened around his face. “Talen, please.”
No reaction, not even the slightest blink. Panic set deep into her bones. His eyes were glassy, so like her mother’s often were when she’d visit her in the asylum.
She couldn’t lose him. Not now.
What the hell had she done?
“Apologies for the interruption, but the rain has started in earnest.”
Ness tore her gaze away from Talen to crane her neck and look at the driverthey’d hired in Birminghamat the far side of the iron fence. She had to lift her voice to be heard over the downpour. “The rain, it is already mucking the roads, isn’t it?”
“It is, miss. We need to leave before the carriage gets stuck. I moved it closer along the lane.”
She straightened, her right hand moving to grip the side of Talen’s neck. “Help me. Help me get him back down to the carriage.”