As Lie the Dead

“I want to know,” he said.

My mouth fell open. A strange chill settled in my stomach. I’d challenged him and he’d called my bluff, and now I didn’t want to say it. Saying it meant he’d really asked, and that meant he wanted me. Not her. Me. Warts and wounds and multiple personalities and all. I retreated until my back hit the door, an immovable barrier. Unless I turned and ran.

Different emotions telegraphed across his face—surprise, concern, anger, frustration, hesitation, even grief. I’d seen them all; I knew his facial tics. I retained the advantage from our old life. He wasn’t so lucky.

“I could guess,” he said evenly, “from things you’ve said in the past, adding details from my own imagination. But I don’t want to guess anymore, Evy. I’ve never known anyone who could still surprise the hell out of me after four years, not the way you do. Who hurt you?”

“Who didn’t?”

His face crumpled. Not out of pity—good for his looks, since I’d have pummeled him if pity had even pretended to come my way—but out of the acknowledgment of hidden fears. This wasn’t the conversation I’d expected, but there was no sense in holding back, either. He wanted the truth? He’d get it.

“Don’t worry,” I said, my voice a little too poisonous. “I wasn’t molested by my mom’s rotating boyfriends or raped by the guards at Juvie. My entire life before the Triads, I was just never treated like a person.”

“Abuse isn’t only sexual, Evy,” he said. Low voice, nostrils flaring. “No one deserves to be ignored.”

I snorted—if only being ignored had been the problem. “Oh no, they paid attention. Just the wrong kind, and mostly it was my own damned fault. To my mother’s boyfriends, I was a leech that needed occasional feeding and slapping around. To the people at the group foster home, I was another pathetic orphan with anger-management issues that was locked in the closet at least once a month for fighting with the other kids. When I was in Juvie, I spent more time in solitary or the infirmary than anywhere else.”

He scowled. I could almost see his blood boiling in his veins. “What about your mother?”

“She’s dead. What about her?”

“Did she love you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. She stopped saying it when I was four. After my stepfather left us, I think she stopped loving everything, including herself.”

“She filled the void with heroin?”

“You know she did.” Where the blue fuck was he going with this?

“Just like you filled the void with killing Dregs?”

The entire world seemed to go absolutely still. My heart pounded so loudly I was sure he could hear it. It drowned out any other sound. Panic set in, colored with fear and anger. He had no right to get into my head like that. He wasn’t allowed to know me so well.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Just don’t!” My chest hurt. It was hard to breathe. Tears stung my eyes, sharp and hot. It was too much. I didn’t want to analyze why I was the way I was. I didn’t want to know why I had a hard time letting people in. I didn’t want to understand why killing Dregs made me feel good—gave me a sense of purpose I’d never felt as just another angry orphan.

Psychology was stupid.

Wyatt walked toward me, and I recoiled. Didn’t even think. The loneliness was there from our conversation; I just slipped into the electrical current of the Break and moved. The jump was brief, barely irritating, and I found myself standing on the other side of the bed, by the bathroom. Wyatt’s back was still to me, attention on the space where I’d been.

I’d just run from him.

God, can I sink any lower than this?

An angry sob tore from me and I fell to my knees, helpless against the shame choking me. Shame over what he knew, and all the things I couldn’t bear to tell him—about the scared thirteen-year-old who’d let an older boy touch her down there for the price of a plastic necklace; the confused twenty-one-year- old who fucked strangers in dirty bar bathrooms to prove she was a woman and not just a killer.

Tears blurred my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut, gasping for air, desperate to keep it together.

Warm arms circled me from behind. I pulled away, but he held tight. Unafraid of my weakness. Not seeming to care that I wasn’t the strong, independent Hunter he’d trained. I turned and collapsed against his chest, unable to fight anymore, and let the tears come. Cheek against his shoulder, I sobbed until my head ached and I’d soaked his shirt through with tears and snot.

He didn’t speak until I was choking back soft hiccups instead of shaking gasps. “You scare me, too, you know,” he whispered, breath warm by my cheek. “You barrel into situations you don’t always understand, and you’re way too fond of questioning my orders.”

“Good thing …” I wheezed a bit, cleared my throat, and tried again. “Good thing I don’t take orders from you anymore.”

“I don’t want to give you orders. I want to be your partner, Evy, not your boss.”

“My partners have a bad habit of dying.”

“Well, I’ve already died once, so we can strike that off the list of objections.” He stroked my hair with one hand, gentle brushes, like I was fragile glass. “Why did you disappear like that?”

Tell the truth, dammit. He deserves that. “I was afraid.”

“Of me?”

“Not you.” I pulled away far enough to see him. The look on his face broke my heart and my resolve to shield any more of myself. Building that wall had been easy, placed brick by brick over twenty-two years of loneliness, ignorance, neglect, and pain. Keeping the wall up against something as simple as love … not so easy.

I was tired of it. Tired of battling my emotions. Tired of fearing the future. Why continue to fear what I couldn’t stop? I had too many other enemies out there, too many other things to fight, without fighting with myself all the time.

Wyatt hooked a finger beneath my chin, drawing my attention back to him. I tried to focus on the bridge of his nose, afraid if I looked into his eyes I’d fall in and never climb back out. He didn’t speak. I gave in, looked, and barely held on.

“Then what?” he asked.

“Of us.”

“Why?”

My stomach quaked. A tremor tore down my spine. I balled my hands in front of his shirt and closed my eyes, sure I would break into a thousand pieces if I didn’t hold on tight. Wyatt pulled me close, abandoning his quest for answers, and just held me. I pressed my face into his shoulder. Inhaled him. Felt his heart beat.

“I told you I’d never pressure you,” he said.

“It isn’t that. I want to be with you and let myself care for you, but it’s those things that scare me the most.”

He tensed a fraction, barely noticeable. “I don’t understand.”

“It feels like …” I struggled to put into words what was so clear in my head. My mixed-up, tired, pain-addled head. “No, not feels like. It is. Giving in to this thing between us—to my physical attraction to you—means losing the old Evangeline Stone for good. It means the sensations I feel in this body are well and truly mine, and that what I was before? She’s gone. It means accepting I will never be her again, and that this is my life now. Period.”

I’d finally said it, and I felt strangely good. Relieved, even. There it was—my fear in full-color detail, and even if I’d been able to take back the confession, I wouldn’t. I knew in my brain that I couldn’t go back to what I’d been before my death, but I had not accepted it in my heart. Saying it drove that acceptance home. Made it impossible to ignore, for both of us.

Besides, it was better he know it all up front, so he could weigh the totality of my issues against his feelings for me. He’d more than earned it.

I drew back and searched his face. “Sorry you asked?”

“Never.” The vehemence in his voice made my heart soar. “Are you sorry you told me?”

“No.”