He tapped a code onto the keypad on the box, flipping it open and I stopped breathing. Stopped blinking.
There, inside it were my letters to Jess and the worn edges of those she’d sent me in return.
“What?” I breathed in complete confusion. They couldn’t be there. I’d seen them burn, char, turn to ash.
“I forged the ones I burned,” Saint muttered, those words making a wave crash against my heart. “When we first brought you here, I found them in your bag. I borrowed them one at a time and made replicas.”
“Why?” My lower lip quivered, my heart thrashing as I reached into the box with trembling fingers, taking out the most precious things in the world to me. The letters I’d seen burn, lost forever. I gently thumbed through them, confirming they were mine. They were all mine. Pieces of me and my sister tangled up together in words. Parts of my heart which had been cast to the flames the same day I’d watched him destroy them. Or so I’d thought.
His hand rested on my knee, curling gently against my flesh and I turned to him in complete shock. There were no words, not a single one in the English dictionary that could encompass how this made me feel.
“I always planned to hurt you with them,” he said in a dark voice, his eyes dancing with shadows. “But I never would have truly destroyed them.”
Tears tracked silently down my cheeks and I didn’t know whether I was happy or sad, whole or broken. Saint lifted a hand to brush my tears away, observing me with what I could almost have mistaken for pain in his eyes.
I fell against him, wrapping my arms around him and squeezing tight. This changed something between us, something vital. But I didn’t want to face what that was. He’d still wanted to hurt me, still let me believe my letters were gone. But he hadn’t really done it. What did that mean? What did that make him?
My tears washed over his bare chest, running across his dark skin in tiny rivers. He never pushed me away or gave any signs he was disgusted by my display even though that was exactly what I would have expected from him.
I leaned back again and cupped his cheek, making him look at me so I could study every inch of his handsome, too-perfect face, and I realised I didn’t know much about him at all. And as cruel and as black hearted as he was, there must have been something good lurking inside him for him to save those letters. For him to spend all that time forging them to hurt me, but not nearly as deeply as he could have hurt me by taking them away eternally.
“You always intended to give them back?” I asked in a whisper and he inhaled my breath like it was a drug in the air.
“I honestly…don’t know,” he said earnestly, unblinking as he absorbed the sight of my tears. He should have been bottling them in a jar, adding them to his collection of the broken pieces of my soul he kept. But instead he continued to wipe them away like he was willing them to stop. Like he took no pleasure in watching them fall.
I leaned in close, kissing the corner of his mouth as I found myself unsure of where to plant it. His cheek or his lips. So apparently I decided on somewhere between the two. His eyes blazed, his muscles hardening beneath my touch like he was restraining himself from pulling me in for a different kind of kiss. One that would change my entire world.
I released a breath, breaking his gaze, sure I wasn’t in any state of mind to make a reckless decision like that. Then I curled up against him and he held me tight, his thumb tracking up and down my spine in an endlessly fluid motion that made me want to sleep. After a minute or two, he started humming a song I knew. Baby Mine, a lullaby my dad had sung to me and Jess when we were kids. It was the most soothing song in the world to me and somehow Saint knew it too.
I lay in the arms of the devil, wondering if I’d been wrong to think of him as inherently evil. Cruel maybe. But perhaps he really had been an angel once and sometime long ago, he’d lost his wings.
Sleep hadn’t come easy to me in as long as I could remember. It was a problem born of the conditioning my father had subjected me to when I was growing up. He said he did it to make me strong. But in some ways I knew it had made me weak. Not being able to sleep properly was one of those ways. And being perpetually tired impacted on the rest of my day too. I knew it affected my moods, shortened my fuse – basically, it kept my demon angry and its appetite insatiable, because the one thing it needed most was often illusive and sometimes impossible.
Insomnia was a medical condition. I knew it. And I could have sought all kinds of help for it. But that would have meant admitting that it was a problem. Medical records. Pills, counselling sessions, whatever. Father wouldn’t stand for that and the possible scandal it could cause if it was revealed. Not to mention the fact that I’d never stand for him to know that he’d damaged me that way.
So, night after night, I closed my eyes at midnight and refused to open them until six am. Sometimes I slept for a few hours. Others none at all.
Even though it had
