And when the last one hit, she heard him roar behind her.
Then she knew no more.
Molly didn’t know what woke her, or how she knew that it was later. Much later, by her guess, and she knew instantly that Constantine wasn’t in the bed with her. She’d slept but she’d been always aware of him beside her, wrapped around her, hot to the touch.
She sat up, her heart pounding at her as if in fright, but then she saw him.
He stood by the window, and for once, she got to gaze upon his glorious nakedness instead of the reverse. The lights of Paris flowed all over his perfect form, making him seem unreal. Like one of the statues in the Musée Rodin, where she had spent many a stolen afternoon while at loose ends in the city.
He put them all to shame.
“Constantine?” She hardly sounded like herself, but that didn’t shock her. She didn’t feel like herself either, not any longer.
She felt like his.
He didn’t turn toward her, and yet she knew, somehow, that he had heard her all the same. A small, shivery thing teased the nape of her neck.
“I hated your mother long before I met her,” Constantine said, his voice gravelly, his gaze on the city before him. “I hated the idea of her, probably before my father ever met her. But then, there she was. And she had a name and a face, and told me to call her Isabel, as if we were friends already.”
Molly had spent her life wanting to have this conversation, and now that it was happening, she wanted no part of it. She wanted to fly across the room and throw her body against his, hoping that could distract him from whatever he was about to say. But just as he seemed to stand there, frozen solid at the window with Paris at his feet, she couldn’t seem to move, either.
She could only watch the light move over his dark form. And wait.
He seemed to grow even more frozen as she watched. “But as luck would have it, my new friend Isabel gave me more than enough reason to hate her, personally.” Constantine let out a laugh, though there was no humor in it. It sounded like a weapon, and this time, it wasn’t one aimed at her. Why did that make her ache? “She tried, you see. She tried so hard. Not just to make my father happy, a doomed endeavor if ever there was one. But she went out of her way to try to love me, too.”
He turned then, and Molly caught her breath. Because his face was a mask of anguish. Sheer torment. His eyes blazed with it, and she hated that, too.
“Constantine. I don’t understand—”
“And how dare she love me so easily?” Constantine gritted out, as if she hadn’t spoken. “When my mother’s life was a spiral of despair. When my own mother had never been any good at loving anyone or anything because she was so focused on my father—anything to get his attention, good or bad. How dare a stepmother come along and try to do what she had never managed?”
That hit Molly like a blow. Hard into her belly.
She whispered his name. And he laughed again, that awful sound.
“Your mother was kind, Molly. Understanding. Warm. And oh, how I loathed her for it.” He moved toward her then, and it felt like fate. Like doom. Then he stopped at the end of the bed and it felt a whole lot more like heartache. “But then you came.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she managed to get out.
Maybe she meant, Please don’t do this.
“But I do.” He raked a hand through his hair as if he would rather have put it on her. She wished he would. And her heart was beating so hard against her ribs that she was surprised she wasn’t rattling with the impact of each hit. “You were so soft. So astoundingly innocent.”
“I think you mean stupid.”
Constantine shook his head. “It was obvious to anyone who laid eyes on you that you could be easily chewed up and spit out and more, would never have the slightest idea what had happened to you.”
It was a searing sort of pain, she found, to imagine her former self like that. Particularly as she knew it was true. And more, could see too well the gap between the girl she’d been then and the woman she’d become.
“Again, I think the word you’re looking for is stupid,” she managed to say. “All I knew of the world was the village I came from. Our neighbors might not have liked my mum much. They might have watched me a little too closely, forever on the hunt for evidence that I was either like Isabel or looked a bit too much like one of their sons, since Isabel never named my father. But at least I knew my place there.”
“You had no business turning up in our world, Molly. You weren’t made for it. You made the terrible mistake of imagining that people, at heart, were basically good. No doubt another gift from your mother.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “You treated me like a friend and I believed you meant it. I’ve had a long time to beat myself up for that, Constantine. A lot of years to regret it, but do you know what? I don’t. I would rather see the world as more good than bad. Or what would be the point of living in it?”
“How can you possibly continue to be this naive?” he asked, his voice filled with sadness and something like wonder at once. “The fashion industry should have succeeded where I failed and beaten this out of you years ago.”
Her smile was rueful then. “Oh, it did. So did you, Constantine. But cynicism is a choice. And I decided I would not choose it, despite all provocation.”
It hadn’t always been easy, because there was a certain ragged pride to be taken
