Page 86 of Black Sheep

Her sins have loomed very large in my mind for a very long time. But I never stopped to imagine how mine would look to her.

Never imagined what seeing myself in her eyes would do to me. I once dropped my guard during an illegal cage fight with a Filipino bruiser. His concealed kalis slashed my thigh wide open. The wound took three weeks to heal, each moment of that healing process hellish agony.

The pain I feel now is a thousandfold multiplied what I felt then. Sitting on the side of the bed with my head in my hands, I wonder in what dimension I imagined confessing would be okay.

Because it’s good for the soul? Probably, if you believe in Sunday school stories and fairies. And if you believe you have a soul to redeem. I don’t. And now she knows.

I raise my head and stare at the bathroom door. There’s no sound coming from inside. She’s been in there ten minutes. She wants to be alone. I should respect that.

The idea bumps around in my head like a clumsy puzzle piece seeking its slot. I’m not surprised when it doesn’t find a landing.

Because fuck that.

When it comes to Cleo nothing is ever as it should be. Besides, we’re not here, in this room, for the fun of it. We’re here because, no matter what she thinks of me now, she’s still mine.

I stand. Agonized but resolute.

My first knock receives no response. I try again. Harder.

“What?” Her voice is weak. Worn. Heartbroken?

The yearning to believe that last emotion sears through me. But hot on its heels…I loved a figment of my imagination who was never going to live up to reality.

I push my own imaginings to one side. “Time to come out, Cleo.”

“Why?”

A dozen answers crowd on my tongue. I discard them one by one in favor of the bald truth. “Because you have to face who I am sooner or later. And because your time is mine, I vote for sooner.”

She makes a sound that rips at something wide open inside me. Like the pain that lurks inside me, this new rip pisses me off. They all point to weaknesses I thought I conquered on the battlefield. The special black ops team I was assigned to following the Taranahar incident trained what extraneous emotions I had left after Cleo out of me. It taught me to divorce myself from everyday emotion. And yet I’ve never been rawer, felt more exposed, since she turned up at the club three weeks ago.

The sound of running water comes through the door for a few seconds. Then silence. I force myself not to kick the door open. And wait.

When she emerges, her face is paler than I’ve ever seen, her blue eyes dark and haunted. Not that she allows me to look into them for long. She slides past me and heads to the window where I fucked her an hour ago, her gaze fixed on the street below.

“Why did you tell me?” she finally asks, her voice husky and broken. “You could have kept it to yourself for…for the rest of your life. So why?” A raw, dejected demand.

My hands flex. Bunch. Flex. Words feel inadequate for the weight I carry inside. “Perhaps it was wrong but I needed…” A confessor. “If I could take it back, I would.”

She rounds on me, her eyes wild pools of desolation. “Well you can’t! You…you can never take it back.” She shakes her head and storms back toward the bed. When I reach her, her mouth is pinched tight as if she’s holding it together by a thread.

Jesus. How the fuck selfish am I? To dump this burden on her when she blatantly stated that the reason she left was because she couldn’t handle the violence?

But then why take up with Finnan? What the hell does he have on her?

The questions blaze through my mind, but I coldly snuff it out. She wasn’t inclined to tell me before. She most definitely wouldn’t now. But this…her naked torment is down to me.

“I’m going to make amends, Cleo.”

Her head snaps up, her eyes narrowing with incredulity. “How? How do you make up for…for killing someone?”

The wave of helplessness that sweeps through me is so debilitating, I stagger forward and drop into the armchair. She thinks it’s only one. I can’t bear to set her straight. My head feels heavy as I shake it. “I don’t know. I haven’t found a solution yet, but I’m working on it.”

Her face clenches in a grimace of anguish and she throws her arms out. “How do I know those aren’t just words? Here you are, living your billion-dollar life, driving your sports cars, getting to choose how many women to fuck in one night, and having minions on speed dial. How does any of it coming anywhere close to making amends?”

“Those are useless trappings. Whether I give away every last penny I have or make another billion by Christmas, nothing is going to stop the endless cycle of hell that greets me every time I open my eyes and stays with me every single fucking second. Hell, sometimes I don’t sleep at all. You know why? Because sometimes in dreaming there’s hope. And you know what the fuck is worse than hope? It’s hope based on nothing!”

Her eyes widen in alarm at my savage tone.

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