Page 100 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold
“What’s in this room?” Alex asked the next morning. She’d been up since dawn, and after, eating her weight in pancakes, she’d set out to see every inch of a castle that, it turned out, had a lot of inches.
“Oh, you don’t want to—” King started, but it was too late. The door was already open, and Alex was already throwing back the velvet curtains and shining light on... chaos. Or madness. Or—who was King kidding? It was both.
“Yeah. About this room...” King had been avoiding the space for months, and it looked so much worse than he remembered. He’d been telling himself since the funeral that he’d clean it out soon. He’d take the newspaper clippings off the pinboards and paint over the writing on the walls and cram all the “evidence” his father had collected through the years into boxes labeled so neatly that no one would ever know that there was nothing but insanity inside.
King told himself he’d been too busy, but the truth was, being inside his father’s room was the closest thing to being inside his father’s mind, and King knew it was a treasure—a gift. His father was gone, but his thoughts were still there, and King couldn’t bring himself to pack them all away just yet.
“King...” Alex’s eyes were too big, too worried.
“My father got sick. A couple of years ago. He came here to live with me... in the end.”
“Oh.” She looked surprised. “You took care of him?”
King’s throat was full of cotton for some reason. It was all he could do to nod.
He walked to the section of the wall that was nothing but anagrams of the word Nikolai—as if maybe the best codebreakers in the world had just missed it.
“I told you about him. Didn’t I? That he was...”Obsessed. Insane.That something terrible happened a long time ago, and one of the smartest men on the planet reacted in the only way he knew how: by trying to make the puzzle make sense.“He thought he was getting close to figuring out who Nikolai was.” King pointed to the part of the wall where the photographs lived—pictures of another age in black and white. “But he wasn’t.” It was all he could do to admit, “Thisis the cancer that killed him.”
And then Alex’s eyes got wet and King’s throat got raw, and when Alex came toward him, it was so slowly, he almost didn’t realize it was happening. Like a gravitational pull that kept them in each other’s orbit—that wouldn’t let him pull away.
Her arms slipped around his waist, and her head rested on his chest, and he wondered if she could hear his heart beat. He wanted to know if she realized how easily she could make it stop.
“I’m glad you got to be with him. And take care of him,” she said into the cotton of his shirt.
“I’m glad I get to take care of you.” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. He wasn’t expecting her to go stiff, but it was like she’d frozen in the sea and her body had just realized it.
Something was wrong. He’d said something or done something, but King didn’t know what and he wanted to cut his own tongue out.
“What? What is it?”
When she pulled away and looked up at him, she didn’t look like a badass spy. She looked like a little girl and, suddenly, he got it.
Alex had spent her whole life watching people worry about Zoe, take care of Zoe, nurture and cherish and care for Zoe. Her family hadn’t had the bandwidth to worry about a second sister, and so Alexhadto be okay. Alex had to be strong. Alex took care of Alex. And suddenly, everything about her made sense.
“I’m not the sister people take care of.”
He pressed a kiss to her forehead and whispered, “You are now.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Alex
Alex got sick.
Not the kind of sick that comes with bags of O-negative and triage kits. It was the kind of sick that means chicken soup and saltine crackers and watchingThe Price Is Righton the sofa by yourself all afternoon.
It was the kind of sick that comes from finishing your last final before Christmas. The kind of sick that only happens when you let yourself stop running long enough for the world to catch up.
So she slept so long, she dreamed. And then she laughed so hard, she cried.
Her nose turned red and she carried a box of tissues with her wherever she went. King found an old-fashioned hot water bottle and tucked it by her feet, and she made him read her favorite historical romance novel aloud to her every night by the fire. And, through it all, she just kept thinking that it was winter in Scotland and he cared whether or not her feet were warm. Zoe had once said that was what love was.
Zoe was right.
Outside the old stone walls, the wind blew and moaned and smelled like snow, but even in that drafty castle, Alex stayed warm in King’s sweatpants and thick wool socks. They ate soup and played Scrabble.
They kissed and they touched and they spent their nights skin to skin, and for the first time in her life Alex was happy.
