Page 103 of Cara
Her wild inky waves frame her face. A face that, in just a few days, seems to glow as brightly as the heavens do. She’s an angel—my angel. For over a year, that wasn’t just a thought. It was a real, hard fact I lived with every single fucking day.
“Your father. Tell me what hurting him did to you,” she says, cupping my face as I avert my gaze. “Tell me what you felt when they told you I was dead. Tell me what being this has done to you. Tell me all of it!”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t bring you here for this. This isn’t how this was supposed to go.”
“These sculptures are beautiful, Xavier. This place is a dream. But they fail miserably compared to what’s right in front of me.” Sophie’s lips press against my cheek. I close my eyes, my hands tight around her wrists. “My pain doesn’t strip you of yours. We are broken, so broken. And that’s okay.”
Fuck. I can’t do this.
She shifts until my eyes are forced to return to her. Does she see the terror?
“It’sokay, baby. We’ve earned the right to feel this.”
The urge to lash out at her stems from a deep-seateddarkness, a force that says she’s right, that there’s no way around this. It’s not something I can fix and arrange like everything else in my life.
When I look at her, I see myself beaten on the floor of her apartment in the heart of Madrid. I see the gun on my nightstand, once a form of protection that, in her absence, became a temptation. I see the shell of a man who struggled to move, let alone run an entire organization, raise a child, anticipate betrayals, and search every day for the wife he failed to protect.
“I’ve wanted to die,” I whisper. “Every damn day, from the moment I opened my eyes till I drank them closed, it’s all I’ve thought about.”
The horror that crosses her face hearing that confession is precisely what kept my mouth shut in the first place. But she wants to hear it.Fine.
“I can’t remember the last time I slept through a full night. I can’t remember when my body was free of phantom pain from the punishments they carried out on me, places that are still numb from where my nerves permenantly severed. This feeling didn’t begin when I lost you; it developed while you were trapped and I wasn’t. While I had to pretend to give a shit about the man who was ordering abuse on you day in and day out.”
Now that it’s spilling out of me, she’s frightened. “I still look at you and imagine all the times I saw you over the last four years and had to tell myself that you weren’t real. That I would never see you again. That I would never touch you again or feel even a shred of happiness. I'm still there, Sophie.”
“I’d be scared if you weren’t,” she says. “This pain means you’re still you.”
“Sometimes, I feel anything but myself.”
“Well, I’ll love him too. Any version of you.”
She brings my hands to her face, pressing them against her flushed skin. “I'm here. X, I’m here.”
The sculptures stand as silent observers while my hands trace where the shadows fade, both outside my skin and within, wanting nothing more than to lose myself in her warmth.
When she guides my head to hers, my eyes wander to the ceiling, that camera, and the men in the booth.
“Not here,” I breathe against her.
“Why?”
Nothinghas gone the way I want it to. “The cameras. My… soldiers.”
She locates the red flashing dot on the security camera in the room’s corner, lowering her face. “They’re here?”
“I wanted to laugh tonight.” My teeth grind. “Ease your mind. But we’re in public, and being alone isn’t a luxury we can afford when the other territories would do just about anything to unseat me.”
Her sapphire depths are endless in this dim light. “Where are you safest?”
Deep down, she knows where.
It’s a fortress we’ve been avoiding for days.
“Then take me there,” Sophie says, walking into my chest. “Now.”
