Page 11 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
I force myself to meet her gaze. “I wrote you a hundred letters. Lit each one on fire. Some nights, the only light in London was the inside of my skull.”
She’s silent. The gun catches the light, a cold metallic eye watching from her grip, as if she’s already a ghost and the weapon is the only thing still alive between us.
“That was five years ago,” she says. “But you made me think. I just thought things were different between us.” She stops, jaw tight, as if she’ll vomit if she says the rest.
“You made me think too,” I say, softer than I mean to. “Every night. Every morning. For five years, Laura. I moved to another country, learned how to hate myself, but you never left.”
She sets the glass on the counter, empty now, and it rings faintly—a bell for lost causes. “Is this why you’re back?” she asks. “To make peace with the old ghosts?”
I laugh, and it comes out wrong: desperate, eager. “No. The old ghosts tangled with worse monsters and lost, if you haven’t noticed. Are you here to finish it?”
She lifts the gun, not quite aiming, just letting me see. Her hands are steady, the kind of steady you get after killing a dozen men and seeing a dozen more kill themselves rather than face you in a room. “My father wants you dead.”
“He always did. Is this a professional visit, then?” I try to sound amused. “You want me to beg?”
She sets the gun, loud and deliberate, on the counter next to the glass. Her finger never leaves the trigger. “I want to know why,” she says. “You don’t get to do what you did and then turn up just a train ride away. Not unless you want to die. Or unless you’re desperate.”
“I’m both,” I tell her. “But not for your father.”
She flinches, as if I spat in her face, and now her teeth show a little. “Don’t talk about my father.”
“You always protected him. Even after everything?—”
She slams her palm flat on the counter. “Don’t talk about him. You talk about yourself. About why you left.” Her face is red, wet along the lower rim of her eyelids.
I close my eyes.
“You know how I left, Laura. Your father made it very clear what would happen if I stayed. He came for Adam, for my grandparents?—”
“You could have told me.”
“He would have killed you.” The words are so raw they scrape my teeth.
She stares at me, and I watch it sink in. She’s running back the years, the clues, the angry letters, and the quiet summer nights when the phone wouldn’t ring. Her mouth opens, then closes again. In the time it takes for a star to die, she sits.
Her voice cracks like thin ice. "You don’t always have to be the martyr, Pierce.”
A sob leaks out, but she swallows it mercilessly. She’s still got one hand wrapped around the wineglass, but the other is clenched white on the gun.
“Why are you back?” she asks, low, dangerous.
I think about lying. Instead, I pour another glass, raise it, and this time I don’t bother pretending to be calm.
“Because Adam’s dead,” I say. “Because I have nothing left to lose. Because five years of pretending I don’t love you is worse than dying at his hands. At your hands.”
I let it hang. A noose of hope. She lifts her head, and I see the girl I loved, the woman I ruined, and something in between that might one day forgive me.
“You still love me,” she says. It isn’t a question.
“I always did,” I say. “I never stopped.”
Laura looks away. The kitchen is cold, outside, some lost dog wails at the moon, but in here it’s just Laura and me, and a slow, eroding terror that for once, maybe, we can outlast the ghosts.
Slowly, she reaches across the counter and takes my hand. Her skin is cold as liquid nitrogen and just as pure. I wait for the bullet, but all I feel is the squeeze of her fingers, tight enough to break bone.
“I hate you,” she says.
I nod. “I know.”
