Fallen Rose by Amelia Wilde
Chapter Ten
Leo
Eva leaves three days later. Daphne doesn’t come down from the large suite on the second floor. I had it prepared so she can paint in what used to be a spacious sitting room. Doesn’t matter. She can be pissed at me all she wants.
Better that than dead.
Haley is restless after Eva leaves. It’s a bitter day, and she looks longingly out the window in my bedroom. “I wish it wasn’t so cold.”
I wish I could heat the earth for her. Make it summer. I would love to see her in a sundress. The dress she wears now is alluring for how much skin it covers in its comfortable fabric. I want her in it. But I want her in warmth, too.
“We can walk inside. You haven’t spent much time in the rest of the house.”
Her eyes light up. “Yes, yes, yes. Show me somewhere I’ve never been.”
Haley’s seen the den, my office, the kitchen, and the courtyard. Once we’re past the kitchen I let her open doors at random. “Leo, this ballroom is huge.”
I look in over her shoulder. It’s a dark room, the windows covered with curtains, the furniture covered in white cloth, gathering dust. “I’ve never used it. I don’t throw parties.”
“Dinner parties count, don’t they?”
“I don’t throw parties like this. With that many guests.”
She purses her lips, but doesn’t ask why.
I’m hardly thinking of the shelf, pushing the thought away, when she opens a door and draws in a breath. “What’s this room? Another living room?”
It’s flooded with light. The furniture is recently dusted. Everything perfect. It’s not like the den, where Haley might leave a book out. Where a blanket might slip down off the couch and have to be straightened. “It’s a study. I don’t use it either.”
“No? It’s gorgeous in here.” Haley steps inside, and I follow her, ignoring the unease at the pit of my gut. She does a slow turn in the middle of the floor.
“What do you think about building a library?”
She stops, a delighted laugh on her lips. “What about your den? It’s so nice.”
“What about you liking libraries?” I follow her farther into the room, my pulse ticking up. “This space could use more books.”
Haley’s traveling around in it now, skimming her fingers over the back of an elegant sofa and opening a drawer on the desk to see what’s inside. A mirror behind her gives me a perfect view as she pulls the antique handle. The drawer is empty. When her eyes lift from the drawer, they brighten with curiosity. It sparkles in her blue eyes. For an unused room, there’s plenty to see. Haley drops her gaze again and continues around the room. She stops at a painting on the wall. Skims her fingertips over a miniature statue of a rose, perched in an alcove on the wall. Touches a piece of stained glass hung up on a stretch of white.
I follow her toward the desk, but it’s too difficult to watch. I’ve become used to her looking through the shelves in the den and pulling out my books. I’m not used to this. My stomach tightens with nerves. I could stop her. It would be easy to stop her, to hold her down, to kiss her and fuck her and demand every scrap of her attention.
The first time she discovered one of my secrets, I let the beast loose on her. Fucked her throat. Scared her so badly she ran from me.
This time, I turn away and reassess the room. No library I built would be complete without one or two reading nooks. It would take some relatively involved renovation, but it wouldn’t be impossible. I could do it. Leave the light intact, but make it comfortable. I try to picture it.
I end up envisioning Haley. Innocent, perfect, depraved Haley, curled up by all these windows with a book. Only in this vision I’m reading with her. In this vision, I’m reclining on the couch, Haley nestled next to me, and nothing hurts at all. It’s as vivid as any daydream I’ve ever had. Meanwhile, she’s behind me, rustling through the space.
There’s a chance she overlooks that bookcase, that shelf. What’s on it.
I go back to picturing her naked, bent over an armchair. Waiting for punishment or pleasure or just me.
“Leo.” I turn at the sound of her soft voice, turn to her blue eyes, filled with worry and hope. A memory, too. Me storming out of my shower. Her with nowhere to run. “This is you. Isn’t it?”
She has the photo in her hand. The photo, in its plain black frame. It’s been sitting on that arched bookcase since the day I moved in here. At least once a year I think about throwing the fucking thing out. I’ve never been able to do it.
I take the frame out of her hands and look down at my fourteen-year-old self. In the photo, I’m sitting on a dock somewhere in the Bahamas in a pair of blue swim trunks. Nothing about them was custom-made or special. They didn’t have to be. Something happens to my heart. A punishing squeeze. A tear. I don’t look at that shelf, or that photo, because this feeling is hard to name and harder to feel.
In the photo, my entire back is visible. There’s not a mark on it. My head is turned, and I’m grinning at the camera, as carefree as I ever would be again. Laughter in my eyes. My father was a prick. An asshole. But the bruises he left always faded. They were tempered by a righteous cause. Any mark he made on me was one less he made on my siblings, so what did I care?
Haley presses her side against mine so we’re both looking at it together. Now that she’s here, now that she’s close, I would call this feeling grief. I’m looking at a person who’s been dead for eighteen years. Who never had a chance to become anything. The person in this photo died at Caroline’s hands. My death began before the whipping. With touches that didn’t cause the kind of pain my father did. That they were gentle in comparison to my father changed almost nothing.
I feel flayed by this moment. By Haley, standing next to me, looking down at this person I haven’t been and never will be. I look happy. There’s light in my eyes. An ease to my body I can’t remember having at all. Caroline took that from me.
Haley loops her arm through mine and rests her head on my arm. “How old are you in this?”
I clear my throat. “Fourteen. This is—” Fuck. I haven’t spoken these words to anyone. Ever. “This is the last photo of me before Caroline.” It’s the last photo taken of me when I had a chance to be different. I only kept it because my sisters are in the background in matching bathing suits, getting ready to jump into the water. Laughing and laughing.
“You’re grinning,” Haley says, her voice soft as a rose petal.
“I was a different person then. A person you’ve never met.”
She studies my face, then looks back down at the photo. I hope to fuck she can ignore the subtle shake in my hands. Emotion bristles and cuts, magnified by the pain in my back, intensified by her presence. My siblings sat around the table in my dining room last night. Haley sat with them. Elaine. It felt almost normal. That normalcy is unsettling as fuck. It makes me think there’s a life that doesn’t involve constant battles, constant pain.
But that can’t be right. I’m the source. I’m the one who fights. I have to. Always, always.
“You’re not so different. You still care about your family. You still protect them.”
By being the villain. Pain flares over my scars, and I grip the frame tighter. I am not the person in this photo. I will never be that person, no matter how many times I wish or hope or pray.
“No. I’m the beast now. The nightmare.” Looking at myself as I was before offers a wrenching contrast to now, to this emptiness, to the hurt that fills every breath. “I’m different. Ruined. Violent.”
Haley slides her hand around my bicep, stroking like I’m on the verge of losing control. I’m not. I’m fucking not. It’s just old anger coming to the surface. It’s just old habits, as if being confronted with this person is a threat. He is not. I’m the threat. “I see you for what you are. You’re a prince. My prince.”
I can’t be. I can’t do this to her. Haley is like the person laughing in the photo. She is still relatively clean. She is still undamaged, if I can keep her that way. The biggest danger to her has always been me. Ever since the moment I saw her in that alley. Ever since the moment her eyes met mine.
“I’m not a fucking prince.” I drop the frame and it clatters onto the rug, turning facedown. And then I undo the buttons on my shirt. Strip my undershirt over my head. My heart pounds at the exposure. At the shame. Haley backs up a step, her lips parted, her blue eyes wide, and I can’t bear it, the look in her eyes. I turn away from it. Plant both hands on the desk. The sun breaks free from a cloud and golden light pours into the room. It shows everything. Every fucking thing. “Look at me. Fucking look.”
I demanded that she look at me, but I’m the one who can’t stop looking at her. In the mirror Haley is a creature of sunlight. All sweet, gold softness. And I’m myself. I wait for horror to overcome her features. Or worse, pity. I wait for the expression on her face to match the hurt that roils through me.
Her eyes meet mine in the mirror. They’re crystalline blue in this light. The color of the water in that photo. “I’ve seen you, Leo. Lots of times. When you were sick. When you brought me home.”
“Not like this. Not in daylight. You can’t deny it to yourself here, darling. I’m a fucking monster.”
Haley takes a deep breath and steps closer. Closer again. She’s doing what I told her to do. She’s looking. Outside of a parade of anonymous doctors, outside of Eva, I’ve never allowed anyone to look at me like this. It hurts like a motherfucker to hold still and let it happen. Haley studies the scars without flinching. Without recoiling. Without disgust twisting her lips.
“It’s just scars. It’s just your skin.”
A bitter laugh slices out of my throat. “It’s proof of how weak I am. What kind of fucked-up soul I have.”
Haley shakes her head, and I didn’t know how much I needed for her to deny this until she does. “It’s not.” She carefully, deliberately touches the top of my shoulder, where there are no marks. “Does it hurt right now?”
“All the time. Since you were taken. All the fucking time.”
“Is there anything you can take? Like when you were in the hospital. Is there anything you can have that would help?”
“I can’t take them. The only ones that touch the pain are so powerful that I can’t avoid unconsciousness. And I can’t be unconscious, darling. I can’t protect anyone that way. I can’t keep myself alive.”
I expect tears. I expect to have to console her in this, but Haley nods. Her eyes catch mine again in the mirror. “Will it hurt more if I touch them?”
“Do it anyway.”
She has always been so careful, since that day at the shower, never to cause me more pain. Haley. The innocent I’m in the process of ruining. And she is careful now. Her hands are soft, like they were when she cleaned my stab wound, like they were when she held me after I was shot. Her breathing is even, as if she’s not looking at a fucking horror show. She strokes her fingertips over my unmarked flesh, down toward the scars, and my body braces itself for searing pain.
But there’s only a featherlight touch. Soft as one of my shirts. I discover I’ve closed my eyes when I open them to seek her out in the mirror. Haley’s looking at her fingertips on my destroyed skin. My heart is a raw, convulsing thing. Hope and pain are both jagged in my veins, in my muscles. She ignores the barely controlled trembling. Haley traces one scar, then the next, and the next. The anticipation of pain bleeds out of me. My skin has gone hot with the shame of having to be touched like this, like I’m fucking made of glass, but that dissipates, too.
It leaves something else in its wake.
She reaches the last scar, the last wound, the last inch, and lets out a breath. “You,” she says, and then she leans in and kisses the first scar, the one across my shoulder blades.
It hauls a gasp out of me. Haley might as well have my whole bloody heart in her palms.
She kisses me again.
It’s too much, and I’m too desperate for it. It’s absolution I don’t deserve. That I never thought was possible. I turn around and kiss her mouth and she flings her arms around my neck, holding on tight while I bite her. Claim her. Let her see.
