Dangerous Exile by K.J. Jackson
{ Chapter 19 }
Talen watched the back of Ness’s dark blue skirt swing in front of him, the bottom hem dusting along the overgrown grasses half-dormant along the hillside.
“Not too much farther.” She looked over her shoulder at him, a half-smile on her face meant to encourage or placate him, he couldn’t read.
Fifteen more steps and she crested the top of the hill, pulling to a stop at a wrought iron fence that he hadn’t been able to see from the angle they walked up the hill. The fence encircled a plot of land dotted with headstones.
The heavy rocks already rolling about in his gut multiplied. He didn’t want to do this. Didn’t want to do this with every fiber of his being.
He needed to leave. Leave now. And at the exact moment he started to turn on his heel to do just that, he caught sight of Ness’s gaze on him.
Intent, worried, needing this.
Needing it more than he needed to escape. She needed this to move forward with him, so he would give it to her. He would look at a couple headstones and then they could be on their way.
Easy enough.
Hunks of granite with names emblazoned on them couldn’t conjure memories that were long since forgotten.
Her look darted away from him. “Over there is the gate.” She pointed to the far side of the iron fence. “We must have come up the back way, but it was the only way I knew of. That sheep field below is where we would escape to, your cousin, Harriet, and I liked the lambs and you liked chasing the sheep. Harriet always used to yell at you for making the ewes nervous. And you liked to tell us ghost stories of who was buried up here on the hill. So when it was near to dark, we used to dare each other to come up here.”
His gaze went back to the long pasture they’d trekked across, several sheep moving slowly in the distance along the stone fence they’d crawled over. Grey skies above threatened rain. None of it looked familiar. His bottom lip jutted upward. Just another memory he didn’t have.
“My mother said we couldn’t come to the burial—that was men’s work. But Harriet and I snuck out of the manor house and watched them lower you into the ground from over there.” She pointed to her left at a long bank of trees, oaks with crispy, russet-hued leaves still stubbornly holding onto the limbs.
“This isn’t right, Ness.”
She stepped toward him and took the shovel that they’d borrowed from a farmer along the way from his hand. “I don’t want to disturb the dead any more than you do. But I don’t know that there’s another way. You need to know. I need to know.” Before he could snatch the shovel away from her, she moved away from him, her gaze determined on the iron gate opposite them.
Talen followed her, a new fear burning down his chest. Fear of what this would do to Ness if she was wrong about this grave. His grave.
Half of him wanted her to be wrong for his sake. Half of him wanted her to be right for her sake.
Pulling a hard breath into his lungs, he followed her around the fence to the front of the cemetery. It was private at least. The site nestled between three hills. No one around for miles. It’d taken a full half hour to walk here from the road where they’d left their driver and carriage and if they didn’t hurry, twilight would be upon them before they finished the business of this.
By the time he caught up to her, Ness had already wedged the point of the shovel into the ground by a headstone on the far left of the graveyard. Her movements were awkward with her left hand and arm still wrapped along the splint gently trying to help balance the handle as she dug her heel onto the back of the metal spade.
He stopped directly behind her, his hands slowly going around her waist as he slipped the shovel out of her hands. “I’ll do it, Ness. This isn’t work for you. I shouldn’t have even let you come up here.”
“You know I need to be here, just the same as you.” She turned around in between his arms, her hand on his chest, her look lifting to him. “I need you to look at the headstone. Your headstone. Your name. This is where I lost you. Where we all lost you.”
His gaze left her face, going over her shoulder to the weathered grey stone with a rounded top sticking out of the ground, leaning slightly to the left.
Beloved son, Conner J. B. F. Burton.
Nothing. No recognition. No sudden memory.
He looked down at Ness, his head shaking.
“Nothing?” she asked, worrying her lip.
“No.” His right hand dropped from around her waist and he shifted to her side, driving the spade into the ground with his boot. “So we dig.”
Three shovelfuls of dirt moved and Talen glanced up as Ness moved to the next headstone over, her fingers touching the top of it. A tall classical panel with side pillars and a pediment atop, the flowers etched into the stone were only partially worn with time. His gaze moved down the front of it.
Beloved wife, daughter, mother, Mariana Burton.
Mariana Burton.
The shovel fell at his side and he moved forward, his legs wooden and barely able to carry his weight. An uncontrollable shake set into his hands, but it didn’t stop him from bending and reaching out, tracing the letters etched deep into the stone. Once, twice, three times over her name.
“Mariana.” His lips moved, the faintest breath of a whisper forming the word.
His eyes closed with the name spoken to the wind and a blinding light filled his head, so bright it felt as though his brain was about to explode from the inside out.
And then nothing.
Nothing but blackness.
Blackness and one thing—the echo of a voice from long ago.
“My merry Mariana.” He whispered the words, afraid to set them into the air for fear his head would truly rupture.
Ness’s hand landed on his arm, worry in her voice. “Talen, what did you say?”
“My merry Mariana.” He swayed slightly with the words, trying not to lose them into the blackness. “My merry Mariana.”
His eyes opened to Ness. “My merry Mariana.”
The words didn’t leave him. Instead, they only grew stronger in his mind, a seed with a thousand tiny sprouts flashing all at once.
He closed his eyes, trying to stem the flow, trying to stem everything that was entangled with them.
“Talen?” Ness’s hand tightened on his arm.
The words. Concentrate on the words.
“My merry Mariana. It’s what my father used to call my mother. My merry Mariana. All the time. My merry Mariana.”
“You remember?” Her breathless words drifted into his ears.
His eyes flew open, searching for her, searching for her eyes. “Your face—when you showed up at the Alabaster for me beaten to all hell.”
She blinked hard, her head shaking. “What?”
His entire adult life instantly made sense.
Why he could never stomach a bruise on a woman.
Why he could never dabble in brothels in his holdings.
Why he cringed every time he heard a gun clicking on an empty barrel.
“They killed my father immediately—even though she fought them—he fought them. She went crazy. Pure vicious madness. Scratching their eyes. Biting their arms.” His words flew in a torrent, his eyes closing as the scene—arms and legs and terror flying in puzzle pieces in his mind. “I fought them. I did too. But my father was the first to go. Quick. Merciless. One gunshot and he went down. They turned on me next, setting a pistol to my head. And then a click, the trigger pulled.” He had to gasp in a breath.
“They shot you?”
“No. The gun didn’t have a bullet. Just the click. So they took to their fists. Pummeling me, my head, my stomach, my chest. Fist after fist crushing into my face. So much blood I couldn’t see past the red in my eyes. They dropped me to the floor when they grew tired, thinking I was dead. I thought I was dead. In and out of blackness.”
“But you weren’t.”
Both of his hands went to his face, the butt of his palms crushing into his eyes, trying to wipe free the images. Images he didn’t want to see. “They moved onto my mother.” His hands pulled away from his eyes with a growl and he found Ness’s face.
“Hell, you. This is what you looked like. It’s why I first felt the need to protect you, Ness—that first day when you came to me. I could never stand a woman with a bruise on her face—but yours, yours was horrific. It looked just like my mother’s as she took her last breath.”
Her face crumpled, horrified, her hold on his arm bruising. “What?”
His eyes squinted close as image after image flooded his mind. “But only…only after the hours—the night of the horrors of being half alive, hearing her screams, what they did to her. I could only watch through blood streaming in my eyes. I couldn’t move. When they finally let her body drop to the floor, she looked at me.”
He collapsed onto his heels, his knees hitting the ground, his shoulders dropping. “And I saw only one of her eyes looking at me. Everything was in that eye. Still blue. Crystal clear blue. She could see I was still alive. And everything was in her eye. What she wanted for me. The future. For me to live. Giving me the strength to keep breathing. She wouldn’t look anywhere but at me. Willing me to live.”
Ness’s hand, gentle, slid along the back of his neck. “And you did.”
The blackness invaded, wiping free the images.
He shook his head. Trying to get them back. Trying to banish them back into the void. An anguished roar left him, his mind battling itself.
“You lived, Talen.”
His body buckled forward, all air leaving his lungs, his knuckles digging into the dirt. “I did, but I do not know how.” His voice rough, words choked out. “The next thing I remember, I was waking up on that ship, Declan shoving a mop into my hand, yanking me out of bed because he was sick of swabbing the decks alone.”
His body swayed, his mind fighting itself with every second.
Fighting until he was numb, losing track of place and time.
Fighting until he didn’t exist, not even in his own mind.