Tell the Wind and Fire(46)

I thought of my father, my poor father, and all the secret resentment and weariness I felt when he suffered.

I turned my face away from Ethan. “If you think loving me means you can’t despise me,” I said, “you’re a child.”

“What if I told you everything that I’ve been hiding from you?” Ethan asked, and his voice was soft now, imploring. “What if you told me all you ever felt, all you ever did and felt you could not tell me? What if we loved each other and we trusted each other? What if we discovered each other, right now?”

His caressing, convincing voice did its work. I wanted to turn around and look at him, then cry and fall into his arms and whisper promises of love and trust. And I never wanted to be that weak. I could not bear to tell him what he wanted to hear.

I did turn. I did look at him. I did not cry.

“You bring Jarvis back,” I snarled. “You go and get him, save him, return him alive to his family. Then I will listen to whatever you have to say. Until then, it doesn’t matter what you say. All that matters is what you did, and that means I don’t want to talk to you or see you, ever again.”

I walked away from him. My cheap shoes made muted, dull thuds on the marble floor as I went.

When I returned to midtown and the Lorry home, I pushed open the door gently in case my father was resting. It swung silently and slowly to reveal Penelope on the sofa, home during a workday for the first time since I had known her. She sat with her face in her hands, and I stood staring at her, paralyzed with guilt and trying to nerve myself for the inevitable onslaught. She had let me and my father in from the dark and the cold, she had shared her home with us, and I had destroyed her family. In her place, I would have wanted to kill me. She would have had every right.

Penelope lifted her head and stared at me. Her big dark eyes were glittering with tears, like lakes with treasure lying in the bottom, drowned and lost. She looked as young as her own daughter.

“Oh, Ladybird,” she said, her pet name for me almost swallowed by a gulping sob. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

I ran stumbling across the floor, to the sofa, and into her arms.

Penelope stroked my hair and murmured to me, words of love and gratitude that I had come to her, words of misery she assumed was shared. She spoke to me as if I was part of her family and not the agent of its destruction. Her tears fell into my hair, and I hung around her neck and tried to say all the right things back to her, tried to offer her what little comfort I could. I did not say that I’d agreed to Jarvis being sent because I was too much of a coward to stand up to Mark Stryker. I did not say that Jarvis was lost because of me.

I still could not cry.

When Marie came home and my father woke, we had to tell them. Penelope did it holding tightly to my hand, as if we were in it together, as if we were allies. We were able to reassure them both, make them believe that something bad had happened but we would all be spared from the ultimate horror of losing Jarvis.

Later that night, I lay in bed and thought of Jarvis, and of Ethan.

Ethan had not wanted any of this to happen. I did not want to turn away from him and be alone in my misery. I did not want him to be alone either.

He had sent Jarvis to the Dark city to save lives, to help people. I had wanted someone to go and try to protect my Aunt Leila, to protect what used to be my home. I had wanted someone to be sent, but I had not been able to choose someone or been able to truly hope for change. Ethan had.

He had not been brought up to fear, and he had refused to learn how to hate. Even now that his father had been killed, he wanted peace.

And he had not been wrong about our relationship, and how it worked. Neither of us had been truly willing to tell the other about our families, about our beliefs, even that we could both sword fight. I knew fear and hate, and I did not know how to tell him about either. He had asked for the truth, and I had not felt able to give it to him.

Just because I had failed to trust him did not mean that he was unworthy of trust.

I loved him and I did not want to be without him. Jarvis was gone, but perhaps we could find him. I had saved somebody from the Dark city once before, and with Ethan to help me—Ethan and all his resources—maybe I could do it again.

If I could not, I did not want to lose anybody else.

Of course, what I wanted was not the only thing that mattered, I thought, and lay curled on my side with my hands curled too. Both the curl of my body and the curl of my hands hid emptiness.

I had never understood why Ethan loved me, why he had wanted me or chosen me. But I had always tried to be good to him, not to show too much of my damage or my ugliness to him, and now I had spilled the bitterness of years all over his wounds. He had just lost his father.

I remembered the part I had played to save my father. I remembered knowing that if I slipped up, nobody would remember how hard I had tried. All they would remember was how terribly I had failed, and the pure perfect image of me I had worked so hard to put in their minds would be shattered and stained.

Ethan might not want me back.

I rolled over in bed, tangled in sheets and darkness. The one thing Ethan had asked me to do was trust him, and the one thing he had said to me over and over again was that he loved me, loved me, loved me.

If I could not trust that, I could not trust anything.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN



The next morning, I woke early and went softly through the apartment, getting dressed so as not to wake Penelope or Marie—who I knew had cried themselves to sleep last night—or my father. I dressed in the nicest clothes I had, buttoning up a white blouse with pearl buttons, brushing my hair until it shone.