Restore Me (Shatter Me #4)(73)

“But I thought The Reestablishment wanted to get rid of all the languages,” she says. “I thought you were working toward a single, universal language—”

“Sí, Madam Supreme,” says Valentina with a slight nod. “That’s true. But first we had to be able to speak with each other, no?”

Juliette looks fascinated. She’s forgotten her anger for just long enough to be awed by the vastness of the world again; I can see it in her eyes. Her desire to escape. “Where are you from?” she asks, the question full of innocence; wonder. Something about it breaks my heart. “Before the world was remapped—what were the names of your countries?”

“We were born in Argentina,” Nicolás and Valentina say at the same time.

“My family is from Kenya,” says Stephan.

“And you’ve visited each other?” she says, turning to scan our faces. “You travel to each other’s continents?”

We nod.

“Wow,” she says quietly, but mostly to herself. “That must be incredible.”

“You must come visit us, too, Madam Supreme,” says a smiling Stephan. “We’d love to have you stay with us. After all, you are one of us now.”

Juliette’s smile vanishes. Gone too soon is the wistful, faraway look on her face. She says nothing, but I can sense the anger and sadness boiling over inside her.

Too suddenly, she says,

“Warner, Castle, Kenji?”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, Ms Ferrars?”

I merely stare.

“If we’re done here, I’d like to speak with the three of you alone, please.”





JULIETTE





I keep thinking I need to stay calm, that it’s all in my head, that everything is going to be fine and someone is going to open the door now, someone is going to let me out of here. I keep thinking it’s going to happen. I keep thinking it has to happen, because things like this don’t just happen. This doesn’t happen. People aren’t forgotten like this. Not abandoned like this.

This doesn’t just happen.

My face is caked with blood from when they threw me on the ground and my hands are still shaking even as I write this. This pen is my only outlet, my only voice, because I have no one else to speak to, no mind but my own to drown in and all the lifeboats are taken and all the life preservers are broken and I don’t know how to swim I can’t swim I can’t swim and it’s getting so hard. It’s getting so hard. It’s like there are a million screams caught inside of my chest but I have to keep them all in because what’s the point of screaming if you’ll never be heard and no one will ever hear me in here. No one will ever hear me ever again.

I’ve learned to stare at things.

The walls. My hands. The cracks in the walls. The lines on my fingers. The shades of gray in the concrete. The shape of my fingernails. I pick one thing and stare at it for what must be hours. I keep time in my head by counting the seconds as they pass. I keep days in my head by writing them down. Today is day two. Today is the second day. Today is a day.

Today.

It’s so cold. It’s so cold it’s so cold.

Please please please

—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM





I’m still staring at the three of them, waiting for confirmation when, suddenly, Kenji speaks with a start.

“Uh, yeah—no, uh, no problem,” he says.

“Certainly,” says Castle.

And Warner says nothing at all, looking at me like he can see through me, and for a moment all I can remember is me, naked, begging him to join me in the shower; me, curled up in his arms crying, telling him how much I miss him; me, touching his lips—

I cringe, mortified. An old impulse to blush overtakes my entire body.

I close my eyes and look away, pivoting sharply as I leave the room without a word.

“Juliette, love—”

I’m already halfway down the hall when I feel his hand on my back and I stiffen, my pulse racing in an instant. The minute I spin around I see his face change, his features shifting from scared to surprised in less than a second and it makes me so angry that he has this ability, this gift of being able to sense other people’s emotions, because I am always so transparent to him, so completely vulnerable and it’s infuriating, infuriating

“What?” I say. I try to say it harshly but it comes out all wrong. Breathless. Embarrassing.

“I just—” But his hand falls. His eyes capture mine and suddenly I’m frozen in time. “I wanted to tell you—”

“What?” And now the word is quiet and nervous and terrified all at once. I take a step back to save my own life and I see Castle and Kenji walking too slowly down the hall; they’re keeping their distance on purpose—giving us space to speak. “What do you want to say?”

But now Warner’s eyes are moving, studying me. He looks at me with such intensity I wonder if he’s even aware he’s doing it. I wonder if he knows that when he looks at me like that I can feel it as acutely as if his bare skin were pressed against my own, that it does things to me when he looks at me like that and it makes me crazy, because I hate that I can’t control this, that this thread between us remains unbroken and he says finally, softly,