Say It's Forever (Redemption Hills #2)(49)

A low chuckle rumbled out. “Thought you trusted me?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I never said that. Besides, you’re the one who just told me I shouldn’t.”

“I changed my mind.” The words were close to a growl.

“Touch me and I stab you.” Mischief glinted in those blue eyes.

A bolt of laughter boomed from my chest.

Shit.

This girl was too much.

My little wildcat.

I reached out to open the right side of the double doors.

Salem warily looked through the opening.

Ripples of need.

Waves of unease.

I shifted around to face her, tugging at her hand while I walked backward, luring her in.

Her attention raced across the rambling bedroom. Entire thing was this extravagant show of the wealth I had built. A reminder that I was doing it right for a change.

Had to wonder if that applied right then.

I kept moving across the room to the door on the left wall.

I paused outside it with the girl facing me.

The room dark. Her gaze bright.

“Just what are we doing, Jud?”

Disquiet rattled me to the bones.

“Should I be concerned?” She attempted the tease to break through my apprehension. “Is this where you hide your victims?”

I reached out and brushed back the lock of hair from her face, tucked it behind her ear, my voice close to shaking when I muttered the truth, “No one has been inside here except for Trent.”

Not even Logan.

A frown marred her gorgeous face.

I watched as her expression shifted, as she realized I was giving her something I rarely shared with anyone.

A view into my forsaken soul.

I punched in the code that unlocked the door and let Salem into my studio. A studio that took up half the area of the loft.

The soft glow of recessed lights barely illuminated the massive space, just a drizzled white seeping over the shadowy room.

There wasn’t any furniture except for the easels that were littered about and the stacks of canvases piled everywhere.

Buckets of paint and supplies were strewn all over. Ladders and scaffolding climbing the walls.

Salem stumbled in, her eyes wide and a gasp leaving her mouth as she took in the scene.

Paint covered every inch of the room.

I didn’t only utilize the canvases.

My art spilled onto the floors and the walls. Every surface cloaked in the artifices of my mind.

A kaleidoscope of images—images I’d painted and repainted again. Where the strokes were almost manic, my thoughts and fears and shame imprinted in the scenes.

Place a nightmare.

A mess.

A dream.

Surprise wheezed from her lips, and Salem eased deeper into the studio. In the middle of the room, she slowly turned around, studying it through the dim, hazy light.

“You said you didn’t know me.” I uttered it low. A morbid confession.

The heels slipped from Salem’s fingers, and they clattered to the floor. She all but floated to the far wall, her feet so soft it felt like I was watching a slow dance in the darkness.

She glanced back at me once before she turned and ran her fingertips over the deranged depictions smeared on the wall.

Demons climbing from Hell.

Angels falling from the heavens.

Whispers of dreams.

Half, undefined faces.

Scourges and eternal fire.

So much fire.

Some were rudimentary outlines of my family.

Brushstrokes of hope and joy and desperate devotion.

Indistinct intonations of those that I’d lost and others that I clung to.

They were all haphazardly woven together across every flat surface.

As if she were drawn to it, she moved, her fingers quivering over the crude image of the child that would forever haunt my mind.

Salem’s chest heaved and her body shook as she traced the cryptic shape.

The air locked in my lungs as a rush of old agony froze my blood.

“This is me, Salem.” I shoved my tatted hands into my pockets. Shame came at me tenfold.

She swiveled back to look at me. Tears soaked her cheeks.

“Jud.” My name was a whimper.

“Warned you it was ugly.”

Her head shook. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” She touched her chest. “And the most devastating.”

There she was, looking at me in a different light, in the way I should have shown her from the start.

Because what everyone else got was deception.

They didn’t get the scars and the tragedy.

But Salem?

Felt compelled to show her this.

A fucking fool.

But there I was, laying it at her feet.

“And you see me like this?” She whispered that, a spec of horror and confusion, her brow pinching in the most gorgeous way.

That frozen blood thudded.

Pulsed harder. A warning that lit in my veins.

Or fuck, maybe it was straight-up liberation. This moment I’d found with an enchantress who floated through my studio.

“No, Salem. Think that’s the problem. I see you in an entirely different way. In a way that fucks with my head. Because when I’m looking at you? I see beauty. I see light. I see a treasure and goodness and every fuckin’ thing that is right.”