Because It Is My Blood (Birthright #2)(57)

“I know that loving you is going to be hard, Annie. But I love you, come what may.”

I looked him in his eyes, and he looked me in mine. His eyes were not the blindly adoring ones that had looked on me a year ago. They were clear. So were mine except for the fact that tears were starting to make everything blurry.

“So, do you like anything about me?” I asked.

He considered my question. “Your hair,” he said finally. “And you were a semi-decent lab partner last year. When you were around, that is.”

“I had to cut most of my hair off. It’s only half grown back.”

“I know, Anya. It’s a great loss.”

“Hair’s not much to build a relationship on anyway,” I said.

I rose up onto my tiptoes and I kissed him on the mouth. The first kiss was soft, but then I kissed him again. The second was so hard, my teeth cut into my lip and I could feel myself start to bleed. I lapped up the blood with my tongue and laughed. Win moved in to kiss me again. “Stop, Win!” I said. “I’m bleeding.”

“I didn’t think there’d be bloodshed this soon,” he commented.

I admitted that I’d hoped to avoid it.

“Maybe we should take it slow,” he said, as he pulled me to him again. “Make sure no one gets hurt.”

“Let’s do that,” I said. And then I took off his hat. He’d been wearing that silly hat this whole time. And I touched his hair, which was springy and silky and clean.

The heart is so very peculiar. How light and how heavy it can feel at the same time.

How light.

*   *   *

Re: the remaining twenty-nine days of house arrest. I couldn’t go out, which meant I couldn’t begin to address all the problems in my life. Win came over every day, and Scarlet came over most days, and the month passed quickly enough.

We played Scrabble, and Natty and I cried some, and I basically ignored everyone who tried to contact me. I didn’t know what I wanted to say to anyone yet.

About three weeks in, there was a snowstorm, the kind that makes everything stop in the city. Win somehow made it uptown and he stayed for three days.

I had been having trouble sleeping at night, thinking of Leo and of Theo and of Imogen and even sometimes thinking of the man I’d likely killed in the grove, and I was glad for Win’s company.

“Unburden yourself,” Win insisted. “Confess.”

“I can’t.”

“You’ll die if you keep it all in, and I want to know these things.”

I looked at Win. I could not visit a priest and I was tired of keeping secrets. And so I told him everything. I told him about growing cacao. I told him about the marriage proposal. I even told him about slicing off someone’s hand with a machete. What it had felt like to slice through human bone. What the hand had looked like there, lying in the grass. What the man’s blood had smelled like. I now knew that not everyone’s blood was the same.

“Do you think Yuji Ono was behind the killings?” Win asked.

“He said he wasn’t. And I think I believe him.”

“So was it Mickey? Or Fats? Or someone else entirely?”

“I think it was Mickey,” I said after a bit. “I haven’t heard from him since I got back to New York. And I imagine once I lost favor with Yuji Ono, Mickey might have thought he was avenging his father’s shooting by killing Leo.”

“You think the other shootings were just meant to scare, not kill?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Nothing has happened since then,” Win said. “Maybe all of this is over.”

But it wasn’t over. If Leo was dead, I had to make someone pay. I furrowed my brow, and Win ironed it out with his fingers.

“I can read your mind right now, Annie. If you go after whoever you think killed Leo, they’ll come after you or Natty. It won’t ever end.”

“Win, if I don’t go after them, they’ll think I’m weak. Why shouldn’t they just come back at me and Natty to finish the job? I’ll be holding my breath forever. I don’t want to seem like a person who can be trifled with.”

“What if you said you had no interest in the chocolate business? What if you said you were going back to school and then to college to become a crime scene investigator and good luck to everyone else?”

“I wish I could…”

“Why? Why can’t you? I don’t understand.”

“Because … I’m a convict, Win. I have a record. I’ve missed tons of school. And no high school, let alone college, will want me. I’m stuck.”

“There’s one somewhere. We’ll find one. I can help you, Annie.”

I shook my head.

“Okay, what if we just go somewhere where no one knows us? We take Natty and leave. We could change our names, dye our hair.”

I shook my head again. I had tried running and I didn’t want that kind of life for Win, for Natty, or for me.

“It’s more than that, Win. When I was in Mexico, something changed for me. I realized that I will never escape chocolate. And so there was no point in running away from it or even hating it anymore.”

“Dad’s always saying that it should never have become illegal in the first place.”