“Zyah?”
“It’s all right, Player. You don’t have to talk to me. I’m here, so just try to get some sleep. Steele said the more you sleep, the faster you’ll heal.” She was tired of trying to connect with him on the same level. It wasn’t going to happen. She had to face that.
She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging herself tightly, staring at the artwork her grandfather had painstakingly drawn all those years ago for her grandmother. It was very different. Very unique. Black and white. Charcoal. Such beautiful, precise lines. Even his signature falcon had been drawn with those lines. She couldn’t believe how much time and care he must have taken to draw such a masterpiece for Anat. The piece was an abstract, lines, whorls, squiggles and what looked like bird wings. Thick shading and thinner ones. She sometimes traced them lovingly over the glass. She almost knew them by heart.
Her father’s frame was equally as beautiful, a carved masterpiece, undeniably precious to her and every line memorized as well, that incredible scrollwork that looked as if it had been dug up from some ancient pyramid and was covered in the very stars above them. She often traced the various carvings, and now that she had seen the doors to Alena’s restaurant and knew that Player had been the one to carve them, she thought he was the only one who might equal her father in his ability to capture such beauty in wood for her.
“I don’t like going to sleep when you’re upset.”
“What’s different about tonight than any other night? Let’s just get you healed and out of here. Isn’t that what we both want?” She was careful to keep the hurt out of her voice.
He didn’t answer. She kept her head down, aware that, although it was very dark out, the light shining off the sea gave them both the ability to read expressions if they chose. She didn’t want to chance him seeing her face. He made her feel vulnerable. Exposed. Every time she was with him— near him—she felt that way. She detested it when he felt so far from her. When she knew he wasn’t feeling the same way and never would.
She stayed very quiet, going over in her mind the things she saw repeatedly in his nightmare, trying to ignore the childhood trauma. She concentrated on the beginning. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Something wasn’t quite right there. It was as if the other children loved the story and the memories the hallucinogenic mushrooms brought them, but Player had a terrible aversion to the novel. He detested the recollection, which was odd because it happened repeatedly and he laughed with the others. He was so good at faking his amusement that those who knew him well believed him.
Zyah turned that over and over in her mind. She replayed the images of the various times she saw him do it in his dreams. The age changed, but the circumstances were often the same. There was some kind of intense trauma, a horrific torture of one or more of the others, and the reading would be asked for. At first, she could never get beyond the terrible things that had been done to the members of Torpedo Ink as children or teens, but eventually she forced herself to only look at Player’s face. He despised when they asked for the reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
He never stopped Absinthe or Transporter or Absinthe’s brother, Demyan, from reading the hated book, but he didn’t look at the others while it was being read. Why didn’t they notice? Because all of them had been beaten, tortured and used. They were all in such a terrible state and barely surviving. They were just children. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was entertainment, and Player knew it. They had to get their minds off what was happening to them, to their bodies. His illusions of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the caterpillar were his way of contributing to his brothers and sisters, but the cost to him was much greater than any of them understood. Maybe even greater than he understood.
She rubbed her hand up and down her thigh, massaging her aching muscle. She really needed a long hot soak in a tub. That was one of the things she loved to do at night. Or sit in the hot tub on the lower deck out under the stars in the middle of the night. She didn’t dare, not with Player waking every night in a cold sweat, out of his mind, the illusion turning to some strange reality she couldn’t quite fathom but needed to figure out fast because last night, for the first time, she had actually heard the ticking of a clock. That hadn’t been there before, not in all the four weeks of terrible nightmares and illusions.