I sensed this whole catastrophe wasn’t over yet.
“How long were you planning on staying here?” I asked Evan after we left the restaurant and returned to the hotel room.
“Just until you can recover a little. I’ll get someone to go to Les Jumeaux and have our things forwarded, including your paintings,” he said, locking the door and walking toward me. He stopped in front of me. “Have you thought about where you’d like to go?”
I shook my head, avoiding his stare.
“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. I’ll make sure you have whatever you need. I’ll do whatever you want, even leave you, if that’s what you decide. But not yet. Not until you’re stronger.”
I studied the design on the carpet, holding my breath.
“But please know this,” he continued, his deep voice washing over me. “I love you. And I will never leave you willingly.”
My lungs burned. I exhaled in a lurching gasp.
“I don’t understand how you can walk away from this whole thing with Madaster.”
“Don’t you?” he asked. I saw his hand rise, as though he were about to touch me. I took a step back, instinctively avoiding him. His hand fell to his side. I saw the desolation on his face.
Madaster had plunged a knife into both Evan and me in that tower yesterday. He’d wounded us both, and triumphed in our pain.
He’d abused and neglected Lorraine for her entire adult life.
He’d peeled back the very skin of my existence and scooped out my identity.
(He murdered me, choked off my life like he’d snuff out a candle. Light from my darkness, please help me.)
I trembled, recognizing the speaker in my head, and yet denying it, at once. Believing, and all the while knowing it was ridiculous to believe a smidgeon of Madaster’s ravings.
“You have heard her, haven’t you? You’ve seen her.”
I silenced the charged memory with effort. Evan had said that Elizabeth was barren, after all. It made no sense for me to be so overwhelmed by Madaster’s claims.
I focused on Evan’s face. It made no sense that this man could be my biological father.
“Of course I understand that you want to leave,” I told him.
But it was a lie. I didn’t understand how Evan could walk away from Les Jumeaux. Because somehow, in the past few days, Evan’s obsession with seeing justice served in the case of Noah Madaster, Evan’s hunger for revenge, had transferred to me.
(You will be the wielder, darling. And you will be the weapon.)
I smiled to reassure Evan.
“I think it’s time I called my parents, don’t you?” I asked.
Evan seemed very uneasy about the idea of me speaking to my parents. But he didn’t try to postpone the call, for which I was thankful. In fact, he offered to take a short walk, to give me some privacy. When he went to leave the hotel suite, he hesitated with his hand on the door.
“Are you going to tell them everything?” he asked me quietly.
“Do you mean am I going to tell them about how you married me to get back at Noah Madaster? And Madaster’s claim that I’m somehow Elizabeth’s daughter?”
I saw his regret at my blunt questions. Would there ever be a time when I didn’t see guilt and wariness and pain in his eyes? I used to see heat, desire, and love. Or at least I thought I did. Now, the memory of his hunger cuts at me even more than his regret.
“I don’t know what I’m going to tell them exactly, to be honest,” I admitted. “But I have to find a way to ask them if there’s any chance what Madaster claimed was true.”
“And you’re sure you’ll be okay if I go?”
He saw my impatient expression and put up a hand, as if to surrender. He left the suite, closing the door quietly behind him.