The wrongness of it twisted up my guts like coiled barbed wire. I pressed my hand to the glass window ’tween us, needin’ more than anythin’ to comfort her ’cause I was already a lost cause, and I needed to do somethin’ or I’d go out of my skin.
After a long hesitation, her glazed eyes vacant like a dead fish, she tilted forward and pressed her forehead to the glass over my hand.
“You’re going to be free, Z. There were witnesses to the shooting, and now they’re actually doing something about Danner’s corruption, so there is no way you won’t be acquitted for Gibson’s murder. You getting free? It’s the only fuel in my tank right now. Knowing my beautiful father-in-law will get out of this horrible cage,” she whispered in a threadbare voice that fucked with my anger and set it to crumblin’. Then she turned those big, whiskey-coloured eyes my son’d always loved so fuckin’ much up to mine with her face up against the plexiglass, and I lost my breath to the catastrophe of sorrow in that gaze.
“We don’t even have his body,” she wheezed through the tight squeeze of tears in ’er throat. “He went over the cliff, and he was lost to the sea.”
A carter opened in my chest, in the space I assumed my heart might have been, and yawned open with painful alacrity, devastatin’ my insides.
Fuck me.
Could life really be so fuckin’ unjust that the best man I knew would die at the hands of the worst kinda man I’d ever met?
“He looked so beautiful,” she breathed, tears smearing against the glass and catching in her eyelashes like diamonds. “In his suit…you should have seen him, Zeus. He looked exactly like an angel cast down from heaven. All that gold hair in the morning light, it was like a halo.” A moan rumbled through her throat, pure agony. “I held that beautiful face in my hands and stared into those arctic ice eyes, and I swore I’d love him forever.”
Her eyes fluttered closed, and a tsunami of tears erupted from the pressure of her pressed lids. The wet went streamin’ down the glass like rain.
“That was only yesterday,” she mouthed more than said aloud. “Yesterday, I held him in my hands.”
Her head angled down to look at the hands in question, and then she slowly raised ’em to the glass so I could see the twin scars in ’er palms, the tattoo of the queen of heart on the inside of one finger and the ring of gold around another. She offered ’em to me, the last place she’d ever touched my son, as if I could somehow feel that last touch through ’er.
The last time I’d touched my son had been four months ago when they’d locked me in ’ere.
So I pressed my hands over hers, and my forehead against hers on the glass, and together, just for a moment––’cause a moment was all I was gonna give myself ’fore I got my shit together and figured out how to slaughter Danner from inside this concrete hell––I closed my eyes too and cried with her.
“He was the very best of us,” I grunted as the tears fell, so hot they scalded my cheeks and pooled like fresh wax in my beard.
“He can’t be dead,” she begged, those dead eyes reawakening to turn crazed like Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment gone wrong. “He can’t be dead. Please, Zeus, he just…he just can’t be dead.”
“Cress,” I said, but the word was broken. “If he’s dead, it’s only on this earth. You gotta know he’s gonna be here every day so long you and me and all the hoards’a people who knew and loved him still live.”
“It’s not enough.”
Fuck me, of course it wasn’t. But how was I supposed to comfort a woman with a shattered heart when my own was crumblin’ all round the edges, threatenin’ to cave in too.
Suddenly, she shifted, pullin’ back from the glass and wiping a hand under her nose to clean herself up. I watched as brick by brick, she carefully collected herself until the Cressida I’d first met, prim and proper as a buttoned-up tweed suit, sat before me.
It was fuckin’ scary, and I wasn’t afraid to admit it. Watchin’ her act like that reminded me of Priest after he’d come to us from his own crazy heartbreak.
He’d never recovered genuine emotions, not really.
“Lou is here,” she told me with an anemic smile. “I’ll send her in.”
“Cress,” I called ’cause even though she was sittin’ right there, she’d gone again. “I got you, yeah? We all do.”
She looked off into a distance only she could see and smiled softly, in a way that made it an expression of pain. “This time, I got you. We’ll see you out of here soon, Zeus.”