Page 64

It was enormous. Its scarred shoulder blotted out half the silver. The great seams ran across its chest and climbed its shoulder, livid in the white light, crawling with stitch-marks. The lighter track of it went up the left side of its face.

The woman beneath it was gold and white and breath.

The thing’s eyes were open, staring back at him.

He knew the posture.

That was the horror that came up through him like water through a floor. Not the scars. He knew his scars.

The posture.

A figure bent low over a body laid out beneath it, working, in a room lit just so, by just this light, while the storm hammered the house above and a voice muttered dry German against dry Latin.

“Vivit.”

It lives.

The dark came back. Her looking glass was only glass again. Ophelia’s hands were still moving over him.

He caught them.

One and then the other. A gentleness he did not know he still owned. As if her wrists were fused shells that would go off at a jolt. He had taken men by the arms in the field without thinking of the bone. He thought of the bone now. Of her child. Of the fact that his hands had no right to close on anything that could break.

He lifted her hands away from his body. The loss of them was immediate. He folded them together. Laid them against her own breastbone, where the lawn was still warm from him.

Then took his weight from her.

Stood.

The cold where she had been against him was extraordinary. Infinite. The cold of a place that had been occupied a moment ago and was not occupied now. His chest, where her palms had been. His mouth. The air between his body and the bed.

“Damian?”

She pushed up on her elbow. Her hair was wrecked, dark gold spilled over the coverlet, still holding the form his hand had made of it. Her mouth was soft and swollen from his, her breath still coming quick. She gazed up at him with the beginnings of confusion and not one particle of shame. A player who was watching a winning trick somehow being taken back.

He had to stare at the floor. The looking glass was still there at the edge of his sight, mocking him. Mocking his misbelief that he could be whole, that he could live a whole life.

“I cannot.” His voice came out wrecked too. Gravel dragged over stone. “Ophelia … I cannot.”

The name was all he could offer. Not milady. Not the title he had used like a closed door. Her name, as if it would soften his rejection.

“You—”

Rain flung itself at the window in the short silence. The house took the peal through its bones. He counted without meaning to: three, then two.

The left-shoulder seam, still warm from her mouth, listened like a limb that knew weather.

When she spoke again she had leveled her voice like a pistol.

“You will have to give me more than that.”

He could not.

You deserve a living man stood on the tip of his tongue with everything behind it. Falling in the field. The slab. The jars. The mutter of lunacy. The empty cellar somewhere in Belgium with his name on the rolls of the fallen.

He could not let one word of it out without the whole story following.

If he said it she would take it. Anything … everything … he could lay down in front of her. She would become keeper of his living horror, robbed of her innocence. Robbed of her grace.