“I’ll get you some clothes.”
“I’m okay like this. If that’s okay with you?” I nod and swing my gaze between her face and the t-shirt. “Sorry, I didn’t know what to … wear. Clothes, you know? Taylor's gone.”
She wrings the bottom of my shirt with her fingers, looks around again until she moves over to a large vase of flowers. I don’t know what to say for a while. I’m still lost in a war in my head, as I watch her moving around.
“So this is you, huh?” she says.
“Part of me.”
”And the castle is the other?”
“Yes.” She fiddles with a leaf on the flowers, smells one of the blooms. “Are you hungry yet?”
She nods and looks back at me. “Don’t think I’m dressed for dinner, though.”
“You’re perfectly dressed for dinner if you’re eating in my company. I would have thought you’d know that by now.”
A small smile lifts her lips, and she nods again before going silent to carry on looking around my things. She fingers objects, caresses fabrics, smells more flowers and gazes at paintings. It’s calming. Just watching her seems to cause the sun that should be here to shine again.
I smile and watch her move, enjoying the perverse confliction of those tattoos in a building as exquisite in stature as this one is.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
She walks a little closer, her eyes on mine. “For saving me. I haven’t said thank you.”
All the rage and anger that had dissipated with her small presence finding me, comes racing back to the fore, and I break eye contact to look out the window instead. “Your thanks is unwarranted. I was too late to save you, Alice.” She doesn’t say anything to that. “Perhaps if I hadn’t been so busy denying you I would have made it in time.”
“Denying me?”
“Yes. Wait here.”
I leave and find one of the maids, unable to continue the conversation, or maybe not ready for it. I don’t know where the fuck I am in my own thoughts, but the one thing I do know, the one thing I refuse to deny any longer, is my heart aches and my chest groans in some fucking agony I can’t manage. There isn’t any vengeance I can find to make the fault go away, nor is there any way of reversing time so that it never happened. And my usual way of changing the now, of dismissing or forgetting it, is somewhere that will now be haunted by new memories because I lost her there.
We lost each other.
The maid stares blankly as I tell her to bring us food. Or maybe I’m the one staring and she’s just doing as she usually would. Either way, as little Alice would say, here we are. What we are, or who we can be, is as unknown to me as this feeling that stretches and yearns inside my body.
I turn back for the breakfast room and find her looking out the window I was, arms crossed, her ass resting on the window ledge.
“It looks cold out there,” she says. “Busy.”
“It’s Manhattan. It’s always busy.”
She sighs and looks back at me, more of her old features on show now she’s beginning to talk again. Wide lips, eyes narrowed as if she’s back to constantly thinking and finding a way through me. “Why am I here?”
The question surprises me. Where else does she think she should be? At her old house? Back to some place she neither belongs in nor will ever go back to as far as I’m concerned. “And talk to me about denying me.” Part of me smiles at the frankness of the words, and part of me frowns at the undertone it commands. “I think, after all this, I deserve some fucking reality around me, don’t you, Malachi?”
Yes. I suppose she does.
Chapter 8
Ally
It’s a strange feeling inside me now. I’m here, in this obscenely expensive townhouse, with a man who is nothing like he was at his castle. He’s become soft, gentle. He’s keeping his distance - making no forward movement into me at all, other than to stop hysteria. I guess the fact that I’ve been raped has tempered his personality, or maybe I’m too sullied for him now. I am for me. I’m rotten and invaded, broken and lost in a maze of time that revolves around those men, what that did to me, and a numb sense of fear.
I stare at the surroundings, considering the fact that I’m here and his wife is not. I wish the thought that she’s dead wasn’t circulating in my thoughts, but it is. Temple said I killed her, and although I can’t remember that, it’s possible. Not something I want to talk about now, though.
