Page 45 of The Count
Irolled over when the door opened again. “Back so soon? I thought you had work to do?”
But the man who entered wasn’t my Will. He still only wore his boxer briefs. It didn’t matter, his face is what caused me to scramble up to sitting and look at him. All traces of the soft, beautiful man, who’d just washed my hair were gone. In his place stood The Count. The fearsome man I’d met when he dragged me out of my office a month ago.
I waited for him to speak. He produced a green ledger I recognized as the one Danglars kept from everyone for the past thirty years. The only way he stayed safe and alive this long.
He flipped it open and turned it to face me. The date I knew instantly. It was the day I asked Villefort, Danglars, and Fernand to help me overthrow the family. The day which changed my life forever.
He poked the page with his finger forcefully. “This is your symbol. You made a payment this day. What was it for?”
I stared at him over the stained pages. “What does it matter? It’s the past.”
“NO!” He shouted and threw the book against the wall. “It’s not the past. It’s the reality I live with every single day. You were in on it. The woman I loved and promised to spend my life with you. It was your fault they took me away.”
He paced back and forth beside the bed and I tried to get up, to stop him, make him look at him. Because if he said what I thought he was screaming about that would mean.
I climbed out of the bed, but my bad leg wouldn’t hold and I pitched forward. He caught me easily enough before I busted my head and sat me down. He pulled away the moment he could, but I held his arms and ran my hands over the top of his chest.
“Fucking stop it. This isn’t the time for that shit. I don’t want you.”
The words punctured me but I kept feeling around over his left pec until I felt it. A small circular raised scar imprinted in his flesh.
Suddenly, I was eighteen again screaming at him for looking at another girl. He defended himself but I hadn’t taken his word for it. I had my father’s gun pointed at his head. And he stood there talking to me calmly, explaining.
I wanted him to fight with me. We needed to fight or else I wasn’t going to be able to do what I needed to do when the time came. I raised the gun into the air and fired one shot. He flinched but didn’t leave. I pointed the muzzle at him again, and he pressed his chest into the hot steel.
He cried out and I dropped the blasted thing and rushed to him. A small burn mark appeared raised and ragged on his chest. Marking him mine forever.
With the evidence under my fingers and my entire world realigned around this new knowledge. I scrambled away from him. My leg screamed as my feet scraped on the floor, and the rug, and then finally the covers as I got myself over the bed.
“No.”
He held his arms open to me and tears started pouring down my face hot and heavy. “No,” I whispered.
He watched me crumple back down and did nothing to stop me, help me, or hurt me. I almost wished he did.
“You see, I understand you didn’t come to me in jail because you thought I was dead. But this, being the mastermind behind the operation. Your symbol was first. You paid first. You did this to me.” He stalked around the bed and I made no move to protect myself. “You betrayed me and I want to know why.”
I couldn’t speak around the tears gushing from my eyes, the snot pouring out my nose. I tried and ended up wiping my face on the t-shirt. His t-shirt. When I could speak again the words wouldn’t come out.
The pain and suffering had a purpose, and I promised, sworn an oath twenty years ago, that my secret would never come out. To anyone. And I couldn’t change it now. “I’m sorry,” I offered instead.
“NOT GOOD ENOUGH,” he roared, and railed backward to pace at the end of the bed.
It would be easier if he hit me, punished me, whatever he needed to do. And I wanted it too. The knowledge I’d done this to him ate at me. Him being dead had been devastating, but also a blessing. Knowing he only suffered a short time before it ended, had helped.
My stomach churned violently and I slid up the wall from the corner to standing. I used the bed to get around him and into the bathroom. My knees hit the tile with a sickening thud. My breakfast came up in waves. And when it ended I breathed through the following wave of nausea.
He stood at the door, hand on his hips, leveling me a look of disgust. “The idea of you costing me twenty years of my life makes you sick, does it? Me too.”
I pushed off the floor, and he made no move to help me up, or back to the bed. I deserved it. All of it.
If I could make it to my own bed, I’d have gone there. As it was I wasn’t sure I didn’t need to lay a pallet in the bathroom at this point.
He watched me limp and suffer and I hoped it helped him. I hoped it eased him.
The sheets smelled like him. Everything in me wanted to explain, tell him what he wanted to hear, but I knew where my allegiance lay. And I couldn’t just stop after all these years of heartbreak and sacrifice because it suddenly became more difficult.
“Don’t get comfortable. We are leaving soon. Take a nap, fix yourself up, but I’m going to give you a fucking reason to explain yourself. And you are going to tell me the truth.”
