Page 118 of Bitter Burn
“Sorry,” she says thickly, turning her head away. “It just hit me that we’ve done it, we’ve killed him. And this is what’s left. Finding the Scales. Being alone. They say revenge won’t bring someone back, and I knew that…but maybe I didn’t realize that I was filling the hole McKenzie left behind with punishing the people responsible. And I never liked Isolde or Tristan, but I did like seeing you happy. It made me think that maybe one day I could be?—”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. She doesn’t have to.
I put my hand over hers on the railing. The dried blood on my ring stubbornly refuses to reflect any light, polluting the gleaming bands of silver on either side of the black. “Live now, Andrea,” I say. “Don’t let Cashel take any more of your future. If we wait on justice for happiness, we’ll never smile again.”
And then I leave her to her tears so that I can finally go spill my own.
I don’t sleep, even though I should.
I go to the garden, to Isolde’s favorite spot by the cherry tree, and I sit under its bare branches while the outdoor heaters glow nearby and stave off the worst of the chill.
I can’t seem to stop crying—the kind of rib-jerking, breath-stealing crying that fizzes my vision with static, that makes thinking impossible—and there is a shaking deep in my body, like my bones are trying to wrench themselves free. Isolde is right to believe love is the same as pain, because this fucking hurts. It hurts like nothing has ever hurt—no injury, no other loss, not even walking away from Eliot’s grave with only his watch on my wrist.
It hurts like a broken sternum with every shuddering breath; it hurts like blistered skin with every exchanged molecule of oxygen in my capillaries. My nerves are exposed to the open air, my organs are in a glistening pile at my feet, and my brain tears and rips at itself, gnawing on every memory of starlight hair and green eyes, of chess matches and hymns sung in a haunting tenor. If I could bury myself alive with my bare hands, I would, but what would it fucking matter when I already have? I buried myself with my own fury, my own stubborn pain, and I might have carved a cancer from the world, I might have made it a safer and better place with Cashel’s death, but I cut myself apart to do it. I cut other people apart. I took a saw to any chance of happiness and didn’t stop even when I got to gristle and bone.
I always wanted to be the one burying the embers at dawn. I should have known that the last embers I buried would be my own.
I have no idea how much time has passed—have had no grasp on time since the saints took Eliot’s watch off my wrist—when I hear footsteps on stone. Short strides, a softer footfall. My shredded heart jumps, barely, weakly, and my lungs refuse to inflate when I see the garden lights glint off golden hair.
Hope—it’s a fire, a knife, it’s soil in my mouth. The last red kiss of a funeral pyre in the dark.
But the glinting is more copper than gold—and of course, the footsteps I want most I would never actually hear. Isolde never makes noise unless she wants to.
It’s Isabella Beroul coming toward me now, wrapped in a soft, camel-colored coat, her hair loose around her shoulders. She’s wearing red gloves with the white line of nitrile just barely visible above each wrist.
I’m not enjoying this habit I’m making of crying in front of people whom I’m not particularly close to—my club treasurer and now Isabella—but I don’t think I could disguise what I’ve been doing even if I tried.
My eyes are swollen, my chin dimpled. My ribs and throat are at odds with each other when it comes to pulling air into my lungs. Also I’m sitting outside in January, at night, leaning against my soon-to-be ex-wife’s favorite tree and staring at a fountain that’s been shut off for winter. There is no chance of reclaiming my usual self-assurance, and I can’t even bring myself to care. Let everyone see me like this: my friends, my enemies, the ghost of Mortimer Cashel himself.
Let them see that I did exactly what I set out to do and immolated myself in the process, that I used myself for kindling, my future as accelerant.
That I blew on the flames with air I should have been using to say I love you. I’m so sorry.
I love you.
Isabella doesn’t hesitate when she sees me, and she doesn’t hesitate to sit next to me either, even though I know a coat like that has no business touching the bare dirt. She sits partially on her hip, her legs curled next to her.
“People are looking for you,” she remarks, tucking her coat around her knees.
“People.”
“Sedge. Kayden. They’re worried.”
God, what I’d pay to hear two very different names right now. “Ah.”
“I checked your office and then your apartment too and didn’t see anyone there, so I thought I’d try here next. Seems like a private place.”
Didn’t see anyone there. I clear my throat, but the words come out sounding like they’re made of ash anyway. “In my office—on my desk—did you see anything there? A folder, maybe?”
She shakes her head slowly. “There wasn’t anything on your desk, sir. I walked around to the other side to look out the window, and I would have noticed if there was.”
It’s what I expected, what I’ve been grieving—apartment empty, divorce papers gone—but the confirmation of it is enough to make me wish for death. Just complete darkness and absence of being. Ending is the only way I can go on.
And still my flattened lungs pull in air. Still my mangled heart attempts to beat.
There is no folder on my desk, and my body stubbornly refuses to die.
“Andrea told Kayden,” she says after a minute. “About the divorce. I’m so sorry, Mr. Trevena.”
