Page 52 of Red Masquerade

A sob suddenly wracked through me, catching in my throat. “What happened?” Voice breaking, it came out a plea.

It was what I wanted to know all this time. He’d been missing—I thought hedied. On a battlefield, thousands of miles away from his home, on another continent, surrounded by other boys sent away to die. All these years, I’d wondered what it felt like to get shot in the mud, to feel that bullet pierce through flesh and know you were going to die. What were his last thoughts? Who shot him? Friendly fire, an accident, something completely preventable? Or was he taken? A hostage?

He looked like he wanted to come to me, to make the step forward and take me into his arms, but he didn’t. Maybe he forgot how.

“I went to France,” he began.

I suppressed the urge to tell him to stop. Not to tell me. He didn’t have to relive whatever it was.

But I needed to know.

“It was my first time on the field, in battle, and before it felt like it even began, I was full of bullets. I don’t remember a lot of it,” he confessed, and looked at me through his lashes, as though he worried about my reaction. “There were bombs, and gasses, and I couldn’t move, and I thought I lost all my limbs. Then I couldn’t breathe.”

He glanced upward at the sky, mirroring Dixon’s exasperation from earlier. Except this time, Adam looked hurt. Worry lines at his eyes.

I’d seen men come home from overseas. They never came back the same. Some were deformed, and if it wasn’t a physical injury, a missing arm or leg, it was something they lost in their mind. Like they went to the war and came back a little less themselves, forgetting a piece of their soul across the ocean.

Lucas sneered at the men in the streets, and Mother never said anything, but her eyes said it all.

“I wanted to follow you,” I admitted. Wanted to tell him everything, how I’d been dragged home by Lucas after Adam had left, locked in my room.

He shook his head. “No you didn’t. I wouldn’t have let you.

“I woke up dead,” he said, returning to his past. His eyes glazed over like he was watching it all before him, like one of those moving pictures. “I was dead, but I could feel my arms again. Couldn’t feel the beat of my heart, didn’t need to breathe, butI could move. Could feel a burning hunger. There wasn’t any more blood. At least, none ofmine.”

He’d held a glass of red liquid a few nights ago. I hadn’t wanted to accept it, to admit it to myself, that he wasn’t justlivingamongst these monsters.

“You…” I didn’t know how to say it. “You didn’t come back the same.”

“I’m not the same,” he said, and looked me straight in the eyes, and I knew he told the truth. This was not my Adam. He used to be, but he was something, someonedifferent. The dangerous glint to his eye told me so. His ease of control over those peculiar guests at his house. It wasn’t just the war.

“You have to tell me,” I insisted. I couldn’t go home without the truth. Couldn’t return to Mother and Lucas and the prospect of Lord Wright Highsmith without knowing wholly what had happened.

He opened his mouth to speak, but stopped. “Come here.” He held his arm out to me. And at my hesitation, I saw something break in him. A glimmer in those eyes. “I won’t hurt you,” he said, his voice so soft, just like those whispers he used to say to me, late at night in the garden, right in my ear.

I put my hand in his and tried to ignore the shock I felt at his cool skin.

His fingers fit in mine just like they used to, intertwining the exact same.

He led me out of the garden, and the guests watched as we passed, staring just like they did when I wandered in. Except now, their eyes widened at Adam, at our hands linked together, and they averted their eyes almost in a sort of reverence.

He was not the same.

The party on the lawn was slightly more subdued than before; a few people passed out against tables, the couple no longer in the fountain, a few articles of clothing discarded and soaked on the ground. Adam led me around the side of the house, down a walk I’d not seen before, and we ended up on a veranda. Huge marble columns, like those of Ancient Greece, supported the roof covering. Electric lights strung there, too, to light our way.

“You live here,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

He nodded. “This is my manor.”

“How long?”

How long have you been back?

He paused, and I felt his grip on me tighten almost imperceptibly. “Two years.” He cleared his throat. But the parties had only been going on for the better part of a year.

“Why?”

He seemed to know what I meant and looked directly at me. I felt the same chill run down my flesh as I did that first night, when he was high above the crowd, and he found me, even when I must have been a speck amongst thousands. “To find you.”