Page 44 of The Winner's Kiss
“Maybe.”
“How many did you kill?”
He shrugged. He didn’t know.
“Does it bother you?”
He met her eyes. Slowly, he shook his head.
“Why not? Do you like killing?”
“They want my country.”
“So you do like it.”
“Lately, sometimes.”
“Why?”
“There are many reasons.”
“That’s no answer.”
“But you are one of my reasons, Kestrel. You don’t want to hear that. I think you might be pushing me to say something that will make you leave.”
This gave her pause. She thought of how painstakingly she had neatened his bedsheets to erase her presence.
“I don’t—” The words caught in her throat. She let herself sit at the table and studied a symbol carved onto its surface. The symbol of a god, prob ably. The Herrani had many. “I don’t understand why I’ve forgotten so much.”
“You were drugged.” There was something unspoken in his voice.
“You think it’s more than that.”
He took the other chair, but sat at a distance, his body turned from her, directed toward an eastern window, face in profile, scarred side hidden. As he spoke, it occurred to her that maybe he, too, felt like two people, that maybe everybody does, and that it’s not a question of whether one’s damaged, but of how easily or not that damage is seen.
She studied him. Captor, rescuer, culprit.
He kept talking. She began to listen. It was a terrible story, told softly, never stopping. He barely paused for breath. As he described the night of the Valorian invasion and himself as a child, she began to see how natural the reflex of self-blame was for him. Ingrained. Insidious.
You’re the reason I was in that prison.
Yes.
It occurred to her that he might have taken blame he didn’t deserve.
It occurred to her that she had already guessed this even before he’d begun telling his nakedly awful story.
And that maybe she had been cruel.
This thinking was not the same as trust. Still, she listened. After he finished, she listened to his silence.
He spoke again. “Maybe, for you, it’s not just the drugs. Maybe . . . there are things that you can’t bear to remember.” He glanced into her eyes, then away, and she saw that it wasn’t because he was afraid of letting her see how he could or could not bear his memories, but because he was afraid of what her own lost memories might be, and didn’t want to show this fear, for fear of frightening her.
She said, “I didn’t choose to forget.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. It wasn’t a false smile, but only as true as it could be. He spoke lightly, like some joke had been played upon them both. “I don’t choose to remember.” He shifted to face her fully. “May I ask you a question?”
She thought about it. She wasn’t sure.
