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ENGLAND.
The land of my birth.
The land of my parents—one dead, one in jail.
The land of my death and slavery.
Sailing into South Hampton filled me with dread rather than homecoming. Why was I back here when my childhood apartment had been sold, my mother was locked up for twenty-plus years, and I had not one friend to stay with?
Elder joined me on deck as the Phantom slowly traded open seas for the gloomy shore of an industrial city. A light drizzle fell from the grey clouds above; a perfect memory of the mercurial moods of England. I already missed the gentle swell of the ocean and the unhindered sunshine dappling the yacht with sunbeams.
Ever since our argument two days ago, Elder had studiously avoided me. I’d caught him smoking a joint outside his room the night after. We’d shared a very stilted dinner, and I half expected him to find me on a lifeboat and star-gaze once he’d finished smoking and was mellow enough to be near me without wanting to yell at me.
But he hadn’t.
I’d star-gazed on my own.
And my anger and hurt grew from an annoying pinprick to a throbbing bruise.
We’d had our first argument, and neither one of us had apologised or moved to end the residual feud.
I wasn’t above being the first to admit defeat and withdrawing my threat to test my inconclusive theory. That was—if Elder stopped avoiding me or, when he was in my presence, stopped filling up the awkwardness with mundane comments about seagulls, yacht maintenance, and upcoming shore endeavours.
He’d said he was exhausted living the way he did. Well, I was exhausted begging him to lean on me a little and forgive me for wanting to be beside him when danger called. I wouldn’t apologise for disobeying him, and I definitely wouldn’t apologise for running to his side.
It should make him feel loved, not smothered.
My blood iced over again with annoyance, coaxing me to give him the cold shoulder, but England spread before us. Conversation would have to be indulged in and token sightseeing endured.
Whatever happened in the future, today had to be the moment where we ripped off the Band-Aids from our mutual wounds and cleared the air.
Something would snap if we didn’t.
Something was already fraying.
I couldn’t continue to wave the white flag without moving forward because we couldn’t continue to coexist this way. The barricades and distance had only worked when I was still healing mentally, physically, and sexually. Elder could endure me on his boat because I hadn’t healed enough to tell him who I truly was.
Hell, until recently, I’d forgotten who I was. Or perhaps I’d been stolen too young to ever fully develop into who I should’ve become.
I might never know who Tasmin might’ve been. Now, I’d been shaped by those experiences that’d fractured the old me. I’d persevered and matured and found I had a temper to revile his. I had dreams to challenge his. I had needs that ran parallel to his if only he trusted that I could cope with whatever it was he gave me.
Stealing a glance at him, my heart swooned a little as the sea breeze tangled in his blue-ebony hair, and grey drizzle added severity to his already severe face. His nose, his cheeks, his stubble-covered chin—all of it screamed the same message as his eyes: tread in my stead and don’t deviate. Do not make my life any harder than it is even if it could be made great if I actually gave in and tried.
Just tried.
If he was so terrified of sleeping with me with no end barrier, then tell Selix to stand by with a tranquilizer gun. Have safeguards in place to experiment with different methods because the one he was currently using....It wasn’t working.
For either of us.
I’d healed enough that his distance was no longer welcome, and pity for him, I’d learned how to read him and knew he didn’t want to be estranged from me either.
For a girl who’d begged for a life of no physical connection after rape, I’d changed my mind quickly where he was concerned. My adaptability surprised even me. My tenacity to keep forging ahead, leaving the darkness behind where it had no power over my future was my true strength.
I might not have muscles to overpower evil, but I did have a strength of mind that ensured I wasn’t beaten. I no longer wanted to be Pimlico, the mouse. The girl who might have teeth but was still happiest not using them.
I wanted more than that.
My teeth had grown to fangs.
And although I was free from my past, I was still trapped.
Elder was now my master, and I was still in a cage.
I want out of that cage.
I didn’t know how we’d taken on the roles we’d been custom designed for, now that I’d opened my eyes, it was painfully obvious.
I might be in a cage of his doing, but he was in a cage of his own making. A cage he was born into just from the way his brain had formed from the womb. It wasn’t his fault, and I had to remind myself not to take his surliness or pig-headedness personally.
My theory that he thought in threes—my concept based on watching his fingers dancing and the common waltz whenever he did something...was dying to be tested.
If he’d just heard me out, I would’ve given him my hypothesis. I would’ve listed all the reasons why I thought it would work. I would point out that whatever he was doing was discounted easily the moment he hit that magic number.
Obsession had laws too.
I just needed to learn more about his to convince him.
“Over two years and you’re finally home,” Elder murmured, his shoulders rounding as he sank deeper into the moleskin jacket he’d thrown on. The tan material turned darker with little circles as the mist steadily turned to rain.
I’d also dressed in a jacket—mine down to my thighs with a large wraparound belt and oversized buckle. Clothing was no longer optional but wanted—especially to ward off the familiar chill in England.
“Yet it doesn’t feel as if I’ve been away a day.” I kept staring at the horizon, refusing to look at him. My heart hiccupped at the truth. Everything that’d happened and the reason I’d been away for so long was suddenly nothing more than a single paragraph on a long letter of my life.
Two years was nothing.
It could be scribbled out or erased or torn from the page and burned.
England meant nothing to me because it had taken everything I’d cared about and cast me out. The only thing I wanted here was locked away out of reach.
You couldn’t scribble him out, though.
Looking at Elder, I didn’t think I could ever erase him or scratch off the letters he’d written on my heart. No matter how much or how little time we spent together.
He was permanent. Inked. Tattooed.
And if he didn’t start trusting me to share his life and help him, he would also be thrown overboard.
His lips locked tight as he peered at the harbour and the other vessels moored along the shore. There were no steam-propelled boats or coal-powered cargo ships these days, but the haze of working-class toil painted South Hampton in a dreary light, no matter the new glitz and glamour of restaurants and cafes intermixed with warehouses that’d stood tall for centuries.
A massive clock, housed in its coal-blanketed brick tower, chimed the time at two p.m.
Elder quickly glanced at his watch, a scowl painting his face. “Shit, we’re late.”
“Late?”
“The Hawks ball is tonight.”
My heart raced. “Tonight, tonight?” I looked down at the black pea coat I wore, hiding the simple long-sleeve navy dress beneath. I looked the part of sleek heiress arriving on her floating expensive island, but beneath the rich fabric and heavy wool, I wore no underwear.
I was still a little wild. Still a heathen at heart. Wilder than I should probably be and slowly relearning who I was. I might not be Tasmin and might be growing out of Pimlico, but I still didn’t know who I wanted to be.
I had opinions. I wanted to voice them.
I had dreams. I wanted to live them.
I had desires. I wanted to enjoy them.
I had fears. I wanted to slay them.
Was I so different from everybody else, or was I normal? Was I sane in my desire to put my safety on the line to prove a point with Elder? Would any woman in love do the same for a chance to fix the one she wanted? Were there other girls who hated the restriction of elastic and lace? Who never finished university? Who’d been initiated into sex in the worst possible way, only to find that on her own terms, she was a hot-blooded female who needed sex in her life? Who needed to be touched and kissed and to feel a man filling her?
Am I so different?
And if I’m exactly alike what makes me custom designed for Elder?
Why did I think I had the right to fix him? Why did I believe I could test a silly theory? Would another woman do such a thing?
How does anyone find a soul mate if we are all the same?
“What are you thinking about?” Elder turned to face me, his eyebrow raised and lips half tilted. The smile didn’t reach his eyes as if he’d placed himself behind prison bars and reached out to me behind them instead of giving me a key to join him.
I shook myself free from such runaway, unanswerable questions. “Nothing.”
“It was something.”
“Nothing important.”
“Your face looked as if you were trying to solve the world’s hunger issues.”
I shrugged, self-conscious that my mind had twisted into a tangent. “Nothing as important as that.”
He paused, his gaze searching mine, doing his best to pry apart my secrets. Slowly, his jaw clenched, and he placed his hand over mine on the balustrade. Licking his bottom lip, he whispered, “Are you happy?”
The question wasn’t something I expected. My eyes shot to his, wary, guarded, but beseeching him to let me steal his secrets. What had made him so uncertain that he had to ask? I was the happiest I’d ever been, and it was all thanks to him. My voice matched his in decibel. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I need to know.”
I should’ve put him out of his misery, but I answered his question with another. “What about what I need to know? What of that?”
His teeth ground together, understanding instantly what I hinted at. “Your theory?”
“Yes.”
Removing his hand from mine, he wrapped his fingers tight on the banister as if wishing it was my neck he wrung. He looked back at the port. His tall height gave him the advantage, blocking me from his eyes and deciphering his blustery moods.
He came across so forceful and unmovable—a true disaster in human form waiting to wreak havoc on anything and everyone, but now that I’d started looking...truly looking, I saw bone-deep pain beneath that rage. I tasted the soul-crushing hurt beneath his temper. And I felt the burning lust, not for bodily pleasure, but for the beauty of letting go entirely and falling.
Falling in love.
Falling in lust.
I understood more than he knew.
Perhaps that was what made me perfect for Elder where any other woman would pale? I’d been through my own trauma. I’d learned the darkest facets of myself and the lowest of lows. I knew what sort of human I was when faced with the purest of poison, and I knew how much I fought to survive.
Not many people knew the answers to those lessons—through luck of an easy life or lack of broadening horizons—but I knew.
I understood who I was in the worst of times.
I only needed to know who I was in the best of them.
Elder was like me. He knew how wrong he could be. How his flaws turned him from perfect to dangerous and just what happened when he let go.
He could never be normal, but unlike me, he didn’t catalogue everything he knew of himself as a strength. He looked at them as downfalls. He didn’t understand himself; therefore, he could never know how he could be in the best of times.
I want to show him.
I wanted a life where I grew into someone well-rounded and sexual and able to laugh at a stranger and not cower in the shadows. I wanted a dream where I held the hand of a man who others might call broken and kiss him without fear of his mind snapping or our trust breaking.
“I won’t push you, Elder. But I will know those answers...soon.”
“Not if I leave you here.”
My heart coughed. “Do you want to leave me here?”
My question was a pit full of sharp spikes ready to impale him. If he answered truthfully, he would be skewered with the knowledge I wouldn’t let him keep the walls up between us. And if he lied, he’d be lanced because I already knew he didn’t want to leave me.
He knew as well as I did the pain of being apart and the overwhelming feeling of wrongness when we weren’t by each other’s sides. Anything was better than that. Including being pushed by the one you didn’t want to push away.
He swallowed hard, glaring at the grey horizon. “You know I don’t want that.”’
The resounding agony in his tone restarted my heart into a rhythm entirely orchestrated by him. He might play the cello, but in that moment, he strummed my soul and sent the chords vibrating through me.
Pressing against him, I placed my hand over his, once again taking the initiative to touch and interact and speak. So long I’d been silent, and now I was a natural at conversing with him.
Him.
This man I wanted to be mine more than anything. “You know I won’t stop. If that makes me selfish and cruel...so be it. I’m doing it for other reasons than my own.”
His head hung. “I know.”
“And you know I’m strong enough.”
He squeezed his eyes closed. “That’s the part that terrifies me.”
“All things worth having are terrifying.”
He snorted under his breath, glancing at me with blue-black hair dancing over his forehead. “Then you must be the greatest thing on earth, Pimlico, because you fucking petrify me.”
My belly danced, clawing at me to release the fluttering of moths and winged things and take flight. To soar up his tall body and claim his mouth. To whisper against his lips all manner of promises—some I had the strength to keep and others I was still too fragile to grant.
But I couldn’t do any of those things as Jolfer stepped into our passion, popping it as surely as a pin would a bubble. “Sir, we’ll be docked in fifteen minutes. The car is serviced and ready to go. Selix already has your itinerary, and the appointments you asked the staff to make are all arranged.”
Elder jerked back, returning me from the midnight depths of his eyes to the dreary English drizzle. “Thank you, Jolfer.”
Jolfer, with his kind, weathered face, nodded politely, tapped his temple at me in respect, and then carried about his duties to bring the Phantom home for her well-earned rest.
Unable to return to the deeply raw place we’d been before, I asked, “Appointments?”
Elder rolled his neck as if doing his best to shed what’d happened and realign himself in the now. “Dress fitting for you. Tux fitting for me. Then hair and makeup before the masquerade at Hawksridge.”
“Why does it have to be a masque?”
I hated not being able to see people’s faces...to see their plotting.
“I’m of the same opinion. If it wasn’t for work, I’d cancel.”
Far off memories of paper mache masks and faceless men bidding on me at auction trickled like tar. I clamped down on such things. Tonight would be different. Tonight, I would be with Elder and safe.
Forcing myself into brightness, I nudged his shoulder with mine. “I’m getting a new dress?” I smiled as if I was superficial enough to only care about a wardrobe.
He didn’t buy it. “Next time you feign excitement, try to do it over something I know you don’t hate.”
I laughed softly. “I didn’t hate it when you made me wear that lingerie.” I blushed and flushed and glanced at the polished deck beneath our feet. “The way you looked at me...it made the claustrophobia worth it.”
Elder sucked in a breath, tattered and heavy and so full of regret—it pierced my heart like countless arrows, their feathered shafts quivering painfully.
“I...” He squeezed the back of his neck as his shoulders slouched. “Goddammit, Pim.”
For some reason, tears prickled my eyes. It wasn’t tears of sadness but more of frustration. I had the power to relieve him of his stress, if only he trusted me as I trusted him.
Instinct told me to pull away, but I fought it and swayed into him instead.
He froze as I wrapped my arms around him, wriggling between him and the banister to lay my head against his chest. I stiffened as his heartbeat filled my ears. It wasn’t the steady thunder I expected but a lightning storm. Fast and fleeting as if being touched by me made his heart work triple time to keep him standing.
He rested his chin on my hair as his arms hesitatingly came around me.
We stood there like that for I didn’t know how long. Breathing each other in. Listening to the havoc we played on each other’s bodies. Unable to say what we truly wanted but knowing anyway.
Finally, he kissed my hair, murmuring, “There is one appointment that isn’t so superficial. It doesn’t include clothes or makeup or glitzy ridiculous balls. Will you go with me?”
“I’d go anywhere with you.”
“In that case...let’s go.”
* * * * *
I stood outside a nondescript entrance overshadowed by turrets and towers. Barbwire and soaring chain-link glittered in the clearing rain, surrounded by brick walls and whitewashed window frames.
It could’ve been any number of corporate buildings: a hospital, a no-frills university—somewhere where wire and spikes were required to keep its inhabitants safe, not for locking them in.
I preferred to think of it that way: a school. A school where my mother taught and studied her favourite criminal patients, diving into the minds of psychopaths before walking from such a depressing place and going home to a warm apartment filled with comfy familiarity.
But it wasn’t a school, and this wasn’t a fantasy.
I’d never understood my mother’s love of delving deep into what made a criminal tick, and now...she is one.
I baulked as Selix slammed the car door behind me and Elder held out his arm. I didn’t know the name of the prison or even what suburb we’d driven to.
All Elder had told me was it was important and to trust him.
Most of the drive through congested English motorways and then quaint village roads, I’d pondered on the hypocrisy of such a request.
When I’d given him my trust the night the coastguard came, he’d shut down on me and refused to sleep with me. He acted as if giving him my trust was an abomination.
Yet here he was asking for the very same gift he’d thrown in my face.
“Pim?” His gentle voice interrupted my thoughts.
I blinked, bringing him into focus, standing with his arm empty and requesting my hand, his gaze imploring me to trust.
I shivered as an icy gale whipped around the harsh corners of the jail. My mother was in there. She was in there because of something she’d done for me. I was so close to seeing her, yet the vinegary guilt made me step back. “I...why did you bring me here?”
He didn’t need to tell me who we were here to see or how he’d arranged this. I’d known the moment I’d set eyes on this place. This place housing my murderess mother.
I didn’t need to know how. I needed to know why.
Why?
Especially as he’d read my notes to No One. He saw how much I blamed her for what’d happened to me. He would’ve witnessed the misplaced hate I’d carried for her in the way my pencil scribbled harder whenever I wrote her name.
I’d thrown around the fantasy of visiting her but in reality...I wasn’t ready.
I doubted I would ever be ready.
“Because she asked to see you,” Elder murmured. “And more importantly, you need to see her.”
“She asked about me?” I shook my head, my hair coiling around my cheeks as if protecting me from the breach of his tampering in my life. “When? How?”
He winced, dropping his arm uncomfortably. “I called her. I left a message telling her who I was and that you were safe. I didn’t think she’d call me back.”
“But she did?”
“She did.”
“And?” I snapped. “What did you tell her?”
Oh, God...imagine if he told her everything? How he’d found me at Alrik’s days away from committing suicide. How my tongue was half severed. How my panic attacks made me so weak.
She was in prison. She didn’t need such terrible thoughts when she already lived in a terrible place.
Elder stepped slowly toward me, remorse painting his handsome face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I know now how that must feel.” He shook his head with a harsh cough. “If anyone spoke to my mother on my behalf...I’d be fucking livid.” Rage burned in his gaze, directed at himself. “I’m truly sorry, Pimlico, but you have my word, not once did I tell her how we met, where you came from, or what we’ve done since finding each other.”
His hand crept out, touching mine with a barely there coax. “She doesn’t know anything more than you’re alive. The rest is up to you to tell her...if and when you’re ready.”
I snatched my fingers back from his. “But the things I thought about her...the hate I held while those things were done to—”
Elder lurched forward, stealing my hand and squeezing it hard. “Stop. You didn’t know. You were alone. You were abandoned to that bastard’s whims. You didn’t know you were loved and searched for. Just like she didn’t know how much she loved you until you were gone. She didn’t show it, and it made you doubt.” He cupped my cheek, beseeching me to understand. His face harsh and wind-bitten but still just as lovely. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I swallowed the ball in my throat. “I did. I blamed her...for all of it.”
I still do even when I shouldn’t.
“Blame is good. You needed someone to blame.”
“I blamed him, too.”
“He deserved it. He deserves to rot on his kitchen floor for eternity.”
“But how can I look at her knowing what she did for me, all while I harboured suspicions that she might’ve been the one to set it up? That I concocted ideas that I was merely an experiment for her to see how her child would react with the same monsters she studied?”
Elder gathered me close, tucking me against his warm moleskin jacket. “Fuck, Pim.”
I trembled, spilling my darkest confessions—even the ones I daren’t write in my notes to No One. “I hated her for not hugging me like other mothers. I despised her for making it feel wrong that I wanted to be a little girl playing with dolls. I told myself I was lucky to be treated as an equal and an adult even when I was young enough to be afraid of the dark. Instead of rocking me back to sleep, she’d give me textbooks to read about the psychology of why children fixate on things that can’t hurt them. That phobias for irrational things can be over-come if one just grows up and faces what they’re truly afraid of.”
Elder’s jacket was warm and heady like the incense flavour he carried on his skin. Its rich scent siphoned up my nose, doing its best to soothe me when I didn’t deserve to be soothed.
My voice turned small. “All I wanted was some small sign she loved me, and a lot of those childish insecurities would’ve gone away.”
“We all love in our own ways, Pim.” His voice was deep and rich, entirely mollifying while, at the same time, not doing anything to mollify my nerves. “You need to forgive yourself for thinking such things, just like you need to forgive her for making you feel that way.”
Pushing me out of his embrace, he nudged my chin with his knuckles. “I’ll come with you. If you want me.”
My eyes trailed to the squat, bristling-in-barbwire building behind him. How was I supposed to go in there? How was I supposed to speak to her after so much had happened to both of us?
“Pim...”
Forcing myself to look at him, I waited for whatever he wanted to say.
His eyes tightened, the stress lines around his mouth deepening. “When she called me back, and I told her about you...” He trailed off, tucking wind-whipped hair behind my ear and smiling with love born from being denied his own mother’s affection. “She broke. I’ve never heard someone’s voice turn from guarded to distraught so quickly. All she wanted to know was if you were okay. She didn’t ask anything else. Just were you okay. And then she begged me to bring you to her. I couldn’t refuse.”
I wanted so much to believe this would be easy. That she would forgive me and I’d forgive her, and we’d somehow fall into a relationship we’d never had, but all I could visualize was her lack of cuddles and abundance of coldness, and once again, I was flooded with fear that I was broken. That I was only capable of hating her when all I’d ever wanted was to love and be loved by her.
I’m a horrible, horrible person.
Even now, even knowing what she’d done, I still couldn’t let go of the pain of my childhood.
Something nasty entered my brain. Something totally out of character but I had to spit it out to prevent it from corroding me. “You couldn’t refuse. But I can. I don’t have to go in there if I don’t want to. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to again.”
“That’s true. You’ve been made to do enough bad things.” His commiseration turned to scolding. “But could you be that person? After everything you know? Now you know the truth about how she searched and killed for you?” He shook his head proudly and sadly. “I still have so much to learn about you, Pimlico, but I already know you aren’t capable of doing that. You’re too pure.”
I shot him a sharp look.
In one moment, he made me sound like an angel and the next, an ungrateful brat—something my mother had called me many times in my past. If anything, that reminder helped me stand taller; to shoulder my responsibility while figuring out hers.
If I didn’t visit, I would be proving her right by calling me an ungrateful brat. If I didn’t see her, I would forever hate myself for being so weak and heartless.
I was eternally grateful to her even though we’d never been mother and daughter. Her love had come from a complicated place and landed her in hell.
Even though it tangled me up inside, Elder was right.
I couldn’t refuse because I wasn’t that person.
I wasn’t selfish.
I wasn’t cruel.
I’m better than this.
My mother was my mother.
I was her daughter.
For better or for worse.
I was a Blythe.