“She was sobbing so hard she couldn’t speak!” Elora yelled through the phone. “By the time I got her calmed down enough that I could understand her, she was too ashamed to tell me!”
“Ashamed?” I scoffed. “Of what? She—”
“Because she feels like a fool, Dad. She thinks she did something wrong! And she thinks she’s done the wrong thing telling me what you did to her—”
“Why?”
“Because I’m your daughter! She doesn’t want me to know what a horrible person you’ve been.” Elora was so distraught as she spoke that I was sure I could hear her mother’s anguish coming out through her voice. “I can’t believe you can do such a thing to someone you love—”
“Hey! I do not love her, Elora! I can’t love her—”
“You’re a liar, Dad. And worst of all, you’re lying to yourself. And if you don’t do something to fix this and she ends up leaving, I swear to God, I’ll go with her, because after what you did today, you don’t deserve her. You don’t deserve any of us! I am so disappointed that I don’t even want to look at you.”
“Elora—”
“No. You can just shut up and listen!” she screamed. “You put your hands on my mother! You bashed her head into the ground and told her you wanted to hurt her.” She broke apart then, crying to herself for a second. “What kind of man are you, Dad? What happened to you in those tombs that changed you so much?”
“Elora, please—”
“No. I don’t want to hear an excuse. I can’t even comprehend what’s happened today. I…” She exhaled, her voice quivering into a high whimper as she said, “What would Mom say?”
I sighed, resting my head on a fist. What would she say? Nothing. She would say nothing. In fact, she would never have let me do that to her and I had to wonder why Ara did. She was stronger than me, even in my rage, so why didn’t she fight me off?
“Fix this, okay?” she said, her voice gaining its steady command again. “Or you won’t just lose her, Dad.”
I went to speak, but she hung up the phone, leaving me alone in my room again. My ears tuned in to the conversation going on in the kitchen then. It was hushed, but I could tell Ara was back. As I crept down the stairs and stood in the dining room, I heard Mike’s voice rising angrily above Em’s. He had Ara tucked tightly into the curl of his arm, his worried gaze on the floor, as Emily quietly told him everything. I could see Ara’s body shaking even from here, but her sobs were muffled almost inaudibly against Mike’s chest.
Vicki’s stone face appeared in the doorway then, and she shut it, closing me out.
I deserved that. I couldn’t explain what came over me today. I couldn’t give a reason why I’d done that to Ara, and I also couldn’t say I was sorry. Because I wasn’t. Even now, if I could slit her throat and it would bring my Ara back, I would. That girl had buried her, trapped her inside, and she needed to be forced to let her go.
“Don’t even think about it.” Mike appeared behind me. Before I could gather my wits, he grabbed my shirtsleeve and dragged me away from the dining room. I stumbled and tripped along behind him until we reached the den, standing back as he shut the door hard, making the windows rattle. I was certain a punch in the face would follow, but he just sat down on the edge of the lamp table and said, in a solemn, weak voice, “I know what you’re going through, okay? But you better hope to God Falcon doesn’t learn of this, because he will kill you if he sees that girl sobbing like that, and—”
“I don’t care.” I sat down on the back of the couch. “Tell him.”
“Why?” He looked right at me with stern, wise eyes. “So he can teach you a lesson? That’s not what you need.”
“Then what do I need?” I rolled my hands out in sarcastic question. “You seem to know everything, so go ahead, inform me, oh wise master.”
“First of all, you need a fucking punch in the face,” he said firmly. “And second, you need to understand that what happened out there is a result of the curse.”
My cheeks loosened, and I felt suddenly enlightened. “What?”
He nodded, rubbing his jaw. “It happens—when the love’s not reciprocated. Remember Ryder?”
I thought back to the day one of our most trusted guards was killed for trying to take the queen’s life. One of our guards who, it turned out, was under her curse for a very long time before that.
“It turns the heart rotten as much as it draws it in,” Mike explained. “I’ve been there—ended up slapping her in the face.”
He was right. I’d forgotten about that until now. We blamed blood hunger, but no hunger had ever made him hurt her before.
“She’s suffered a lot at the hands of this curse, man. You have to be careful—”
“What am I supposed to do?” I said, standing up to get some movement under my feet. “Every time I see her, I just want to choke the life out of her!”
“Well, for your sake, and for hers, you’re going to have to figure out how to move past that.”
“I don’t know how!” I tapped my chest. “I’ve never felt like this before.”
Mike groaned, moving across the room to the bookshelf in the corner. “You remind yourself why you love her.” He bent down and then stood again with my wedding album in hand, shoving it into my chest. “Because if you don’t, you’ll end up hurting her again. And it may be worse next time.”
“And what if I no longer care if I hurt her?”
“You will.” He held my gaze firmly, injecting a wealth of previous experience into my soul with that one hard look. “And when this surge ends, what you did to her this morning is gonna hurt, man. Deeply,” he added, voice breaking on the end. Then he left, shutting the door firmly into place behind him, and I sat down in the shadows of the room, looking at the cover of my wedding album for a very long time.