Beatrice was still awake.
I set the plate of food on her nightstand even though I expected it to go to waste.
She remained on her side, the sheets to her shoulder, the curtains keeping out the city lights.
I turned to leave.
She sat up in bed, giving a quiet wince as she rested her back against the headboard.
I turned back to her, her arms and neck thin, giving her an emaciated look, not the svelte look she possessed when she was happy and healthy.
Her arms crossed over her chest, and she bent her knees, her feet sliding across the sheets and filling the silence with movement. Her eyes were down, and she gripped herself like she was stuck outside in the cold.
I sat at the edge of her bed.
“I’m going to my parents’ place in London.”
“A change in scenery will be good for you.” I assumed she would go alone, because I would not let Claire leave when I just got her back, when the pain from her absence was still so raw. “Take a break.”
Her eyes remained down, her slender fingertips gently caressing her arms. “I’m not coming back.”
I stared.
“I don’t want to be here anymore. This place…” She shook her head. “It’s not home anymore.”
Anger flushed into my system as if through an invisible needle. “I’m not letting you take Claire.” Nonnegotiable.
“I wasn’t going to.” She lifted her gaze and finally met my look.
Disappointment. Rage. Fury. “You can’t do that to her.” Claire was in my care most of the time, and her time with her mother was seldom and short. I was already her full-time parent. But I didn’t want my daughter to ever feel abandoned. “Especially after everything she’s been through.”
Her sigh was deep, like the words she hadn’t said already exhausted her. “I’m a shitty mom. Let’s just be honest about that.”
“And you’ll be shittier if you leave.”
“Benton, come on. You hate me—”
“And I’ll hate you more if you go.” My voice rose. The anger got the best of me. “I will help you through this in whatever way I can. You need to live here for years to get back on your feet? Fine. You need financial support? Fine. My daughter needs her mother.”
“Let’s not pretend that I wanted to have her—”
“But you did. And I will always be grateful for that.” Beatrice was just a warm body in bed for the night. Meant nothing to me. I was indifferent to her existence. When she told me she was pregnant, that was when the hatred began, because a woman who meant absolutely nothing to me was now a part of my life forever. My commitment to the Chasseurs was broken. The life I’d envisioned for myself…gone. But when she’d said those words, that she didn’t want to have it, that somehow made everything worse.
I had to convince her to go through with the pregnancy.
Then I had to beg.
Many, many times.
And fuck, I was glad that I did.
She stayed quiet, her eyes drifting away. “I love her. I do. But…I’ve never wanted to have kids, and having her just reinforces that belief. I’m not good at it. I’m here out of obligation. And being in that horrible place…just showed me how terrible of a mother I really am.”
“She came back unharmed. Give yourself more credit.” Claire was exactly the same, the happy, bubbly little girl who made me a better man. There were no bruises, no scratches, any sign of trauma in any way. She was returned to me in the same condition that she had been taken. It made me sleep well at night.
“That wasn’t because of me…” Her arms tightened over her chest. “Constance was the one who looked after her most of the time. I was too mentally disturbed to think about anything, really.”
The brunette woman came into my mind, the look on her face before I shut the door in her face.
“The Malevolent would stare at us through the windows inside the church. Claire was scared…so Constance taped paper to the glass, blocking them out. There was nowhere you could go where they didn’t stare at you, unless you were inside your cabin. It gave us another asylum.”
I’d only seen a glimpse of the settlement so I couldn’t piece together how it looked, but I imagined those freaks everywhere, their horns on their heads, staring like mindless monsters. When I imagined them even glancing at Claire… it made me want to kill them all.
“When they took me away to…hurt me, Claire was left behind. The barrier between our rooms was locked, so she was alone. Then one of the Malevolent came…and tried to get her to take the pill.”
All the old pains in my knuckles suddenly came back. The adrenaline pumped my heart, the rage burned the blood in my veins, and the deep breaths I took fueled my body to destroy. My fingers rolled into fists, and I instinctively flexed and pulled my tendons over my hands, wishing they were bloody from the corpses I’d mutilated.