“I did not give you permission to do so.”
“Since when have I needed your permission for anything?”
“This is not to share.” Tears filled her eyes. “I want you to go away.”
“Is this where they kept you?”
“It is not your...”
“Is this where they kept you, Annick? In this room like a...like a patient at a mental ward?”
“Yes,” she said.
“This is...disgusting.”
“It is,” she agreed.
“I would go back and kill them all over again if I had not already done so,” he said, his tone black as night. “How dare they do this to you.”
“It is so. They did it. I suppose it does not matter how.”
“It matters to me.”
“I felt so different sitting around your family, I thought perhaps I would come down here and see if I was. But I’m the same. I tremble standing here. Afraid that I will not be able to choose to leave.” She turned around. “But the bars are not there. You are.” He filled the doorway, his large frame taking up all that space once occupied by the locking door.
“How did you survive it?”
“The way we all survive such things. We go to whatever place inside of ourselves we can find that will protect us. Keep us safe. You have this place. This place you go to when you smile with charm to your parents. Or maybe it is the place you go when you pick up your gun to kill the men who you imagine are the ones who killed Stella. It is what you do, yes? Every time. That man becomes the man who killed her.”
“This is not about me.”
“It is about those of us who live on. When we sometimes wish we had not. That is what this is. We are not so different, Maximus King.”
“This prison cell is a damn horror,” he said, looking around.
“My life was a ‘damn horror,’ as you say. And yet somehow I am here. As are you.”
“Let’s go upstairs.”
“We are to be married tomorrow. And I am Queen.” Unexpectedly, a tear slid down her cheek. “I did not ever think I would live to see this day. A wedding day. The day that I wore the crown. It is all hitting me now. After all these years of hiding. All these years of feeling nothing. It is all hitting me now. All these feelings that were locked away here. How can you even have feelings in here?”
“You can’t,” he said. “This place is torture all on its own.”
“Yes. It is so. But it is a torture I survived. To come out of this place. To this moment.” She looked at him and her heart ached. It felt too heavy. Much too heavy. And suddenly, she wanted to run from him as badly as she wanted to run from the cell. Because... What she really wanted, standing there, raw from that dinner she had just shared with his family, she could admit wounded her just as much.
She wished that she could be loved. It was a terrible thing that Maximus grieved Stella so much. But... But what a wonderful thing to be grieved. What a wonderful thing to have someone love you quite so much that they turned their life inside out, that they became a mythical beast on your behalf, attempting to rid the world of injustice just so you might be avenged.
She had no idea what that sort of love must be like.
Years. She had spent years in this room. With captors who were utterly and completely dispassionate about her. Captors who didn’t care if she lived or died. Who trotted her out when it was necessary. Who used her to support their great and terrible acts. Who only educated her, even just the slightest, so that she could put on a performance of being cared for.
She was so hungry for love. There were so many things to grieve about the loss of her family, but the deepest one, the deepest one that she had not wanted to acknowledge for all this time, was that when she lost them she had also lost the only people who cared about her.
The only people in the world who loved her.
And she had him, this dark avenging angel, but he was not her dark avenging angel.
He was avenging the wrongs committed against another. And he was using her as a token for that, but it still wasn’t the same.