“I was naked, and savage, and skinny. But I was still alive. My friend over there, he fed me. I had a lot of water. They left pallets of it when they decommissioned this rig.” He pauses to smile. “I didn’t want for anything. I taught myself how to fish. I swam around the reef. I would run laps around this roof. And…” He breathes out. “Every day I would jump off.”

He’s looking down at the sea when he says this, but then he looks at me. “I tried to kill myself every day. I wasn’t unhappy, but I knew…” He shakes his head. “This wasn’t right. There was something very wrong with my life. And if I didn’t die really fucking soon, I was gonna figure out what all that wrongness was. So I jumped. Every day. But guess what?” He chuckles. “This rig isn’t high enough to kill yourself by jumping. But I did try. I haven’t jumped in more than two decades now, but you wanna know something weird?”

I nod my head.

“That night of our fight? That night on the Bull of Light? I had this overwhelming urge to grab your hand and run. Just run with you until we ran out of room and had to jump. And the only reason I didn’t was because… I had won. I had finally reached my goal. We were free. And I was pretty sure that jumping off that ship was a death sentence. We would’ve gotten caught up in the wake or sucked under. And I realized that I didn’t have it in me. I wasn’t ever going to kill myself. My heart was not that sick and I was gonna have to ride this life out for as long as it lasted.”

My hand crosses the distance between us and I place a flat palm over his heart.

He has a heart tattoo there with a big keyhole inside of it. But not the kind you draw as a kid. It’s an anatomical heart. And I suddenly realize something, something I never paid attention to before. All the skulls have silver eyes. It’s not easy to see because most of his tattoos are in grayscale. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And that’s when I realize… these skulls on his body… they don’t represent the death of his opponents.

They represent the death of his kids.

Sick. Heart, I sign.

He nods. “Yeah. It’s fucking sick all right.”

I shake my head no. And change the signs around. Heart. Sick.

His mouth turns down and his eyes go distant for a moment. Unfocused. Like he’s remembering something. Then he looks at me again. “There was someone else. I can’t remember her. Not her face, but I know she was there. I just don’t know who she was.” He goes distant again, then refocuses. “It’s stupid. Like…” He scoffs. Maybe it’s even a laugh. “Like, I get it, OK? We all imagine that maybe this is all a mistake. Maybe we were kidnapped. Or lost. Or switched at birth before we left the hospital. We all want to think that we were dropped into the wrong life. That there is something else out there. Some other place where we truly belong. It’s a fantasy. A very common one in kids. So I get it, right? But I’m telling you, Anya, I wasn’t always this way. I just know that once upon a time my heart wasn’t sick. Not until that girl got taken away. Before that, I was someone else.”

I think I stop breathing in these moments.

He knows. He remembers. He just doesn’t understand that he knows and remembers.

He is heartsick because of what happened to him.

And this is when I truly realize that his secret is my secret too.

Cort throws his hands up. The rain has stopped and the sun is peeking through dark gray clouds. Thin columns of light shoot down towards the water surrounding us. Like we’re being cradled in the hand of God.

“But I haven’t been him for a very long time.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - CORT

The storm quiets as Anya and I sit in the leftover drizzle. My chest feels tight, like I can’t breathe, and I know this is because I said all those words out loud. It’s been a long time since I thought deeply about life before Udulf and I don’t even understand why I felt the need to bring it back up tonight.

Maybe because she understands me?

But even so, that doesn’t make her special. We all come from the same dark place. We all live the same pointless lives. We all know that at any moment death is just right around the corner.

So why her? Why think about it now?

I’ve tried to piece my place in this world together as best I can over the years based on what I see around me. How these kids of mine come to the camp. How Maart and Rainer came to be. And Evard. Even Ainsey. They are both products of a Lectra-induced fight-night win.

Tags: J.A. Huss Romance
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