and determined green eyes and gentle hands. Even his sympathetic expression.
Especially his sympathetic expression.
“You need to rest.” He eases me back down on the pillow for the millionth time, his tone infuriatingly even. As if I’m a child and he’s my parent.
“I’ll go insane if I rest for another minute.” I can feel the insanity creeping in at the borders of my body. It’s a buzzing in my elbows and my shoulders and down by my hips. “I mean it.”
He sighs, dropping into the seat next to the cot. Most times when I wake up, he’s there. He’s always there.
“Your body needs more time.”
“And then what? When this is gone, will I still be trapped here in the church?” I gesture to the wound at my side, the movement causing a twinge of pain through the skin and muscle. I don’t allow my face to react. The sports bra was a fun development in the wound-healing process. I go shirtless now, with no bandages, so my skin can knit itself back together in the open air.
The wound itself looks small now. Only an inch and a half of red scar tissue. Ironically it hurts now more than ever. On the inside, it feels like knives. I ignore the sharp points and keep looking into Elijah’s eyes. He’s going to answer me, damn it.
He shifts in his chair. “No.”
“You’re lying to me. We’re stuck here, aren’t we? Because of me. Because I shot him.” For the rest of my life, I’ll remember the sensation of recoil. It was different than when Elijah taught me to shoot. The bullet seemed to weigh more, even hanging in the air, even separate from me.
“Don’t worry about that right now.”
My heart beats harder, forcing more blood through my veins. My head throbs along with my wounded side. It takes a real effort not to grind my teeth together until they crack. How can he be so consistently calm about all of this? I’m ready to shed my skin like a snake and disappear into a puff of smoke, and there Elijah sits, watching me with concern in his eyes. I hate it.
“I did it to free you. So you could finally be rid of him.”
He looks away. “And you succeeded.”
“Except now I’m wanted for murder.”
“No one knows what happened in that apartment.”
“The men with him definitely know what happened. They shot me.”
“You don’t need to worry about them anymore.”
I’m not worried, precisely. It’s more like I’m in eternal agony. I know I’m losing perspective, but it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever really heal. If I live ten more years, or twenty, there will still be this terrible pain in my side. It’s as if I really was a mermaid who turned into a human. Now I forever have to walk the sandy shore, unsteady and excluded, in this new form.
He’s giving me that patient look again.
“You should be angry,” I say, venom in my voice. I’m the one angry—at circumstances, at the pain. And some of that anger transfers to the only other human I’ve seen in weeks. “You should be furious at me for pulling the trigger. For killing a man.”
“I’ve killed more men than you will ever know.”
“For killing that man. Your mentor. Your commanding officer.”
“He was a bastard. I once watched him order a man under his command to eat peanuts, knowing he was allergic to them. One. Two. Three. He ate them until he went into shock. He died, Holly. That’s who you stopped. Someone who killed for the joy of it.”
That makes me shiver. The colonel wasn’t a good man, but hearing that story makes him more real. As if his ghost haunts this old church now, malevolent and cold. “You shouldn’t make excuses for me. It’s because of me that you’re hiding right now.”
He runs a hand over his face, and I see a crack in the facade. He’s exhausted, and I know I’m to blame for that. He’s hurting, only his wounds don’t bleed like mine. “What do you want me to say? That I’m glad he’s dead? I am. That you shouldn’t have killed him? No, that was my fucking job. I failed you.”
“Hate me,” I say, and he’s already shaking his head before the words are out.
“You were protecting me. No one has ever done that before. Even my brothers—I don’t blame them. They saved themselves the only way they knew how, but they didn’t save me. No, I did that the day I killed my