Turning to Conor now, I let out a slow and steady breath before finally uttering, “Conor, about this morning –”
“I’m sorry,” he cut in, turning to look at me, his eyes soft. “I was in the wrong, dove, not you.”
“I could have held back on some of the things I said.”
“I don’t want that to be our dynamic,” he replied steadfastly. “I don’t want you to hold back. I want you to feel comfortable telling me anything.”
“About Locke –”
“I need to respect your relationship with him,” he cut in quickly. “I stick by my words, though. I’ll hurt him if he ever fucks you over, dove, but I can’t stop you from working for him. I won’t interfere with your relationship with him, but…I want there to be transparency.”
I nodded quickly. “Of course.”
He levelled me with a solemn stare. “You need to tell me if anything happens.”
“I will,” I promised.
“I don’t hate him, not when it really comes down to it,” he then said, swallowing hard as he looked back at the car. “I carry a lot of guilt. It was easier to believe he was okay because…he doesn’t carry his pain on his sleeve.”
“None of you do, Conor. Not Jem, not you, and I suspect not Dominic either.”
“Dominic…” his voice broke just then, his lips trembling. “I left Dominic behind in that prison. He needed me, too.” He sucked in a breath, his eyes growing red with unshed tears. “I let them all down. They turned to me, Char. They wanted me to protect them. Jem when he lost Addison, Dominic in prison, Locke when he suffered in that hole…and I…I couldn’t help them. I was too busy playing the bully, pretending nothing affected me. I buried it down for years with the drink, with the women, with the crime, with prison terms…like all of that was going to make me some bad ass. I didn’t want emotion to touch me. I didn’t want to care about anything…until I met you.”
He turned back to me, his gaze finally meeting mine. He took me in, slowly, his body stiff, his lips parted with words he was struggling to form.
“Charlotte,” he whispered, “I see Billy, too, but not the way you do. I don’t see his form when I’m upset. I see him in random faces. I saw him…” He swallowed hard. “I saw him just the other day when I was speaking to Reid. I looked up, and there he was, peering at me behind a window. He was Kane. An innocent boy – Penny’s boy – and he had the saddest eyes, and I kept thinking…Billy was like that too. You said so yourself. You played with him. He loved you.”
Tears fell from my eyes. “I loved him as a boy, too.”
A tear escaped his eye, trailing down the side of his face. “I’m sorry I took him away, dove. I may have killed the bad man, but I killed the boy, too. I killed both of them at the same time, and I never confronted that truth in its entirety.” He shook his head to himself, the remorse bleeding out of him. “I see these little boys everywhere. I remember Max before he got taken. He needed me so much. The way he looked at me, Char, with stars in his eyes. He was so fucking innocent. I thought about him so much over the years. Sometimes I would close my eyes and try to harness time, as fucking stupid as that sounds, and I would try to believe I could rewind it. That I could start over again with this life and take better care of him and the others.
“I left prison, but I’m still caged. Everything I ever did wrong, everyone I ever hurt, all the laws I broke, all the misery I am responsible for, all of it has come together to create this monstrous form, demanding retribution.” He let out a long breath, looking lost. “I just want to be free.”
I took his face into both my hands, urgently saying, “Then you need to forgive yourself, Conor. It’ll never go away until you learn to make amends with yourself.”
He searched my eyes, frowning. “I’m scared of what that means. Dominic, Max, Jem…all of them are bound to that time in our past, and we can’t shed those little boys inside of us. I can’t…I can’t leave that cage knowing they’re still trapped in there.”
I nodded, understanding, feeling shattered for him, for the