Darker Than Night - Amelia Wilde Page 0,31
“You loved your sister.” Brigit glances down at the journal as if she can see through the cover to the lists and notes I made at incredible risk to myself. If he’d ever found it— Her eyes come back up to mine. “I think you still love her.”
Hot air, fire down my throat, fire licking the walls of my chest. “I hate her.”
“What happened?” She steps forward, into the ring of light from my desk, and as much as I loathe this, as much as it’s killing me, there’s a part of me that wants a painting of her with the warm light in her hair and that awful book in her arms. “You can tell me, you know.”
“You?” Brigit actually flinches at my tone, though I have a death grip on it now. I need her to stop asking questions, to stop burning me from the inside out. I need something to make the pain go away, even if that means hurting her. “You’re nothing but a whore, and a mediocre one at best. Why would I tell you anything?”
A tear slips out from her lashes and she brushes it away, setting her jaw. “You’re only saying that to push me away. You don’t mean it.”
“Oh, sweetheart, but I do.” I put my hands in my pockets so she can’t see that they’re shaking. With rage. With hurt. Hard to say. “I mean it down to my fucking bones. You are nothing to me. You’re worse than nothing.” Brigit closes her eyes. “You’re a waste.”
She opens them again and takes a deep breath. “This isn’t you.”
I smile at her, making a big show of it. “This is all of me.”
“No, see, that’s the thing, it’s not.” The light skims across her eyes and reflects out to me, and suddenly she’s an avenging angel with the sweetest voice. “It’s not you. This is a show. Stop putting on a show, Zeus.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
It’s her turn to laugh, and somehow, some fucking how, it’s soft at the edges, not serrated. “I know everything.” She tosses the journal onto my desk and I don’t care at all but I hold my breath. “I don’t have to read all of these to know who you are. It’s right here. It’s been here the whole time. You’ve been here the whole time.” Her eyes grow darker, bolder, and I’m swept up in them the way an old piece of paper would be swept up in a hurricane. “You would cook for her, wouldn’t you? She liked shells and cheese. That’s something even a little boy can cook. But you didn’t make it for yourself. You kept a record, the way you keep a record of everything, because he would notice—” Understanding flashes through her eyes and sears through me. “There was someone else to replace the food for you.”
“The nanny,” I hear myself say, “when she could. But it doesn’t matter, Brigit. I hate her. I’ve always hated her. I have always hated my sister.”
“Bullshit.” She works the note down into its original form. “You are so full of shit, Zeus, and you don’t have to be that way. You don’t have to lie. You don’t have to hide. I can see you.” Brigit inches closer, closer and closer until she’s in arm’s reach, but I don’t touch her. If I do, it will be a killing jolt. “I see you.”
Being witnessed in this way chokes off my access to oxygen. I grab for it, a singular panic washing through my gut, and force a breath down. “It means nothing.”
“You don’t want to go after her because to you—” A smile ghosts over her face and disappears. “To you, she’s still that little girl. Shells and cheese were her favorite. And you would make them for her, because—”
“Because she was afraid of the stove.” Memories crowd in, their cage decimated, the bars ruined twists of metal. Demeter, six, her hair a tangled mess and her face red, crying at the foot of my bed in the middle of the night. She couldn’t reach the cupboard where he kept the bread and all she ever wanted were those fucking noodles. I don’t want to burn my hands. Her eyes were a luminous silver then, pleading and innocent, and what else was I supposed to do? “She was hungry, and she was afraid of getting burned.”
Cronos, holding her hand flat above one of the burners, not close enough to scorch her skin but