Page 103 of Raven

“I’m glad you came over,” she says.

My doubtful brain tells me that she just needs to have someone around to feel safe, so I ask, “Are you scared of storms?”

She raises her face to look at me, her eyes dropping to my lips for a second. We are so close that if I leaned in just several inches, I could kiss her.

She smiles, meeting my eyes again. “Not at all. I thought maybe you are.”

She chuckles as she buries her face in my chest, and I’m glad she’s not looking because I can’t keep my grin in check.

“I grew up among cruel men with fucked-up moral compasses,” she says. “The worst things happened in the daytime. Occasionally, I was forced to watch. Night? I’m not afraid of the dark. You can’t see the color red. Or pain in someone’s eyes. Or broken bones. Blood is black at night.”

Many do atrocious things at night because it’s too dark to see their depraved selves. That’s why basements are so common for committing crimes. I know it too well.

I think of Emily and try to shoo the grim thoughts away.

Maddy shifts in my arms, and I still, hoping she doesn’t pull away.

“Darkness doesn’t scare me, Rave. People do.”

Am I one of those people? I stopped thinking about that. She is not scared of me, never was. Maybe despises me. That’s probably even worse. Or puts up with me—that’s the worst. Any emotion is better than indifference.

“Tell me something about yourself,” she says.

“Why do you want to know about my past?”

I want to share part of myself with her. But why would she care? She doesn’t need to know what a shitty person I was before Mac picked me up. I wish me and her met differently. I wish I was a more approachable man, with some of her goodness so that I didn’t have to blackmail her into fucking me.

And here’s the truth. That night I confronted her by the Thai restaurant, if she’d refused to go along with my blackmail, I would’ve never told on her. I would’ve never told Archer if she asked me not to, despite that secret jeopardizing Ayana and probably my work.

I hope one day she knows that. Not now, of course. She might break off our deal and would refuse to ever see me again, and then… well, then I would have to burn this fucking island down or do something stupid in anger. Or leave for the mainland, so I don’t have to live with my regrets about her.

She doesn’t look at me when she says quietly, “So you can fuck me in all ways possible, but I don’t get to know you while you do?”

That’s Maddy. She’s become very straightforward lately. There’s a peculiar fearlessness about her, the awkward honesty in the way she asks questions. I wonder if that’s a no-nonsense Eastern European trait.

“Where did you get the scars on your body? There are so many,” she says.

In the rare moments when I actually took off my shirt in front of her, it was impossible to miss them. My body is a map of all fucked-up things humans do to each other and to themselves.

She’s not looking at me right now. Her fingers draw some invisible patterns on my chest, moving slowly, making my body hum in response.

And I talk.

“Fights,” I say. “Accidents.” It’s easier to talk about scars than people. But I’m lying. Most of my scars did come from people. “Getting home late,” I say, thinking about my foster father number three. Talking about the holy trinity that brought in all the suffering. “Doing bad in school. Talking back. Breaking the lawnmower by accident. Standing up for my little foster sister when he was drunk. Laughing too loudly.”

“You have a foster sister?”

“She’s gone,” I say, my heart twisting at the words, because I never told anyone about Emily except Mac. “Technically, I had several. Multiple foster homes. But only one mattered.”

“Why did you go to juvenile prison?”

So, she knows. I’m not surprised.

“For stabbing my foster father.” Eleven times.

I expect her to raise her head and look at me in unease, but she doesn’t. Her fingers continue moving in the same way on my chest.

She is silent for some time. “Why?” she finally asks softly.

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