Page 168 of Mama Si's Paradise

Maybe I had a bigger death wish than I’d realized, but I couldn’t wait to see what he’d made for me.

“I have a confession to make, Fall,” Grey said as we walked deeper down the hallway. The walls were bare here, no paintings on them. No flowers. No nothing—just small lamps here and there to illuminate the way somewhat.

“You do?” I looked down at where our hands connected, how tightly he held me, and gently at the same time. It blew my mind how comfortable I was—how? I didn’t even like Valentine touching me, and I considered him a friend. Avery closefriend if my reaction to the thought of him dying today was any indication.

It was different with Grey, though. Everything was different with Grey.

“I’ve been watching you,” he said, as we turned right and continued toward a black wooden stairway.

“Oh.” Not exactly something new. He was always watching me.

“I’ve been listening to your stories,” he continued, and I almost missed a step up those stairs.

“My stories?”

“The ones you tell the brides sometime during tea or meals.” Goose bumps rose on my forearms. I hadn’t really told the other brides much—except what I liked to do, and silly stories from school while growing up, the times I’d gotten drunk with my high school friends, and the books I’d read.

But instead of being afraid or freaked out by the confession, I was suddenly curious to know… “And?”

We reached the second floor of his tower and the hallway didn’t look any different. Just as dark and as empty, and he took us to the only set of doors to the far right.

“And I wanted to give you a piece of what you had. What you miss,” he said. “I understand it’s not the same thing.” That thought seemed unfinished, so I waited for him to continue, looking at his face as he focused on the doors ahead, but he said nothing else.

His jaws clenched a bit. His hold on my hand tightened before he let go to reach for the handles.

That when I realized, Greywas nervous.

He was actually nervous right now, and I could have laughed—but then he pushed both doors open, and I forgot what I was thinking completely.

“It’s just some things I was able to gather from here and there. Please, come in.” And he stepped through the doors.

So, I did.

The room I was looking at was maybe twice the size of thebedroom I slept in, except this one was different. This one wasbright.

Three crystal chandeliers on the high ceiling were on, spilling warm white light, illuminating every corner of the rectangular room, divided into four sections. To the right, near the corner, there were canvases, some empty and some with colors on them, and a small table full of tubes and brushes and various glasses. Two wooden isles painted black were near the wall, empty, just like the black and silver frames leaning on their sides.

Then across from them, in the other corner, there were instruments, old instruments. A flute, a violin, a guitar and a tambourine, a cello and even a beautiful clarinet. They were all placed on the floor near a low armchair and a table, atop which was a record player, the paint of it purple and chipped everywhere, the transparent lid open, a vinyl already inside.

The window that took over the walls across from the entrance was the biggest I’d seen in the castle, and the highest panels were made out of mirrors so that the light from the chandeliers reflected on them and came back to the room twice as bright.

On the left was a library, a small library with a black wooden shelf against the wall, and possibly not even a hundred books on it. Two chairs and a long lounging couch were in front of it, and in the middle of the room, just a few feet from the window, was a cage.

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in this castle. The way the iron twisted and intertwined together was a work of art, and it washuge. Easily a few heads taller than me, and the wooden base on which it stood reached up to my knees. Inside it were more birds than I could count, chirping at the same time, their feathers as colorful as faerie hair and wings as they flew around one another in the spacious cage.

“That corner is empty right now because I’m still waitingfor the sewing machine you always wanted. I’ve bargained with the witches—it’s only a matter of time before it arrives,” Grey said, as if he couldn’t see that every drop of blood inside my veins had turned to stone. As if he couldn’t see that I wasn’t even breathing.

When I get really big, I’m going to find my way home,I used to promise myself before sleep when I was little, when I wanted to be everything I could be, everything I’d ever dreamed of being. I wanted to have what I calledmy kingdom, and in it, I wanted tomakemyself every day, little by little. With music and colors and words and threads.

“Birds don’t like it in the Whispering Woods all that much, but I’ve been training them. I sometimes let them out of the cage and they always return. I think they like this room,” Grey continued, stepping deeper into the room, closer to the cage—even more nervous than before. My eyes found him, and I was tempted to call them liars. There was no way that a man like him, one everyone consideredmadanddangerousanda murdererto have made all of this for me. There was no way that a man like him wasfeeding birdsin a cage as I watched from the doorway still, too shocked to move.

And still my eyes insisted that he was.

Right there, by the cage, with a plastic container full of bird food in his hand, feeding them while they flew around and chirped like crazy.

And when he was done, he put the container down near the cage’s foundation, and he turned to me, looking so out of place, so uncomfortable in his own skin that I wassmiling.I was fuckingsmilingat the miserable look on his face, and my poor heart all but burst right out of me.

Grey kept on talking.

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