Page 50 of This Haunted Heart

“I can make it better,” she whispered.

“You can’t,” I whispered back.

She flung her arms around my neck, and another tear escaped the corner of my stinging gaze. I pushed her away.

“Let me fix it,” she sobbed.

“You can’t!” I said, baring my teeth at her, vision blurring.

“Just let me try!” She hugged me again, and I let her for a moment, too weak to turn her away a second time. Rynn kissed that tear off my cheek, and a pang shot through my heart. It was too much.

“Stop.” I shoved her off.

She caught herself on the tile, my housecoat tangled between her legs. Her positioning reminded me of that moment in her bedroom what felt like ages ago now, when I’d dumped her onto the floor beneath me. But there was only determination in her gaze now, no defeat.

“I can fix it,” she insisted, surging back onto her knees. “Let me make it better. Let me help you just like I used to!”

I tried to push her away, but she clung to me. Rynn’s touch broke down my defenses and shattered me. I felt like a mess of parts there on the floor. Fingers and bones and eyes and ears, hair and teeth, all in a heap. This time she pressed her lips to the burn in my skin, the one just below my throat. My next breath stuttered out of me, stirring her curls. Then my arms disobeyed my mind’s wishes, listening instead to my broken heart. They pulled her closer, right up against my chest where I hurt the most.

She kissed my face, kissed my burning cheeks, kissed my scars until I couldn’t tell which tears were mine and which had fallen from her. Her kisses hurt me so sweetly. Rynn’s hands made fists in the lapels of my shirt, her grip tight enough to turn her knuckles white.

This was what I’d once wanted. Her sorry, her begging to help me feel better, but now I just ached. I felt battered and bruised, like I’d been caught in a stampede and trampled on. Like my old wounds had opened up all at once and were fresh and raw again. Every inch of my skin throbbed.

Unable to withstand her touch any longer, I peeled her fingers off me and stood.

She climbed to her feet beside me, lips trembling. “I want to make it better. I want to help you hurt less . . . I don’t know how yet, but I want to try . . .”

“Banish all thoughts of freedom from your mind now,” I told her, and my cold tone stopped her from reaching for me again.

Her hair hung in damp curls over one shoulder as her gaze dropped to the floor. “I know you’re angry,” she said, wringing the quilted fabric of her borrowed housecoat. “God knows you have every right to be, but eventually this has to end. For your sake as well as mine. We can’t carry on this way forever.Youcan’t.”

“This will not end. I will not stop, and they will not stop!” I gestured broadly at the room and the ghosts I could feel haunting it. They crowded in, attracted to my growing anger, drawn in by my grief until the room grew so cold I could see my breath mingling with hers, could see the spirits leaving footprints in the wet tiles on the floor around her. The steam that had been curling off the bath water evaporated in an instant.

That’s what I wanted most. Her to grieve with me.

She stood there frowning, oblivious to their movements. “What are you talking about, Loch? Who arethey?”

“Doesn’t matter that you don’t believe in ghosts, Rynn. They’re here, and the spirits won’t stop. God knows I’ve tried to send them away from me, but they never stay gone. Twenty years I’ve been haunted by them because of you. Now it’syourturn.”

Her nose turned red, and her big doe eyes brimmed over. I abandoned her there in the lavatory like she’d abandoned me.

* * *

I didn’t make it very far, pacing the hall, trying tocalm my nerves for what felt like ages. Marching down the corridor, I shoved into my bedroom and slammed the door behind me. Then I fell against it, letting it hold up most of my weight. My head was pounding—my heart, too. At my sides, my fingers clenched so hard my nails dug little crescents into my palms.

I slid down my door to squat on the floor. There I remained, stuck in the cage of my mind until the light started to fade beyond my bedroom window. Before it got any darker, I needed to start a fire.

Footsteps in the hall stole my attention.

“Is that you, Rynn, or the ghosts?” I called through the door.

“It’s me,” she said somberly, and she must have carried a lantern with her, because an amber glow lit the edges of the door frame.

She set it on the floor, casting its light through the crack at the bottom, just like we used to when my father would lock us in somewhere as punishment for . . . God only knew what most of the time. A pantry or closet were his prisons of choice. When he was gone, we’d sit beside the door with a lantern to give the other some comfort, and we’d whisper to each other for as long as we were able.

We didn’t dare unlock the door. I tried that once to save Rynn, and Father broke three of my fingers.

Her shadow appeared, disrupting the light as she sat down next to her lantern, leaning against the door opposite me. “I’ve got just one question for you, Loch. I know you’re unhappy with me—as you should be—but I hope you’ll answer it anyway.”

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