Page 11 of The Girl and the Cobra

She sits a little straighter when she sees me, and I tug at the sleeves on my arms, making sure they’re down. The scars on my face are visible in the dull daylight, but hiding them is an impossible feat.

She’s the one who breaks the silence first, whispering a soft, “Hi.” The word is short and sweet, yet the trepidation is clear in her tone. She wants to talk to me, but at the same time she’s nervous and doesn’t quite know what to say.

I grind my teeth. Maybe this was a mistake after all. I should get up and go. This could only end badly, for her and for me, so it’s better for us to avoid it entirely.

“You’re Dr. Wolf’s other patient, right?” she asks. “I’m Mabel.”

Typically that’s when someone would tell the other person their name, but my jaw stays firmly clamped shut. Hmm. Maybe I’m not ready for this after all. I can’t seem to say a single word; you’d thinkIwas the one with his tongue cut out and not that Palmer asshole.

She doesn’t seem to take it personally. Her gaze falls to her lap, where she toys with her hands in what must be an anxious gesture. “He seems smart. Maybe too smart. I don’t want what he says to be true.”

As she talks, I finally look at her. I only feel comfortable looking at her from such close a distance because she’s not paying attention to me. She’s not studying the scars on my face, so I take it upon myself to study her.

Her blond hair is messy, halfway between straight and curly. There are strands of it that are a more golden blond than others, and the length easily falls past her shoulders. She’s thin, like she doesn’t eat enough. Her body is currently being drowned underneath the hoodie she wears.

It’s like she doesn’t want the world to see her. Like she wants to be invisible. As someone who was invisible by his own choice for years, I understand the feeling well—though I don’t know why she would feel this way.

Suddenly she turns her head in my direction, meeting my stare with eyes the color of the current sky: a solid gray. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

I should look away, stop staring at her, but for some strange reason I can’t. All I do is shake my head no. If I could use my words right now, I’d tell her I don’t have access to the outside world, so if she’s been in the news or something, I haven’t seen or heard about it.

Her shoulders relax once I shake my head. It’s almost as if she’s grateful that I don’t know. I suppose I should feel the same since she doesn’t know me and what I’ve done.

“How long have you been here? A while?” Still she tries to make conversation with me, and my jaw is clamped shut, like someone used superglue on my mouth to keep it closed. After a while, she whispers, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have asked.”

The crestfallen expression on her face is the only reason I finally speak, though I don’t answer her most recent question. I answer the first one she spoke: “Tristan.”

“Tristan,” she repeats my name as a slow smile spreads across her face.

That smile… it’s the first smile I’ve seen in, fuck, I don’t even know how long. Longer than my time with Wolf. Longer than my imprisonment after my failed coup of the Black Hand. Noone ever smiled at me when I was the man behind the mask, the Cobra.

It’s been years since someone smiled at me like that.Maybe the first time in my life.

Maybe it’s because of that smile, but I find myself asking, “Why are you out here when you should be in with Wolf?” I can’t take my eyes off her. The smile has faded by now, but the feeling it gave me remains. It really did light up her whole face.

Mabel shakes her head once. “He, um, he said something that made me feel… not good. He thinks he knows what happened, but…” She trails off and bites the inside of her cheek. “He doesn’t. I don’t think.” The moan she lets out before she covers her face with her hands is one that resonates with me, just as her smile did.

She’s upset. Wolf upset her. The latter of which is unsurprising; he’s an asshole through and through. The former is more noteworthy to me because of the simple fact that I care. I care that she’s upset.

I don’t know why. I don’t know her. This is the first time we’ve spoken. The only thing I can think of is that smile she gave me—how it stirred something deep within me. How I want that smile to come back. She can’t smile if she’s upset.

“I don’t know,” she mumbles. “Everything is just too complicated.”

Now that’s something I can understand.

“I hated everything Wolf said when I first got here,” I admit, though I do keep to myself the fact that he was pretty liberal with the shocks. Anytime I said something, tried to do something… well, Wolf took it upon himself to recondition me—and now look at me: a broken man who lost his mind when a pretty girl smiled at him.

“Now, I… I still hate everything he says.” When I say that, she chuckles—a soft, feminine sound that rattles me to my core.Just like her smile, that laugh is like nothing I’ve heard before. When you’re in my line of work, when your family is on the Black Hand, smiles and laughter are not things you see often.

Or, apparently, ever.

“But,” I go on, though it’s much harder to continue after hearing her laugh, “he’s not wrong most of the time. He sees things most people don’t.” Because he’s a psychopath himself, but that’s something I keep to myself. Mabel might be traumatized and working through her own issues, but she doesn’t need to know her new therapist is a madman.

Mabel’s voice comes out so soft I hardly hear it when she says, “If he’s right, then my entire life was a lie. Every happy memory is wrong. How am I supposed to live with something like that?”

Her words resonate with me more than they should, but all I end up doing is shrugging and whispering, “I don’t know. You just do.”

She looks as though she wants to say something else, but a third person breaks into our conversation with a harsh, “Mabel.” We both glance to the patio door and see Wolf standing there, frowning slightly. “It seems you did not go to the restroom.” Then his narrowed stare flicks to me and he adds, “And you, Tristan. You’re supposed to be upstairs in your room while Mabel is here.”

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