Page 37 of Perilous Healing

“What?” he demands again, tone turning frustrated.

“I didn’t want you to look at me like you looked when you talked about him.” I open my eyes and a tear slips free. I wipe it away quickly. “Every time you spoke about Lucian and about what you’d have done to him if given the chance, you looked so—I don’t even know a word appropriate for the level of fury on your face. And rightfully so, but I didn’t want to become an enemy. I couldn’t stand the thought of you seeing me as one.”

He studies me, the frustration on his face fading away. “I wouldn’t have seen you as an enemy.”

“You would have,” I reply. “Because it’s how you’ve been looking at me ever since I showed up in Hope Springs.”

Chapter11

Silas

Ishould have stayed next door. At least there, the lines were drawn. But standing here in her kitchen, so close I can breathe in the scent of her ocean-pine shampoo, I can’t think straight.

An enemy?

Is that how I’ve been thinking of her?

“You’re not my enemy.”

“No?” she asks, then wipes a tear away. I long to reach forward and erase the pain from her heart. “You could have fooled me.”

“Lucian slaughtered my team. Those men were my friends. My brothers. He killed them in front of me, discarded their bodies like trash, then River spent a month torturing me. I bled. Over and over again. My bones broken. My soul practically ripped from my chest and thrown to the side like garbage right alongside my will to live.”

“I know.”

“No,” I reply. “You don’t. When that man came and freed me, I thought I was either hallucinating, or it was another trick of theirs. A way to taunt me with freedom only to rip it away at the last second. And every time I took a step forward, I wondered if it might be my last.” I move a bit closer, and Bianca tips her beautiful face to look up at me. “And then I heard you.” The words are spoken so softly they might as well be a whisper. “I heard a voice saysave her, and I knew I couldn’t leave you behind.”

Even though there’s a warning screeching in my head, even though I know it might be a mistake, I reach out and touch her face.

Gently. Just a whisper of contact.

But she closes her eyes and her lips part. I have to fight the urge to lean in and taste the lips I’ve been dreaming about. The woman I’ve been in love with for over a decade.

“With the first look at your face, I couldn’t help but wonder if you were some kind of angel in captivity. You were too beautiful for a place like that. Too beautiful to have blood splattered on your clothes, your face bruised.”

She snorts. “I was never an angel.”

“I know that now,” I reply as I drop my hand and take a step back to put some distance between us. “But I let you in. And I don’t let people in.”

Realization hits her, and her expression falters. “I’m sorry, Silas. If I could take it back, I would.”

“I haven’t been able to get you out of my head since that day, no matter how hard I tried. I locked myself in a cabin in the middle of the woods in Montana, but even that wasn’t far enough to outrun the ghost of you. I’d been determined to die out there in that cabin, until my sister had her accident and I was made sole guardian of Eloise.”

Bianca’s walls haven’t gone up once during this conversation, which is yet another first. Normally, her cheeks are red, her eyes hard and lacking all emotion as she buries anything that makes her feel.

But she’s open now, hearing my words.

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” she says. “But I wish I would have told you. Even if it meant you hated me from the moment we met, or you left me to die in that jungle. I wish I would have been honest, Silas.”

“I want to feel the peace you’re feeling right now. I want to find a way to let go of the anger I still carry. For my sister, my team, my brother-in-law, you—” It’s been so long since I spoke this much. Since I unloaded any kind of—anything, really.

“I was at their funeral.”

“What?” The words catch me off guard. “Who’s funeral?”

She swallows hard as though she’s afraid to continue. “Your sister and brother-in-law’s. I stayed in the back, as out of sight as I could be, but I wanted to be there even though I knew you wouldn’t want me there.”

Her confession forms a pit in my stomach as I recall one of the worst days of my life. Since our parents passed shortly after we’d graduated high school, and we’d never known any of our grandparents, it had just been Sierra and me.

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