Page 176 of Sinful Desires
“Forgive me. For the lies. For the silence. For the pain I put in your chest when all I ever wanted was to keep it safe.”
He looked at me like it hurt to breathe.
“For making you feel alone, when you were never anything butmine. Because from the moment I saw you, something in me quieted. Something in me finally knew peace. Your soul is the only place mine has ever truly belonged.”
He brought my hand to his lips, holding it there like a vow, and I closed my eyes. Because part of me wanted to believe him. But the rest of me needed to see it. To feel it. I needed proof. The kind that didn’t come easily.
“Then prove it to me, Théo.”
His lips brushed my knuckles. “How?”
I opened my eyes, my chest heavy, but steady.
“Take me with you. Let me face your worst mistake beside you.”
Chapter
Forty-Three
“Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime.”
? Mineko Iwasaki
Théo
In the military, when I told them I hated noise, they’d thought I was full of shit. Said I was antisocial, arrogant, too serious to hit the bars with them.
But the truth was simpler. Noise triggered something buried so deeply I could barely name it. That low, mechanical rhythm had rewired my brain.
Not just any noise.
Thisnoise.
The kind you heard when someone was trapped between life and death. The ticking. The beeping. The pulse of machines tracking a body’s last threads.
I’d taken bullets. Four times. Pulled the metal out with my own hands. Gotten stitched up on floors, in basements, in submarines, in the back of a moving car.
Never set foot in a fucking hospital. Not once.
Not because I was brave. On the fucking contrary.
Because I couldn’t bear this sound, the one drilling into my skull right now. This sterile, shallow beeping that didn’t mean life. It meant waiting for death with clean sheets and fluorescent lights.
Fourth floor.
Intermediate ward.
The place where time stretched too long and hope turned sour.
It was very early morning now, the sun rising slowly. The nurses let us in after one of them recognized my face from years ago.
Scarlett’s hand slid into mine as we stepped into his room.
The air reeked of antiseptic and synthetic lemon, hospital-grade cleaner clinging to the walls.
Medicine leaked out of plastic tubes. A fresh bouquet of white peonies sat on the nightstand, still dripping from their wrapping. My father’s favorite. My mother must’ve brought them.
Next to it, a family photo in a silver frame: The three of us on my sixteenth birthday in Hawaii, standing barefoot in front of the ocean, each wearing those floral necklaces they hand you at check-in.
