Page 79 of Sweet Nightmares
But was that it?
Jane didn’t want to think so.
“Nightmare,” Jane said slowly, not fully knowing where she was going with it. She brought her knees up to her chest, splashing the water around her body. “Would you let me go? Would you break our bargain and free me?”
His face paled, and his mouth fell into a flat line, and fear laced the edges of his eyes. “I don’t want to.” There was more he wanted to say, Jane could tell, but he didn’t say it. He pinched his mouth shut and almost stared at her pleadingly.
“But would you?” she asked and stopped breathing for a second too long. But she was met with silence, and a dark sadness swirled in his eyes.
He grunted. “You want to leave me?”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I don’t.”
His silver eyebrows crinkled together. “I don’t understand.” The words seemed to be hard for him to say.
Jane didn’t know what to say. She had gotten her answer. He wasn’t willing to let her go. She would forever belong to someone else. So there wasn’t much left to say. “I should probably get out and get going. It’s my sister’s Mirror Rite tonight, and I have Royalle Ballet auditions this morning. I may not be home until very late.”
He sat back on his heels, examining her. “Have her bargain with me.”
“No, fucking way.” She sat up more, moving the water, her fingers curling around the porcelain.
He winced. “You don’t trust me?”
Jane swallowed past the lump in her throat. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him. She did to a degree. She understood that he would never let her be physically harmed. But he didn’t have a heart. He didn’t understand emotions, and Jane feared he might accidentally hurt Quinnevere and not mean to, because he so rarely did anything for selfless reasons.
In fact, she’d never seen him do anything for a selfless reason.
The silence dangled between them like a spiderweb. Unsettling yet beautiful in its way.
“You don’t.” He nodded, and a hint of something flashed across his unreadable features. “I would never do anything to hurt you.”
Jane pinched her lips and ripped her gaze from his, instead looking at her bare legs and callousless feet. Feet that no longer belonged to a ballerina. “You already have.” Her voice broke. She thought she was over it. She’d thought it no longer affected her. But she was wrong. It felt like her ribcage was being pried open with rusty clamps.
He leaned into the bathtub and tipped up her chin with his thumb. “You said that once before, after your husband’s death, but I didn’t care to know what it meant.” He rubbed his thumb along her jaw. “I wish to know now. I think I would like to know you, too.”
He echoed her sentiment from the vampire lair when she had said she wanted to know him.
“I—” he paused and tapped his empty chest. “I remember what it is to care about someone else.” He sighed, frustrated.“While I no longer truly have that ability. I would like to try.”For you. The words lingered in the air between them, unsaid.
Jane’s throat bobbed, and she placed her hand on the surface of the water, feeling it and pondering if she should let him have this—if she should let him see her pain. Because this pain was the unbearable kind. She could endure torture and assaults, but showing him how much he’d taken from her felt so much harder.
“You have to command me to tell you,” Jane said.
“Why?” His eyes narrowed.
“Just do it.”
“I command you to tell me how I have hurt you.”
Jane pinched her eyes tight for a moment. “You stole ballet from me.” The words were a breath.
“Ballet hurt you. It caused your bruises,” he said so earnestly.
Jane scoffed. “You can’t truly believe that.”
“I believe the words you tell me are true.”
Jane shook her head. “Then you’re naïve.”
