Page 372 of Alchemised
“It’s fine,” he said without looking at her. “I thought you might want to, but of course, you’re not familiar with the space. If there’s anything you want, I’ll bring it to you.”
She gave a stilted nod.
“I’ll walk you back,” he said.
“No, you should go,” she said, pressing her hand against the wall until the manacle twinged inside her wrist. “I’ll slow you too much. I know the way.”
His eyes flickered. “If that’s what you want.”
He turned away, and she reached out on instinct. “Kaine …”
He stopped, and she instantly withdrew her hand.
She forced a tight smile. “Be careful. Don’t die.”
He stood unmoving for a moment, staring at her, and then turned away. “Right.”
IT WAS PAST NIGHTFALL WHEN he returned. Helena was sitting on the sofa in her room, staring at the pattern on the rug as she waited. She had spent the whole day trying to be sure of the lie, piecing everything together again and again.
He paused in the doorway, not entering, as if to make clear that it was to be a brief, impersonal visit. She watched him carefully. He’d always been prone to being still. She remembered that about him.
“Do you know what books you’d like?” he asked at length.
She shook her head. “I’ve been thinking today.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Your plan doesn’t make any sense to me,” she said.
“Well, not all of us have your exceptional intellect,” he said lightly, but he didn’t move from the doorway.
Helena studied the space between them. If Morrough were watching, what would he see? Nothing. There was nothing to see, there was only emptiness between them.
“Today, you didn’t say you’d always come for me,” she said. “You used to say that when I had to go. When I—” She blinked, one hand spasming. “I think. Didn’t you?”
Kaine’s face twisted into a grimace, and he stepped into the room, shutting the door, and leaning against it. “I thought it a rather empty promise at this point.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault. You looked everywhere. Mandl—”
He gave a harsh laugh. Helena started, her heart slamming into her throat.
“Right. Thank you. Of course,” he said, the sarcasm bright in his tone. “Everywhere. Yes, I looked everywhere, didn’t I?”
She stared at him as his voice turned musing but his eyes remained hard and glittering.
“Through wreckage, and piles of corpses, through prisons and mines and laboratories, and across a damned continent. I looked everywhere—except the one place that mattered.” His voice cracked, but he grinned. “Thank you, truly, for crediting my exceptional efforts.”
There was something familiar about the way he was speaking. Her stomach curdled, and her vision flickered. His face suddenly loomed and she wasn’t sure where she was. Past? Present? Both?
He gave another laugh, startling her back into the moment.
His expression had warped. “Not my fault?” he was saying; his teeth showed, bared at her. “Is that what you expect me to tell myself?” He laid a pale hand over his heart. “Do you think embracing eternal victimhood will make me feel better?”
He was seething with so much rage, she could feel it in the air. She looked down, trying to breathe slowly.
There were so many things she was trying not to think about, struggling to keep her face above the surface before she drowned in the morass of her mind.
But she knew that he was lying to her. There was something he didn’t want her to know, that he was determined to keep her from realising, and if she could remember more clearly, she’d know what it was.
