Page 215 of Boy of Ruin
But I tried.
And that’s what I say now. “I tried.” My hands are shaky against the bumper on the hospital bed, but it’s not from the tremor. Not from what the Forgues did to me. Instead, they’re trembling from the same reason my head hurts. My body. The reason my eyes feel achy, my pulse flying from what’s coming.
It’s the grief that’s making me shake. Threatening to send me spiraling.
I’ve been here before, when she ran from me. From them. I’ve felt this pain.
I almost didn’t survive it. I think I won’t now, either.
“I tried really hard for her, but I’m just not…” I shake my head, “I’m just not what she needs.”
“But she loves you,” he says, as if that excuses anything. As if that means we can keep playing this game between the three of us. Keep fucking each other over, nearly killing each other over something like that.
Love.
That’s not real love. I’m not even sure what real love is. I’ve never felt it, save from Sid. She’d take both of us if we’d give her that. But I’m too selfish.
So is he.
I can’t make her choose in this war.
“I love her, too, and when I’m gone…” I can barely say the words, the pain in my chest overwhelming. “I want you to make sure she knows that. Let her talk about me. Fucking…let her grieve.”
He nods. “I will,” he promises me, choking on the words from his grief. “I will.”
And he doesn’t ask where I’m going. He doesn’t say another word, and neither do I when I lock eyes with him and nod, and for a long, long moment, we hold each other’s gaze.
I see his pain. I think he sees mine too.
I see what they made him into, but I see something else, beyond it. I see how he tried to fight against it. How he still has a heart, even though they tried to carve it right out of him. And like mine, his beats for her.
Just her.
I don’t need to say any of that and neither does he. So instead, I nod once more, tap my hand against the edge of the bed, clench it into a fist, and turn around, walking out of his room without a glance back.
When he comes in, he brings the heaviness with him.
Jeremiah has always been impossible to ignore. Not just to me. To anyone. He’s impossible to look away from, tall and fucking gorgeous as he is. He commands a room without saying a word.
And for me?
I’ve always felt like I’ve orbited around him. Like he held my entire world. Even when I ran, I felt his pain at finding me gone.
And those years we were apart?
I missed him, too, even though I had thought he’d terrorized me throughout my life because he was insane.
And he is.
But so am I.
That’s why, when he comes in my room, an IV in my arm to hydrate me, I tense, and not from fear. Even after what he did to Lucifer, I’m not afraid of him. I don’t think I’m even…angry.
Lucifer stabbed him.
They’ve both fucked with one another long before I was around.
Instead, I’m rigid from something else.
