· LIBBY ·
She was sitting alone in the reading room when Nico came bounding in, the chair beside hers at the table making a clatter when he dropped himself into it.
“So,” he said. “I was thinking.”
“Don’t hurt yourself,” she murmured.
“Tighten up, Rhodes, not your finest,” Nico chirped, undeterred. “Anyway, listen—wait,” he amended, immediately interrupting himself to glance around the room like somebody might unexpectedly pop out of it. “Atlas isn’t here, is he?”
Libby reread the sentence she’d been trying to read for ten minutes. “Tristan said he was here yesterday afternoon. You could check the schedule.”
“We have a schedule? Right, whatever. I had to check in with Max yesterday, so, you know, go figure. Anyway, about the sinister plot—”
“Stop calling it that.” She kept her head down, trying fruitlessly to read, but Nico nudged her shoulder.
“Will you just listen to me? I know you’re convinced the world will end or whatever—”
“I’m not convinced, Varona. I’m sure.”
“Right, for reasons you won’t explain,” Nico blithely agreed, with obvious plans to dismiss said reasons entirely, to which Libby said nothing. “I know you’re being very secretive about the whole thing, which is fine, albeit not the cutest look for you—”
Libby turned the page in her book as disruptively as it was possible to do with a thousand-year-old manuscript that pre-discovered Planck’s constant.
“—but just so you know, I think I’m getting through to Reina.”
Libby raised a hand to cover a yawn. “In what way?”
“In that I saw three dots come up the other day.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she was obviously thinking about responding.”
“Or,” Libby sagely pointed out, “it was just an accident.”
Nico made an alarming motion, like he’d considered high-fiving himself before choosing as a last-minute alternative to slap the table with an open palm. “She opened the message, Rhodes!” he trumpeted. “That’s significant enough. I know her well enough to know she’s thinking about it. Me. This,” he clarified, as Libby gave him her most long-suffering look of impatience. “All we need is a few more dots and I’m ninety percent sure I can convince her to do the experiment.”
“What exactly happened between the two of you last year?” Libby asked irritably, abandoning the pretense of reading. “Tristan and Callum I obviously understand. Even Tristan and Parisa to some degree. But you and Reina?”
Nico shrugged. “She contains multitudes. I deeply respect her labyrinthine mind.”
“Whatever.” Libby raised a hand to the throbbing pulse behind her eyes. “I told you, whether Reina might eventually feel up for ending the world with you won’t matter if you only have months left to live. You really should be more worried about finishing off the ritual.”
“The murder thing, you mean?” Nico said, ostensibly as a distinction between the other, more mundane sinister plot.
“Yes, the murder thing.” How wonderful for him that he could joke about it. How laudable, really, that he would prove the better of them yet again by still being the dauntless one, the untouchable one, as if nothing else had changed.
But things were different now, even if Nico wasn’t. It was noticeable, the distinction that now seemed to tear the fabric of reality between them, which Nico might be willing to ignore but that Libby lacked the luxury to overlook. They’d found synchronicity once, reflective sides of some cosmic mirror game, until she’d killed someone. Now, everything she did had to have a reason. She had altered the rules of her morality, rearranging herself down to the marrow, the basis of her code. Now, everything she did had to be in service to something purposeful. It had to have a meaning. It had to serve an end.
Lifeless eyes blurred before her vision, the stillness of familiar hands, disembodied prophecy still following her like a ghost. He will destroy the world—
(What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes, and who will you betray to do it?)
Abruptly, Libby shut the book and leaned back in her chair. “Look,” she snapped at Nico, “I don’t like it either, but it’s looking more likely that we’ll have to eventually complete the ritual. It’s either that or we’re going to be trapped here until we all die.” Of all the things she’d gleaned from her return, that one seemed the most pressingly inescapable. That, and the fact that they’d been fucked the moment they accepted Atlas Blakely’s card. Now, of course, it was too late, and there was only a limited amount of recourse; a narrow crevice of acceptability between sacrificial murder and world-altering apocalypse where Libby was meant to shepherd the others and try to live.
“But I thought we agreed on option two—you know, the one where we stay here and keep contributing to the archives,” Nico pointed out. “That is what you’re doing here, isn’t it?” he said in a tone of voice she recognized. It was about as sly as Nico ever got, which meant he was on the unlikely edge of prudence.
“Yes,” she said, meaning yes, but that had been before she realized the archives might not give her the materials she needed to save herself.
Or, alternatively, it meant no, but go away.
He ignored the subtext. “Well, then I hate to bring this unsavory detail to your attention, but I don’t think just living here is enough.” To that Libby spared him an iota of her attention. “Atlas has lived here the whole time, sure, but I’m sure the other members of his cohort must have thought of that, don’t you think? And he’s able to come and go as necessary, so it has to be more than just a matter of physical location. I mean come on, Rhodes, think about it, it’s simple conservation of energy. What we get from the archives depends on what we contribute to them—which,” Nico reminded her, “even living here, you technically have yet to do.”
Ah yes, how she loved being reminded about her yearlong sabbatical, which was purely by choice and not at all against her will. “I’m researching, Varona.” She raised the manuscript, and the book below it, which was a treatise on naturalism. “See? You’ll recall that this is what it looks like, I’m sure.”
“Yes, but be honest, Rhodes. Naturalism? Elements of quantum mechanics that we’ve already proven and defined? You’re researching things that have already been done,” Nico pointed out with an edge of fatality, “which is probably not reason enough for the library to keep you alive. By your own logic, anyway.”
That Nico happened to be correct—or that Libby had already come to that conclusion herself—did not seem worth mentioning. Nor did the fact that it was all the archives would give her, refusing even the barest show of scholarly ambition with its familiar, amicable letdown of REQUEST DENIED. A proverbial let’s just be friends to Libby’s most heartfelt seduction.
A sudden image of Nico stroking the archive’s walls, murmuring sensually for the library to be a good girl and produce some new phenomena for him drove Libby to a blink of temporary madness. “So you’re the one making the rules now, Varona?”
“Technically no, since I’m not completely certain I believe your reasons for avoiding the experiment Atlas chose us for in the first place.”
Libby could feel herself climbing the usual rungs of fury that seemed to only become accessible when Nico spoke. “So when I told you that I set off a nuclear bomb just to warn you that Atlas could destroy the world, you took that as—what, just a passing whim?” she demanded, cheeks heating with new-old rage.
“Did you?” asked Nico, temporarily destabilizing her.
“I . . . What?” she spluttered.
“Did you really set off a nuclear bomb just to deliver a warning?” he said, and Libby found herself so stunned by the question she didn’t even produce a reply.
“See, I’m not entirely sure you actually believe that,” Nico said plainly. “And I don’t think you really believe some obscure doomsday foretelling, either. So as much as I love my ongoing servitude to a bunch of books that may or may not be tracking me, using me, or eventually plotting to kill me—which I do, Rhodes, I love it,” Nico offered with gusto, “I also don’t know what you want me to do about it. I’ve already killed Tristan loads of times, so.” A shrug. “I’m pretty sure the archives are on board.”
“I swear you’re regressing,” Libby murmured to herself, closing her eyes. She should have been pleased, probably, that he was finally summoning the capacity to be more than just a disrespecting rival. In practice, though, his change in temperament since her return was like being trapped on the weighted end of a seesaw. Without a balanced push and pull between them, she was just sitting on the ground.
“The point is,” he continued, “either you’re right that we need to kill someone or the archives are going to come for us individually to enact our brutal collective demise,” Nico summarized, an obvious dramatization of the actual information she had relayed to him, “in which case you need to do something big—like, for example, opening a portal to another strand of the multiverse—”
“Which I won’t be doing,” she interrupted flatly.
“Okay, so then you’re just living here and purposely doing nothing to save yourself because you’re sad and you hate the world,” said Nico. “Or.”
She chose very pointedly not to look at him.
“Or maybe, as a subset of misanthropy,” he mused, “you do want it, everything we’re capable of in here. Maybe, even though it’s wrong, or immoral, or unethical, or just selfish—maybe you still want everything we can do because we came here. Maybe what you actually came back for was this—us. Everything we had yet to do, everything we had yet to make. Maybe you came back for the power we were promised. The power that, for better or worse, we chose.” His voice was uncharacteristically raw with sincerity. “And don’t you think I can understand that, Rhodes?”
She said nothing.
“Look, I get that you think it’s wrong or whatever. I get that, I know you’re always worried about the consequences. I know that part of this, the part you’re not telling me about last year, and whatever happened with Fowler—”
Nico broke off. “I know you think the blood on your hands is unforgivable.” His eyes were soft with sympathy, like he already understood it. “But maybe you can accept that what happened to you, the impossible situation you were in . . . it wasn’t your fault. You did what you had to do to save yourself, so maybe you could let yourself move on from it. And maybe,” he added, like he was about to deliver the hilarious punch line to an uproarious joke, “maybe you could actually, you know. Trust me.”
Trust him. A quiet voice, prayerful knees. Your secrets are safe with me, Libby Rhodes.
Libby felt a shiver of recognition and turned away from him, then rose to her feet instead, prickly with something. Maybe it was the fact that Nico was being kind instead of obnoxious, which wasn’t a texture of his personality she knew what to do with. Maybe it was the fact that he was giving her the benefit of the doubt; assuming, for once, that what lived in the unspoken was the best of her.
Or maybe it was because he was wrong.
“Can we talk about this later?” She reached for her books, turning away just as Nico caught her by the elbow. One hand wrapped tightly around the crook of her arm, sending an unintentional shiver up her spine.
“No, Rhodes. We’re talking now.”
The impact of his magic reaching out for hers was explosive, zero to sixty in one heartbeat flat. Libby felt it like a snare, the whiplash of a sudden noose, her breath catching in her throat fast enough to choke on.
She tried to pull herself away but it was too late, the building blocks of whatever they were already merging like an unlosable game of Jenga, pieces piling up on the shared foundation of power. She recalled again, unhappily, the sense that over the course of a year without him, she had known with hazy, fading certainty the necessity of Nico; the way that she would not have been trapped, not even for a moment, if Nico had been there. The fact that if, under very different circumstances, she had been lost with Nico, then she wouldn’t have been lost at all.
There was a giddiness to their powers joining, a hyperactivity that Libby had already long associated with Nico himself. An energy that didn’t pulse, not like it did with Tristan, but shot wildly outward, like fireworks—combustion that happened naturally, like stars colliding midair. The space between them was both necessary and insubstantial, like if they’d actually collided, neither of them would have noticed. It was, as it always was, pieces of her in pieces of him, the tangled web of it, and of them—the thing she both missed and had tried to deny.
Come on, just do it. She felt his magic lapping at hers with a feverish, childlike insistence. Come on. Just give in.
Unbearable. God, but she could feel herself stretching out again, filling the house, ready to swell beyond it, like outgrowing the bars of her container.
Fucking stupid. Fine.
Temperature was already high, pressure was already there, a path of circuitry was easily cleared. All that was required now—which Nico could take the helm and provide, but that he was waiting on her to do because, who knew, because he was bored, or trying to make a point, or just being himself, and annoying—was force. Something to convert the instability of his irresponsible burst of magic into kinetic energy that could be of some mutual use.
What did he want her to do, start a fire? Make another fucking bomb? No, but at least one thing had changed between them. Because now it wasn’t about what he wanted her to do.
It was about what she wanted.
(And oh, here was the secret—she wanted. That was the trouble of it, the danger of having returned here. Of everything she’d sacrificed to be here, because now it didn’t matter what she’d learned or who she’d been. The Libby Rhodes that Nico claimed to know was exactly, secretly, the problem. Her existence and Libby’s own were fundamentally in opposition. They shared a body, a potential and a set of powers, but not a state of mind.
The old Libby was the one saying no. Yet another paradox: that Nico could look at Libby and still see her as she was—still believe her to be in desperate need of pushing—when she was indescribably, irreversibly different. Now, she was the Libby who’d burned through time and space, who concerned herself less and less with the ending Ezra had been willing to die for—to kill for—just to prevent, and that was exactly the problem. Because she had trusted Ezra once. Because she believed him, even if she hated him. Because who could be warned of the empire’s fall and still carry on as before?
Only someone who’d paid the highest cost just to stand here. Someone who’d gone through hell itself just to belong here.
And now, when everything she wanted was so temptingly in reach—)
It was near-instantaneous, like the strike of a match, and when Libby’s vision cleared—when the two of them disentangled, Nico’s hand falling from her arm with the exultation of a prayer—she smelled the unmistakable presence of roses. Felt the brush of a dogwood overhead, like a congratulatory stroke of fondness. Libby still held traces of heat in her mouth, like the scorch of rubber on asphalt. A drop of Nico’s sweat fell from his brow, meeting the blades of grass below with a delicate, whispered sizzle.
Outside the sun was high, the heat of July like a sudden conjoined incandescence. Magic rippled the grass in outward-spreading rings of consequence.
They’d managed to transport themselves from the reading room to the gardens. Not bad. Farther than the painted room to the kitchen, which two years ago they’d needed Reina to do.
Interesting.
Nico was watching her, waiting. Radiating, with so much unspoken triumph that Libby feared for the pastoral fault lines underfoot. (Not that London was known for earthquakes, but with this kind of incomprehensible magic tossed around at a madman’s whim, who could ever really be sure?)
“Think about it,” Nico said, and the look on his face, it was absolutely punchable. Libby tried very hard to hate him and it was easy, like breathing. Like convincing herself there was any substantial difference between coincidence and fate.
“Yes, Varona, I’m thinking about it.” She left off on a growl and turned away, storming off from the line of dogwoods and taking a sharp turn from the gardens to the house.
Half of the truth was that Nico was right. The other half was that, more critically, Nico was wrong. She was worried, yes, and she was careful, as careful as she’d always been, but it wasn’t fear of failure holding her back, it wasn’t anxiety—it wasn’t her customary paranoia about the consequences, not the way it used to be. It was Ezra who had told her the world would end, but Ezra was a liar and what he said no longer mattered. Ezra was over, his hold over her actions was gone. She had seen to it herself. What was left now was his prophecy, his warning, along with the sense that she had already come this far—already learned what it felt like to be truly in control—and it wasn’t that she liked it. Of course she didn’t like it.
It was another feeling, something closer to conviction. Like she was getting closer to reaching something, something she was chasing. Something she couldn’t rest until she found.
She nearly walked into Gideon, who was crossing her path on his way to the reading room. At the sight of him, something inside her chest quickened with apprehension, which was ridiculous, because she was not afraid of Gideon. He was as mild-mannered as always, gently funny, a good housemate. He was clean and friendly and not a stranger, and not a threat, and yet—
“Something wrong?” asked Gideon, who was looking at her strangely. As if he’d seen the contents of her dreams and through her outward appearance to the moltenness at her core.
Lifeless eyes. The stillness of an outstretched hand.
(What else are you willing to break, Miss Rhodes—)
“No.” Libby shook her head. “Just . . . Varona. Not in a bad way,” she added quickly. “Just . . .”
“Ah.” Gideon’s smile was pleasant and understanding. “He’s on his best behavior these days, so we’re all a little unnerved.”
“Right.” She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “What’s that?” she asked, gesturing to the papers in his hand.
“Hm?” Gideon glanced down as if he’d forgotten what he was holding. “Oh, well, you’ll never believe this, but access to the archives is recorded with a paper file system.” He gave her a pained look of helpless annoyance. “I’m aware that I was only assigned here to keep me out of your Society’s way for a while,” he mused, “but even so, the actual work involved is impressively mundane.”
“It’s not—” It’s not my Society, Libby was about to say, but she did understand what he meant. She felt possessive over it, and as a result, Gideon’s presence was slightly invasive—a pretty but foreign flora.
Like jacaranda trees in Los Angeles. Libby shuddered and said, “Sounds irritating. Did you have any sort of training?”
Gideon shook his head. “No, all this came from an internal memo. I’m starting to think I may have overestimated the insidious nature of the Illuminati.”
“Nothing, joking.” He gave her another reassuring smile, and then hesitated before saying, “By the way, I don’t know if you knew this, but, um. Your cell phone, it was . . . Someone was using it to communicate with your parents. I—” He stopped as Libby’s mouth abruptly went dry. “I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while and it never felt like the right time, but it seems like if I let it go unsaid for too long . . .”
He trailed off and Libby realized it was her turn to speak. “No, I . . . thank you. Thanks, Gideon, that’s—that’s good to know. Do you have any idea where it is now?”
Lifeless eyes. A pair of feet fallen uncannily still on the office floor. Libby Rhodes, old and new, cleaved around the stiffness of a body. Gideon gave her a look like they both knew the answer.
“No,” he said. “Anyway,” he added, gesturing to the paperwork in his hand, “I should go, so—”
“Hey, Sandman, there you are,” came Nico’s voice from the other end of the corridor, and Libby quickly turned away to continue in the opposite direction, hurrying up the stairs.
She took the right turn she was becoming accustomed to, heart pounding as she reached the drawing room and shut the door quietly behind her.
“Rhodes, is that you?”
She exhaled slowly, pausing for a moment. A beat or two of time. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“Just give me a minute,” Tristan called to her, and she nodded but didn’t answer.
From where she stood in his drawing room, she caught the motion of Tristan’s shadow moving around his bedroom, draping over the piles of books that had begun to take residence below the windowsill. Sun dripped into the room, the windows open, the smell of roses from the garden wafting up on the mid-morning breeze like a drowsy, intoxicating summons.
She stepped quietly into the room. Tristan was riffling through his wardrobe for a clean shirt, and when he saw her, something dimpled his forehead with concern until she stepped forward wordlessly, and then it morphed into something else. He turned to face her, and she kept walking until she reached him, the pulse in her chest loud and unambiguous—like asking, or possibly singing, this-this-this. She reached up to run the tips of her fingers over his chest, following the scar she already knew existed there. Like retracing her steps over long-familiar terrain.
She could feel his hands gently cupping her elbows, the smell of his aftershave sharp with tidiness, as if nothing had changed. As if every day for him still began the same way, even with all the distance that had come and gone between them.
What Nico didn’t seem to grasp was that she wasn’t the same. Not that it was fair to expect him to know her or understand her, and maybe it was unfair to accuse him of things inside her own head when he couldn’t answer for his crimes. But Libby Rhodes was tired of fair, she was sick of it, of weighing the scales constantly, right and wrong. Every choice she’d made had come with crippling doubt, but she had still known it to be the right one. What Nico didn’t understand was that Libby now knew something she hadn’t before, which was that there was no right answer, no such thing as easy choices. Being good, or knowing what goodness even was—it was an old version of her that believed those things to be possible, and the new version of her was the one that understood the truth: that in the end, however simple a choice might feel, everything was complicated.
Doing the right thing, the necessary thing, would always come with pain.
Nico didn’t understand that yet, but Tristan did. She could feel it in the way he leaned into her kiss, the way he’d been holding himself back until the very last moment, until he could finally give in. Capitulation. That was something Libby understood now; the dissonance that became inescapable clarity, just as the moment was right. She dug her nails into his chest and Tristan responded instantly, reflexively, moving with her easily until they both collapsed on his bed, the book in her hand long since tumbling to the ground. Tristan hooked his fingers around the waistband of the boxers she still wore, the ones she’d borrowed from him and hadn’t returned, probably wouldn’t. She exhaled sharply as he tugged them over her legs, pausing only to run a finger down the slickness between her thighs.
He knew what she was. She felt it between them: knowledge. Increasingly it had been difficult to ignore, the ways that he had seen her for what she was and still allowed her to transform—slowly but surely, like shedding scales. The person she had once been, he had wanted. The person she’d been forced to be, he had protected. The person she now was, unknown to them both, was being given permission to blossom, unfurling more and more each day until neither of them could stand to deny it. He stroked her and she bloomed under his touch.
She tipped her chin up to catch his kiss, gasping into it, muttering impatience at the loss of him while he divested himself of his trousers and returned, completing a sequence for which they’d been running the motions in silence, putting off the inevitable until it could no longer be denied. This, god, yes, she wanted it, she wanted this measure of satisfaction, of rightness. Of absolution, of absolute conviction. She wanted this, she wanted everything, she wanted.
This, all of this. This house and everything inside it. The possibilities. The carnalities, the kind of tragic ending she knew was in store for them all. Sacrifice, she understood it; nothing in this world came without its equal and opposite. Whatever had put this in motion, whether it was Atlas Blakely or human nature or Libby’s own authoring of her fate, it had already begun, and what was put in motion did not stop. The origins of life. The possibility of the multiverse. The potency of power—her power. The way time stopped because she said so when Tristan was holding her, when he pinned her hands above her head.
It was fast and hard, rhythmic as a pulse, the build abrupt and the anguish exquisite. A sheen of sweat covered both their stomachs when Tristan fell beside her on the bed. The rise and fall of his chest, the pounding in her ears, again. Again. Again.
But first—“Hypothetically speaking. Do you really think the world could end?”
You couldn’t fault me if you’d seen it, Ezra had told her once when she’d been groggy, half-awake, confessing his sins from a place of compulsion. I don’t know how to explain to you the way carnage looks. The way annihilation smells. That kind of darkness—and the bodies, the way they were . . . I don’t have the physics for that kind of failure. The way it feels to stand in a place devoid of life, believe me, you’d find a way to stop it if you had to. If you saw what I saw, you’d choose betrayal, too.
Tristan chuckled through ragged breaths, shaking his head. “Did I fail to capture your attention, Rhodes?”
“I just want to know.” She let herself ragdoll out, limp in a wash of satisfaction.
“I don’t—” He exhaled. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“You’ve been thinking about it, too,” she quietly observed, wondering whether to feel betrayed.
She didn’t.
Tristan, to his credit, didn’t seem to care. “Atlas said that Dalton would be the one to summon the void. I would be the one to see it, and you and Varona would be the key to the door I could conceivably unlock.” A careful pause. “But to convince Dalton, we’d need Parisa.” That, too, Tristan said like he’d considered it already. Like perhaps he’d already let his thoughts linger over Parisa’s name. “And Reina, too, to handle the generation of that much output. Without Reina, a lot of other aspects could likely fail.”
Libby shook her head. “Reina’s just a battery. She’s a crutch.” She closed her eyes, then opened them. “If I have Varona, I could do it alone.” She turned her head. “And you.”
Tristan passed his tongue over his lips, still breathless. “By definition, Rhodes, that’s not doing it alone.”
“I’m just saying, the fewer things that could conceivably go wrong, the better. Reina being involved might mean Callum. And assuming Atlas hasn’t already planted some telepathic bomb inside our heads, the most likely cause of apocalypse is Callum choosing to interfere.”
Tristan made a low sound of agreement. “That, or Dalton’s a closeted megalomaniac. A fun twist, I suppose, for the object of Parisa’s affections to turn out seriously disturbed.”
Dalton’s pressed collars and stiffly academic lectures seemed a thing of the distant past, unimaginable as a bedtime story. “Callum,” Libby continued musing to herself, “has always been a problem.” The difference between theoretically peripheral and actively dangerous seemed starker from this side of the elimination clause. “And it’s not as if he’s favorably influencing Reina. We could always just—”
She broke off before she said it out loud.
Do you think I was a killer even before I walked into that office?
Maybe she had been one since the moment she first agreed on Callum to die.
Tristan shifted beside her. “Is that a change of heart, Rhodes? I thought righteous manor house confinement was your mortality stopgap of choice.”
“Of course not. I didn’t mean—” She stopped. “It doesn’t matter. It’s just a hypothetical. And anyway, the point is we couldn’t possibly do the experiment knowing it’s doomed to fail.” She rolled onto her side to face him. “Right?”
He looked at her for a long time, his expression unreadable.
“It’s just a door,” he said eventually, to which Libby scoffed.
“That’s like saying Pandora’s box is just a box.”
“It is just a box. Who’s to say that Ezra even knows what he saw, or what happens sequentially to produce it?”
(The world can end in two ways, Ezra said to her back. Fire or ice. Either the sun explodes or it extinguishes. His knees were tucked into his chest; she knew it had been a bad day because she had known him, once. She had known him. I saw both.)
“Time is fluid,” Tristan continued. “Reality is open to interpretation, or else what am I even for? There have to be several steps between discovering the presence of other worlds and blowing up everything in existence.” Tristan hummed to himself in thought. “The experiment is just the box,” he repeated. “It’s what’s inside the box that’s the problem.”
Inside the box, or inside the person desperate to open it.
Libby shifted with a sigh and Tristan opened one arm for her, tucking her securely into his side as she curled around to lay her head on his stomach. She counted the breaths between them, then lifted her gaze to rest her chin in the slats of his ribs.
His eyes were closed, one arm propping his head up against the headboard. She ran a finger over his scar again, wondering things.
They lay there so long in silence that the pace of his breathing slowed and deepened. Becoming restful. Almost sleep.
“Tristan.” A swallow. “Do you trust me?”
She felt him tense, the vein beside his bicep jumping slightly from where his arm was bent below his head.
“You know the answer to that.”
“I know. I’m just asking.”
“You shouldn’t have to ask.”
“I know, I know, but—”
“It’s done,” he said. “You don’t have to feel guilty anymore. You can put it behind you. Unless it’s me you don’t trust?”
“I never said that. I don’t mean it like that, I just—”
The arm around her tightened and she realized she was bracing against him. Pulling away, or pushing. She wasn’t sure, but either way she knew that he was anchoring her for a reason. As if he understood the things that kept her awake at night and would not reject her for the choices she already knew she’d have to make. The goodness she’d compromise for greatness if given the chance, because the unstained version of her was already gone.
She sensed that Tristan was watching her and took a long breath before meeting his eye.
He had beautiful eyes. Soulful. The expression on his face was carefully restrained and she thought again about what he’d said. You can put it behind you.
What he hadn’t said. I forgive you.
“I’m sorry.” So quiet it bled from her. He wrapped her in his arms, careful, and said the one thing that had brought her specifically to this room, to this bed.
The thing Belen Jiménez had already known; that Nico de Varona would never understand.
“No, you’re not,” Tristan said, and Libby closed her eyes.
No, she exhaled in silence.
She wasn’t.
