Page 485 of Coal Hearts

Cursed to always say the words but never earn them in return.

My eyelashes fluttered open.

He needs to know.

It might help.

Or it might destroy him.

I couldn’t tell how he’d react if he knew what he said each and every time he called me Ily.

Would he find it funny or get mad?

Would he scream at me?

Hurt me?

With eyes far too heavy, I caught his stare.

He still didn’t look like him.

He’d transformed into a colder, crueller, dead-eyed version of the man I’d fallen hopelessly in lust with. The puddle of golden light from the bedside lamp avoided him, allowing all the shadows in the room to cling to his body.

Darkness beneath his eyes. Blackness along his jaw. Shadows swirled over his skin like moving tattoos.

Licking my lips, I tried to pull my chin out of his tight hold.

When he didn’t let me go, I slurred, “Do you prefer calling me Ily or Little Nightmare?”

He didn’t answer the question, but he did let me go.

Sitting heavily on the bed, he rubbed his hand on the sheets as if his fingers stung from holding me.

I felt his anguish.

I patted his knuckles with commiseration.

“You know...Ily isn’t really a name.” I sighed with all the love I had for my brother. “Krish misread the note my birth mother left pinned on my baby blanket.” Hot tears prickled before fading beneath love again. “It was just a short note. A scribble really.”

Henri didn’t speak but he did go achingly still.

His palm suddenly tipped up and captured my fingers, fisting me in a painful handhold.

I didn’t know if he squeezed me to make me stop or squeezed me because he needed to know. Either way, this story would probably shatter him.

I’m sorry...

I recited the words scribed on my heart. “You’re perfect. But I’m not. And you deserve perfection. I.L.Y.”

Henri choked.

For a second, it looked as if he believed that sentence was about him—not the final parting phrase of my birth mother—but then his forehead creased, and he licked his lips. He whispered ever so quietly, “I.L.Y?”

“Krish read the note and in his six-year-old brain, he smushed the acronym together.”

Shadows gathered tighter around him. “Acronym?”

“It gives away my mother’s age. Shows she was probably a teenager stuck in a very bad place.”