Page 104 of Till Death Do Us Part

Why did it always come back to this? Why always her?

I cleaned myself up in the bathroom as quickly as I could, getting dressed and stumbling out of the bedroom. I lingered at the door up to the steeple, my hand curled into a fist on the wood.

She would never have let me go. And we didn’t have time to debate it. Every second we argued over it was a second closer Mom could have been getting to dying.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the door, and I turned, and I fled into the cold morning air beyond the safehouse.

petra

“I just wish I could do something for her,” I said, sitting moodily slouched over the table in the meeting room, an old office space with antique wood furniture converted into a war room for Whitecliff operations. Caitlyn, who was making frustrated faces at her laptop, finally gave up with what she was trying to do and shut the laptop, turning to me.

“For Vera?” she said. “Or for Elaine?”

“It’s all one and the same now, isn’t it? Just Vera who won’t recognize it.”

Caitlyn nodded. “I know Vera’s just trying to protect Elaine…”

“Vera’s trying to protect herself. From being in love.” I shook my head. “I mean, hell, I get that. Wish I couldn’t fall in love. Being human sucks.”

“Have you?” she said. “Been in love, I mean.”

I shook my head. “You don’t want to hear about my stupid shit.”

She put a hand on my shoulder. “You can talk to me.”

“You and your sister are such saps.”

“Hey,” she laughed. “Someone’s gotta balance out you and Vera. And it’s not going to be Yulia.”

I closed my eyes. “There was a woman. Victoria. We had the best few months of my life together. We made promises… like the world was for her and I. One day we’d claim it.”

“Petra… what happened?”

I sat up taller. “I’m not trying to flash you right now.”

“I’m… sorry?”

I pulled the hem of my sports bra down, showing the ugly scar there. Caitlyn’s breath caught, her pupils dilating.

“She tried to kill me,” I said. “Turned out she was a spy the whole time. Featheridge family, who mainly operate on the south side. She’d been seducing me for insider Blackbird information for months, and once I’d served my purpose, she tried to kill me in my sleep and get out. If I hadn’t worn a thick bra to bed that night, I’d have been dead. Took most of the force out of the knife. She hadn’t been expecting it. But I was still out of action for two months. Two months of sitting there doing nothing but thinking about how stupid I was. How useless I’d proven myself to be yet again.”

“Oh my God, Petra,” she whispered. “That’s horrible.”

“Then I had my first big job coming back from that. My chance finally to prove I wasn’t just the idiot who’d fallen for a pretty face and lost confidential intel to the oldest trick in the book. I’d never wanted to do any job as badly I wanted to do that one. And then in the last minute, Vera stepped in to do it instead, and they just put their hands up and let her.” I shook my head, dropping back into my seat, kicking my feet up on the table. “So I decided that from that point forward, every time I saw her stupid smug face, I’d try to punch it. I never was able to recover, institutionally, from that.”

“I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have to… have to recover from the shame of falling in love with someone.”

“I didn’t. I fell in love with the image someone was putting on. Someone doing shadow puppets on the wall, and I mistook the shadows for my wife. I’m stupid and I’ve accepted that. So I get it. But even so… she just pisses me off,” I muttered. “Vera, I mean. But I still want her and Elaine to be happy. To stop doing this bullshit.”

“Me too,” she sighed. “But I guess it’s hard to come back from… something like that. You’ve never been in love since then?”

“Ha. Nah. Not really my speed. Not saying I’d go Vera Farkas on the situation and bury myself to avoid it if I fell for someone, but I like just having a good time. I’m a free spirit. Can’t be pinned down. People get weird about the scar, though.”

“Does it hurt?”

I shook my head. “Not at all. People just think it looks scary.”

She blushed a little. “I don’t think it’s scary… I think it’s beautiful.”