Page 30 of Prince of Wrath

“She wants a war, sweetheart,” he says, too calmly for the wrath gathering in his face. “I’ll take care of it.”

Then, without giving me any warning, he lowers his mouth to mine, granting me a brutal, merciless kiss, saying, I am here, I am yours, I will stand between you and the whole world if you let me. And I kiss him back because, for one reckless second, I need to believe in the promise of him more than I fear the threat of her. We break apart only when two people in white coats pass us in the hallway. Tristan rests his forehead against mine, his breathing controlled but rough at the edges.

“And I meant what I said to your father,” he murmurs, low enough that the words belong only to me. “Every single word.”

Tristan

I’m a practical man. I have never vanished into fantasies of building a family of my own. When you spend years at the end of a relentless cane, you begin to rethink the whole father-son relationship. I do have a brother I love. A mother I love. That being said, if there is one thing I was reminded of growing up, it was that I was exactly like my father. So naturally, in an attempt to avoid becoming the kind of man who could harm his own child, I buried the idea of fatherhood entirely. Hurting a child was out of the question. Yet ever since leaving the clinic, I have found myself walking backward on that prophecy.

I should be focused on Brenton’s report about Cole’s whereabouts, the one he gave me over the phone while Ella was visiting her dad. I should be focused on the fact that the rat is hiding and has been seen at one of his uncle’s houses. I should be equally disgusted by the slow police procedure, because yes, they are searching for Cole, but they haven't found him yet. I should also be thinking about the fact that Ella’s stepmother literally threatened us over the phone minutes ago. Each one of those things is a priority I need to tackle today. One by one. Once I can think straight. Which is not easy to do, given the angel sitting beside me on my sofa.

I said I needed to go and would be back late. And yet, here I am, sitting next to her as she curls into the cushions under a blanket, while my housekeeper prepares pasta for her in the kitchen. I mean, look at her.

“Go,” she signs. I connect my fingers above my knees, trying to focus, to make sense of those…feelings. I told her I loved her, and I meant it. Even though she has not reciprocated my confession, I can live with that, since loving her is a natural state I seem unable to exist without. Work needs me, but my mind is stuck on flashes of our future family, on our…kids.

As grateful as I am for school and nannies and anything that added distance between my father and me, he was still there, a constant shadow, calling me late in the evening to his office for a man-to-man talk that ended with him teaching me a lesson about manhood with a wooden ruler across my back. Yet again, I am visualizing things that will probably never happen, but if they did, Ella seems to be the only woman I would do those things with. Life things. Those kinds of things. And I have no issue picturing her one day, pregnant with our child, running through our garden after our kids, laughing with her quick exhales, sharing everything with me.

“What is it?” she signs, blue circles beneath her eyes. Should I really burden her with my worries? Even tired, her gaze pierces me, daring me to evade the question.

“Too much going on,” I admit quietly, hating myself for being in this state when I should be sharp, focused, and solid enough for her to lean on without wondering if I might collapse too.

“Tell me,” she signs.

“You need to rest.” She yawns, as if her body has decided to betray her argument before I can. “See?” I murmur. “Come on, rest. I’ll be back soon.”

“Tristan.” Her lips form my name, and I am done for, because those syllables on her mouth are stronger than an enchantment. She signs again. Tell me. Her signing is smooth and instinctive, each movement belonging to her so naturally it seems less like a language she learned and more like one her body always knew. Mine is different. I still translate English in my head before my hands can follow, reducing a complete language to a slower, clumsier version of my own thoughts, and the inadequacy irritates me. I should be better by now. I should have learned more. Practiced until ASL became a language of its own inside me, not a scattered collection of signs stitched to English syntax.

“You can talk to me,” she signs delicately, raising her eyebrows in that endearing, devastating way of hers. I should sign back. I know I should. But since she disappeared, signing has become a wall between us, something left behind with her in that cell, a piece of us I have not managed to retrieve and return to her yet. I do not know why my hands refuse her now. Why can I just do it?

“What if I’m breaking everything I touch?” I mutter under my breath. She sits straighter, fighting the exhaustion carved into her bones since she came back to me. Her hand lifts, and she signs with a faint frown, “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. I…” My palm runs over my face. When was the last time I got a full night's sleep? “I used to… I used to work.” My gaze fixes on the edge of the living room table, on a slight impact in the squared wood, as if something had caught there once and left a permanent scar. Not unlike the small bump on the bridge of my nose, left there after my father broke it twice and years of fights made sure it never healed quite straight.

“Work?” she signs.

“I don’t know how to explain. I used to be…my work. That was all of me. Morning to night. Work, rinse, repeat.” Since I met her, long before the captivity, a breach had already formed in the clean architecture of my life, though I had not been able to name it before. Or perhaps I had refused to. Perhaps I had no desire to examine my life closely enough to notice the obvious absence of living. Human beings, my mother had told me on my last birthday. You’re a human being, Tristan, not a human doing. I did not understand it then, or I pretended not to, but now the meaning seems to seep into me whether I want it or not.

“I’m so sorry,” she signs, her brows drawing together as one hand covers her trembling mouth.

“I’m the one who’s sorry, Ella. I’m the reason you suffered. I’m the root of the problem.” She shakes her head with the horror of someone being asked to accept an impossible truth. Because she knows there is some truth in it. I am the reason she was in danger. Denying that would be insulting to both of us, and I would be more frightened if she tried to absolve me completely.

“What are you afraid of?” she signs.

“Being like my father.”

“Wasn’t he a good man ?”

“No, Ella, he-” I meet her dark pupils, where innocence still manage to exist. “He wasn’t, at all.”

“Then you have nothing to fear. You’re everything he wasn’t.”

“I’m not sure.” I wince because the confession is already pressing at my teeth. “What if- what if I kill Cole ?”

“You won’t,” she signs. “You won’t because it isn’t who you are. You’re a good man, Tristan.”

“Sweetheart, you have no idea what lives in my head right now. I’ve done things, terrible but necessary things, and you need to understand that. There’s a world of violence in me that I’m trying to keep away from you.”

“Show me, then,” she signs. “Show me the worst part of you and watch me stay anyway.”