AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’re quite mad, Val,”I’d told him once.
“What if I am?”he’d replied, half-smiling, pretending the words were meaningless, but his eyes had been haunted.
The half-empty bottle of laudanum, his obsession with the broken-minded, his thirst for the truth. He’d been looking for answers his whole life, doomed never to know them. The answers he sought weren’t in any books, and they weren’t in any schooling. The answers he needed were in a cupboard under the stairs, in a house long since burned down.
He turned in his sleep, and I moved to his side.
“Valentine…” I whispered. His face was soft, at peace. I stroked his bangs from his closed eyes and brushed my knuckles down his cheek. I dared to touch his lips, just a flutter beneath my fingertips… Lips I’d kissed so long ago.
Could two broken things fix each other?
With a sigh, I sat back in the chair. The beetle had fallen still beside the laudanum, no longer ticking. “Hmm.” I gave her a tap, and she shivered back to life. “Better?”
She spun in a circle.
A shame not everything could be fixed so easily.
“It will be over soon,” I told Val, not that he’d hear. Which was for the best. If he knew my thoughts, if he knew the truth, he’d despise me.
Valentine Anzio. My first kiss, and my first betrayal.
There hadn’t been anyone like him since.
I hated him for that too. For leaving when I could not, and never would.
“Perhaps I should drink the laudanum, hmm?” I asked the beetle. “And escape into oblivion alongside him.”
She scurried along the desktop, fluttered onto the books, and disappeared behind the inkwell. There, hidden almost out of sight, sat a small, weather-worn clockwork bird.
Valentine had found it.
I’d placed it on his parents’ grave as a goodbye, thinking him gone forever. He should have been.
I left the bird alone—it was his. I’d made it for him long before we became friends and begged Jacapo to gift it to him. It couldn’t come from me.“Give it to the boy with the sad eyes.”
“Are you sure?”Jacapo had asked.
I’d never been more sure of anything in my life then and since.
Birds should never be caged.
ChapterFourteen
Valentine
Devere could not be in my room, sitting in my chair, reading my notes on Jacapo’s case. Was I still dreaming? He didn’t look like a dream. His eyes were narrowed, pinched in a frown. He wore the typical neutral grays he so loved. Had he been a dream, he’d have already been at my bed, and while the dream was fading now, I distinctly remembered he and I had been lost in intimacy. His face did not convey satisfaction. His expression appeared to be one of perpetual irritation, even while staring at the book on the desk.
“I threw away the laudanum,” he said without looking over. “You’ll thank me later.”
“What?” I tried to sit up but the room spun around me, dumping me back on the pillow. “Why would you do that?”
“It’s highly addictive. Continue like you are and you’ll never wake up.”
“I only take a small amount. It’s not a problem.”
He threw me a questioning glance, suggesting this hadn’t been the first time I’d needed laudanum to help me sleep. It wasn’t a problem unless I allowed it to become one, and I was most certainly in control. Although, perhaps to look at me, it didn’t appear that way.
“Are those the same clothes you’ve been wearing for the last few days?” he inquired, eyebrow raised.
