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“I amnotmaking this all about me, but I need to explain to you what was happening in my head during that moment. Is that okay?”
The fact that he’s even asking means so much. He’s offering to open up to meandwants permission to do so? As if I’d ever deny him that. My own burning curiosity and drive to know him better was always going to say yes. So I nod.
He takes a deep breath before beginning. “Car confessions it is then. I acted – and spoke – out of uncontrollable emotions yesterday. I’ve never dealt with them well. I wasn’t just taught not to bottle emotions up, but to nothavethem at all.” He shoots me a rueful look and my heart pangs for him.
I may not know all the ins and outs of Axel’s seemingly lavish upbringing, but I do know it wasn’t easy. He was a puppet, a pawn, a possession to be controlled and used. Of course his father tried to mould his son in his own image. And of course, like an image, that would be to create a two dimensional unfeeling character.
“I wasn’t even angry at you. For any of it. I was angryforyou. Raging. Devastated by your story. I felt so much rage and helplessness. For someone who’s always in control, it’s a terrifying experience. Everything I did to keep you safe was not only pointless, but seemed to serve to make things worse for you. Learning that nearly killed me. Having to sit and listen…”
He fists his hands and trembles with the force of his emotions.
“To have to sit and listen to what he did. What they did. WhatIdid. Fuck. I don’t know how I’m still standing here breathing because if I were you I would have killed me that first day in the canteen.”
I crack a weak smile, remembering my own anger then. Not at the tattoo – which should have made me go mental – but at the pain of seeing them again, in a place I least expected to, and learning that they’d lied to meagain.It was all too much. And I was probably most angry at myself for feeling hurt. I don’t say anything though, I don’t want to interrupt Axel.
“You should have put a thousand bullets in me for the way I’ve treated you. I blame myself for everything. Even the cutting – and wearegetting you help with that by the way, I don’t care what you say. But I can’t help but feel if I’d just made differentchoices, stood up to my father sooner, none of this would have happened.”
He’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and it’s not his alone to bear.
“I lash out when I’m scared. I realise that now. Every time I get scared for you, of losing you, I try to clamp down on my control, thinking if I just hold on tighter, nothing bad can happen. But it always comes out of me horribly. For someone who’s eloquent in business and well versed in death, I’m a horrible communicator.”
“Finding out that you had a child was…” He takes a deep breath and blows it out, shaking his head and interlacing his fingers together. “It blew my fucking mind. It was the best and worst discovery of my life. The worst because of the circumstances, the best because I later found out that she’smine. Ours. I didn’t mean it when I said girls are useless. I don’t even know why I said it. I don’t give a shit about having an heir, and I certainly don’t give a fuck if it’s a boy or a girl if I do have one.”
“Then why try so hard to get me pregnant?” I whisper. There’s a lot of Axel’s decisions that I don’t initially understand, but can usually work out where he was coming from later, with logic and time to get my head round things and look at it from his point of view. But this thing, I just can’t.
“It was partly panic, a lot to do with control again. Needing to keep you tied to me in a way which would be permanent. I thought I had eyes on you when we left. I knew we had to cut all contact to keep you safe, and if I caved even a little on that, I would crumble entirely. So I paid someone to watch over you. I thought he was loyal, but he was in my father’s pocket and clearly, feeding me bullshit about your wellbeing and whereabouts. If I’d even got a hint of the trouble you were in, things would have been completely different, I swear.”
“I don’t understand how that ties in.”
“I’m getting there. I knew – thinking everything was fine – that you’d be applying to universities. You’d mentioned the dream of attending Trinity before, so I kept a close eye on admissions. At a few universities actually, just in case. When I saw you’d applied to Trinity for a scholarship, I paid your tuition and paid off the administration to ‘award’ you the scholarship, and gave them all the money needed to ensure you were fully funded.”
This is news to me. “Why?” I blink before frowning.
“To ensure you’d be back with us.”
“But you kept me away,” I point out, frustrated.
“To keep you safe while we couldn’t be by your side. But now you’d be here with us, things could be different. We could keep you safe if you were within sight. But there was another problem.”
“The games,” I say flatly.
“Yes. Our participation as legacies was not only expected, but mandatory. And it would keep us away from protecting you if wewere distracted with the tasks. I also hadn’t managed to select someone to be the doe yet, because I always planned to win, and I needed someone worthy of standing by my side for the rest of my life. Even without you around, I couldn’t pick anyone else because it was always meant to be you... And then you applied to Trinity and it was like all the pieces fell into place. Except two small things.”
“What were they?” I whisper.
“For one, you.”
“Me?”
“I had to trust that you’d be as stubborn as ever.” He shoots me a rueful look that makes my heart flutter. “That you’d be enraged by the way we treated you, that we’d lied about which college we were attending…all of it. I knew there was a good chance you’d tell me to get fucked over being the doe, so I had to act and make sure youcouldn’tsay no. Hence drugging you and taking you to Tom’s for the tattoo. I had to threaten him to do it by the way. He was all for calling the cops on my ass. And that was when I executed plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“The fertility treatment.”
A gasp slips past my lips. “So you didn’t just lie about me being on birth control?”
“No, I didn’t. I did everything I could to make sure you’d get pregnant.”
