Nightshade: An Enemies to Lovers, Dark Academic Romance (Sorrowsong University Book 1)
Nightshade: Chapter 18

Even through the phone, I can sense Dr. Harwood’s exasperation with me.

I’d been doing better for a while.

He stands at the window of his office, staring out at the New York skyline beyond. “You’re frustrated that Harris isn’t interested in your proposal.”

I recline back at the desk in my room, watching with mild interest as Ophelia walks across the gravel path to the mansion with a box tucked under her arm.

Christ, she’s beautiful. Her hair whips around her face like threads of burning copper, spun into soft waves by the wind. Her brown miniskirt sits high on her muscular thighs, covered by thick, black tights. She’s swamped her athletic frame in a brown trench coat that would probably fit Vincenzo and a scarf that has seen better days.

I don’t even bother trying to look away. I drink in every minute detail like I’m dying and she’s the cure. Somewhere in the last few days, I’ve ventured so far into denial that I’m out the other side.

I shift in my seat and bring my body back under control. I want her.

She’s impossible to get close to, though. She’s like that dumb Jenga game. You think you’re getting somewhere, and then the tiniest move in the wrong direction and every little bit of progress I had made with her is gone again.

I guess she shuts people out because it’s easier than getting hurt. I get it, but it still irritates me. I think we would be good together, but she doesn’t agree.

And that sucks.

My jaw tenses watching one of the second year’s gaze follow her a little too closely. She doesn’t notice anyone admiring her; in her own world all the time, stuck in a mindless loop of her own thoughts. I know, because I’m in a similar torture of my own.

Dr. Harwood would say I have an addictive personality and an immature streak. He thinks I had to step up and raise my sisters too young, that I didn’t have time to explore my emotions before I shoved them into a box. I cope with the stress of life by clinging to one thing all the time. It was drinking, then it was smoking, then it was running, drawing, working. Now, I think it might be her.

Watching her with Shawn Miller was easier before I realized her tights were stockings.

Life was easier before I realized her tights were stockings.

“I’m frustrated at everything.”

“Everything?”

The outside world blurs as I home in on my reflection in the window above my desk. At the fading cut on my forehead left there by Loughborough’s flanker last week, sitting beneath the bruise left by my own father. “Everything.”

“Carmichael’s reaction can’t have come as a surprise, surely? He chairs the board of a billion-dollar company. It’s his job to do what’s best for the business.”

“But it’s not the right thing, ethically.”

“It’s a rare occasion that ethics and smart business align.”

“I don’t pay you to depress me more.”

He sits back down in his red desk chair, examining me through the webcam. His hand rubs the dark brown skin of his bald head, dark eyes narrowing. “How is your mother?”

“I called her doctor this morning and asked him to keep her for another night.” I drum my pencil on the desk. “He wants to increase her Clozapine again, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. They say it’s my call.”

“This is a very heavy weight on your shoulders to manage from afar.”

I almost crush my coffee mug in my fist. I opt for a cigarette instead. “I know, Robert. Don’t you think I don’t know it was wrong of me to come here? But what else would you have me do? I need Carmichael to convince the board that my father has to go. I can’t spend another week in that house, watching him play them all like puppets. I stay and I lose, I leave and I lose.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant you need to get more help back in New York.”

The laugh that escapes my lips is bitter. “From who? My father? My fourteen-year-old sisters? It’d be easier if they could move to London or Paris, but Cain won’t allow it.” His family man, father-of-seven image is perfect for the press. “As soon as he’s gone, everything will be easier.”

“Tell me about the other things in your life. Not your mother and not your sisters.”

“There is nothing else.”

He sips his tea, and I can almost smell the Earl Grey from here. “Your studies?”

“Are just a means to impress Carmichael, which is a means to help my mother and sisters.”

“Your rugby?”

“The same.”

“Rowing?”

“Gave it up. No time. I’ve been sketching when I can’t sleep.”

“And the girl?”

I told him about Ophelia a few weeks ago in a moment of weakness, right after I’d found her sitting under the sofa listening to my conversation with Carmichael, right after our moment in the trees. I wasn’t in my right mind, riding whatever euphoric high it is that I get whenever I’ve just seen her. Dr. Harwood knew something was different, anyway.

I’ve never been so perplexed by someone. She’s fucking miserable, yet she makes me feel alive. She stains the corners of my gray cloud orange, but I have a feeling I make her bright colors gray. She never really smiles around me. I’ve always been like that to people. “She’s interested in someone else. And I’m not interested, anyway.”

“Why not?”

I sigh, drawing endless circles in my sketchbook. “What’s the point? What’s the end goal?”

“Love?”

I snort. Love is so far at the back of my priorities at the moment. “She’s not that sort of girl. She wouldn’t want me to love her. We don’t speak anymore. Why are we even discussing her?”

“We’re discussing her because you need a break from your home life. You need to give yourself a break from your home life.”

In the trees with Ophelia a few weeks ago. That was a break. A moment when my mind was in Sorrowsong and Sorrowsong alone. I thought of little else that day. She felt perfect against me; soft and strong all at once

I should’ve kissed her.

“Two and a half more years,” I say flatly.

“Stick with it. It’ll get better. You’ll be glad you stayed by the end.”

“Yeah.” I agree because it’s easier than not. A text pings through from Fleur. It’s a picture that Josie has drawn of me. I have seven fingers on each hand. It makes me smile. It reminds me why I’m here. I’ll be glad I stayed by the end.

If my plan works.

My limbs ache with inactivity. “I gotta go work out, Rob. See you next week?”

“Yes. Virtually again?”

I scribble inside a circle. “Depends on my mother.”

“Don’t let it depend on your mother. She’s in good, capable hands. I’ll visit her myself if I need to.”

I nod and hit the red button to end the call, staring out at the mountains beyond the tarn.

I’m losing a battle with the gray cloud inside me.

“I’m pretty sure it has, like…chia seeds in? Or maybe they’re poppy seeds? I dunno. The small ones. They look like bugs. But I put Greek yogurt in it this time instead of oat milk, and it makes a big difference. It’s way thicker. You could probably eat it with a spoon, honestly.”

Mia, my fourteen-year-old sister, bleeds on in my AirPods, describing her smoothie in a level of detail I never imagined smoothies could be described in. On the plus side, Jack has invited Shawn and his Cortinar buddies to work out in the Nightshade gym, so she’s doing a terrific job of drowning them out.

I drop my final deadlift with a low grunt, undoing the belt at my waist. The gym is as dimly lit as the rest of the mansion, the lighting warm and flickering slightly. Oak paneling rises up to high, corniced ceilings. It looks like something from the Elizabethan era, save for the state-of-the-art equipment everywhere. “I’ll have to try it.”

“Yeah, I’ll make it for you. Are you coming home this weekend?”

Three two-day trips back to New York in four weeks, alongside my studies and my calls with select board members of Green Aviation, have burnt me out. “Not if I don’t have to. I’ll see you when I’m home for Christmas in a few weeks.”

I’m excited for Christmas, for once. I’ve missed all my sisters more than I thought I would, and my father will hopefully be busy working.

Mia’s voice is pensive on the other end of the line. “Do you think we’ll still go to Paris? If Maman is ill?”

“Hopefully. Was the smoothie the only reason for the call?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, well, I better go. I’m at the gym. Who’s at home with you all?”

“Ingrid and Russel, but Dad gets home early tonight. He’s taking us to watch Evie’s ballet.” The housekeeper and the driver. I’m sure they don’t get paid enough to essentially parent my sisters. “Also, I got a new phone case. It holds my lip gloss.”

“I’m sure that’s a solution to a nonexistent issue.”

Her giggle makes unloading the barbell easier. “It’s pretty!”

“I bet. I’ll call you again next week, M.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too. Take a video of the ballet and send it to me, okay?”

“I will. Bye!”

I hang up, sliding the weights onto the squat rack.

Shawn comes over right as I replace my footing beneath the bar. I grit my teeth together. He’s working out in a golf shirt, for fuck’s sake. “Hey, bro. Amazing touchdown at the game last week.”

Idiot. I try to be as civil as I can. “Just trying to work out, man.”

“Looks like Ophelia kind of swapped you out for me, huh?”

What’s that supposed to mean? Are they sleeping together now? My knuckles crack around the steel across my shoulders. “I’m trying to work out.”

“Was she uptight with you?”

I can almost see my reflection in his overly gelled hair. I’d club him around the head if the sheer amount of product wouldn’t shatter the club.

Seconds pass, and he’s still in front of me. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. “Would she want you to be asking that?”

He must be completely devoid of hearing, because he carries on. “She’s frigid to a new degree, man. Was she like that with you?”

I’m going to kill him.

I can’t kill him. His father is on the board.

I’m going to kill him.

His father is on the motherfucking board.

“Well?”

I turn the volume of my earphones up, trying to muffle his incessant whining. “If you were talking about one of my sisters like that, I’d crack your skull, Miller.”

“Good job it’s not your sister then.” He flashes his overly white veneers in a salacious grin, and I drop the weight back onto the rack and duck underneath it to get closer to him. Jack pauses his workout to watch us in the mirror warily. “I tell you what, next time I take her out on a date, it’ll be a fucking great job she isn’t your sister. Reckon Ophelia is as quiet in bed as she is outside of it?”

My blood smolders in my veins. I shove him back. “She’s not even quiet, you dick, you just don’t shut up.”

“Woah, there. Better keep a check on those emotions, Green. Wouldn’t want to turn into your psycho mother, would you?”

A red mist sinks in around me, swirling around the rows of dumbbells behind us. I don’t even remember pushing him, taken over by a violent fury. The glass mirror makes an audible crack behind Shawn’s head. My fists clench his ugly top by the collar, glaring down at him. “My what?”

He looks terrified. Scared and small, as he should be. His pulse drums beneath my fingers, fast and heavy. A sickening satisfaction runs through me. It would be so easy to become my father. So easy to snuff out a life. “I didn’t mean anything by it, man.”

I slam my fist into his nose. And again and again and again, until Jack pulls me off him and Vincenzo appears out of nowhere to drag me out of the gym. “Don’t.”

I stare down at my bloodied fists. “I need to finish him off. I’m doing all of us a favor.”

Vincenzo pulls me into the library, away from the gathering crowd in the foyer. “Over Ophelia? She’s just a girl. Let it go.”

“He called her a psycho.”

Vin pales slightly. “Your mama?”

“Yeah.”

He looks like he might go in there and finish Shawn off, but he shakes his head and stays in place. For once. “You need his father on your side, man.”

“I’ve fucked that plan already.”

“Just go. Clear your head. I’ll deal with Shawn. I’m sure my dad will have some dirt on him or his father I can use. Just go.”

I stagger out onto the path outside, hands on my knees as I suck in a desperate lungful of air.

I can’t do this anymore.

It’s Yale all over again. It’s all too much. Too much for me, too much for my mother, too much for my sisters.

I have to go back.

I break out into a jog through the forest, punching a number into my phone. It only rings once before my father’s PR agent picks up. “Andrew speaking.”

“Hi, Andrew,” I say as my feet pound the forest floor. My tone is sickly sweet. Andrew is the human equivalent of wet cardboard; fucking useless and smells weird.

“Mr. Corbeau. Good morning.”

“There are videos of her online again.”

“Ah yes. I’ve seen.”

“So what the fuck do we pay you for? Get them taken down.”

“I’m working on it, sir.”

“Well work faster. I can fire your team just as easily as Cain can.”

“I’ll have them down today, sir.”

I hang up, winding my way through the Solemn Woods that sprawl out at the castle’s feet. My demons chase me between centuries-old pines and mangled oaks. They follow me through shallow streams and over jagged rocks. I run and I run, but nothing tires me. Nothing quiets the darkness. I can’t outrun my problems anymore. There are so many things on my mind; I’m tempted to keep going and never come back.

One mile melts into two, which melts into five and then ten. By the time I calm down enough to loop back toward the castle, the afternoon is slipping away between gaps in the gray cloud.

I take the muddy track that runs along the far end of the tarn and up the left side back toward the castle. The tarn is still, undisturbed by the soft breeze.

I’m about to veer back into the trees when something catches my eye. A neon orange balloon, or a float of some kind, drifting across the black water. I follow its path to the bank, where a small figure lies passed out in the shallows.

I swear my heart stops beating.

Dread shoots up my spine like a bullet, my feet breaking out into a sprint beneath me. She’s far enough away for me to jump to a hundred conclusions as I run.

She’s dead.

She drowned.

No. She’s the best swimmer I know.

She can’t have just drowned.

I dial Belladonna on the way but she doesn’t pick up. I try again, and again once more, skidding to a halt when I reach her.

My pulse hammers in my throat. This isn’t apathy, this isn’t gray. This isn’t nothing, this is pure and utter dread.

She’s lying on her back in nothing but a black swimsuit when I fall to my knees in the soft mire beside us. The icy water laps around her head, licking at the skin on my legs. A bitter chill sinks deep into my bones.

She looks like her Shakespearean namesake.

With my heart in the firm grip of terror, I drag her out of the water, feeling a weak pulse beneath my fingers. She’s devoid of all warmth. Her lips are blue, limbs white. Dirt and blood are smeared down the side of her face. She’s breathing, just.

This was no accident.

“Ophelia, can you hear me? Jesus fucking Christ, Ophelia.”

I don’t have time to panic. Don’t have time to think, feel, or pause. I pinch her nose, sealing my mouth against her frozen lips, breathing a steady breath into her lungs.

I have to be calm. I have to hold it together for her.

Belladonna’s name lights up on my phone as I breathe a third breath into Ophelia’s limp body. “Bella, I need you on the bank of the tarn. Emergency.” I seal my lips over Ophelia’s again.

Don’t die.

Don’t leave me.

You occupy my mind.

Those stupid crosswords. You’re those for me. You’re the cage for my thoughts.

The busy sounds of a ward filter through the loudspeaker. “I’m on rotation at Raigmore. Is Vin okay?”

“Then I need a goddamn air ambulance.”

“Is Vincenzo okay? Hold on.” The phone goes quiet. She picks it up a moment later. “It’s out on another call. I’ll send another fifth year down now.”

I cover Ophelia with her towel and my hoodie, but not before I spot the finger-shaped bruises on her neck.

I swear, I’ve never felt a fire like it.

“No, don’t.” I can’t trust anyone. “Ophelia’s been drowned.”

“She’s drowned, or been drowned?”

“Just fucking talk me through it. She’s hardly breathing.”

“Open her mouth and breathe for her.”

She’s so cold beneath my fingers. Her lips are so still beneath mine. I should’ve kissed her in the trees. Should’ve made her see how much she mattered. “It’s not working. Fuck, it’s not working.”

“Alex, the calmer you are, the easier this’ll be. You know chest compressions, yeah?”

I’ve done them for my mother once before. I shrug the memory away before it drags me into the cloud. “Yes.”

“Start them. Harder than you think you need to.”

I layer my hands over her chest and press. Blood trickles across her cheek and down her neck, onto the mud below. There are claw marks from her fingers beneath her.

The anger threatens to incinerate me.

Belladonna is calm on the other end of the line. “More breaths.”

“God, Ophelia. Wake up,” I whisper between them. I start the compressions again. “Please wake up.”

Wake up, Maman. It’s me.

I shake my head, focusing on the body beneath me. If I can’t save her, I’ll be everything my father always said I’d be.

“Breaths again. Does she have a pulse?”

I grit my teeth. My heart beats too fast between my ribs. Hers doesn’t beat fast enough. “Yes.”

“That’s good.”

It goes on forever. Until my arms are burning and I’m losing hope. She’s cold and still and silent. The fire beneath her skin is missing. Does she know I’m fighting for her? Does she believe she’s worth fighting for?

Her chest contracts with a cough beneath me, wet and ragged and weak. “She’s choking.”

I hear a car door slam on the other end of the line. She barks rapid Italian at her driver. “That’s good. That’s great, Alex. Roll her onto her side. I’m on my way.”

Belladonna must’ve texted Vincenzo, because he’s running toward me with blankets in his arms. I roll Ophelia onto her side, watching her cough up more water than anyone should.

Her breaths steady out. Her pulse builds to a steady drum beneath my fingertips. Gratitude gently prizes the claws of dread from my chest, allowing me to take a full inhale. If I could cry, now would be the time.

I pull her frozen body onto my lap, wrapping her in blankets. “I have you,” I whisper against the dirt on her forehead. “You’re okay.”

A quiet sob escapes her lips, her whisper barely audible. Her head leans into me the smallest amount. “I’m cold.”

I tighten my arms around her limp frame and don’t intend to ever release them. I feel like I could vomit. “I know. I know, baby. I’m so sorry.”

Vincenzo presses her freezing finger against the button of her phone and opens up her meager list of contacts while I dry her skin. He rings her dad, but it goes straight to voice mail.

He hits dial on her mom’s contact. It rings three times. Then four. I’m frustrated with them. Angry with them for not picking up.

Don’t they care?

I brush strands of Ophelia’s beautiful hair from her face, wrapping her hands in blankets. I run my finger over each of her eyebrows. Does she know she matters? “Try them again later.”

I can’t look away from the bruises on her neck, blinded with rage. “Ophelia, who did this to you?”

I don’t get my answer. She’s fast asleep in my arms. The rhythm of her chest is slow and steady in time with the briny water lapping the bank. I focus on each breath. It’s the final remaining chain on the cage that hides the monster inside me.

She’s alive. You did enough, Alex. Dr. Harwood would be proud.

Like she’s made of rice paper, I carry her back to the mansion, hiding her face from curious watchers. I put her in my bed until Belladonna arrives, because I don’t know what else to do. Vincenzo tucks a Glock into his waistband and leaves on a manhunt.

Ophelia’s damp hair spills over the white sheets, the muscles of her legs covered in bruises and scrapes. She looks like that stupid painting in the hall outside Carmichael’s office.

I want to put my fist through the wall.

I sit with her head in my lap, a bowl of warm water beside me as I wipe the cuts and scratches across her face clean. I can’t bear not knowing who it was. I need her to wake up.

I brush my lips against her hair and tell her she’s okay, and that she’s doing fine. That I have her where no one can get her. I hope my voice permeates the fog.

“Cazzo. What the fuck happened?” asks Belladonna, finally arriving with a green duffel bag of medical supplies.

I run my fingers over Ophelia’s scalp like my mother used to do for me, like I do for Josie when she can’t sleep. I hope it brings her comfort. “Someone attacked her.”

Belladonna pegs a fucking IV treatment bag to my headboard and gets a sharps disposal kit out of the duffel. “Who?”

I clench my fist so hard my nails leave moon-shaped cuts in my palms. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be sat here. Vincenzo is out looking.”

“Did he take someone with him? Kirill and his men are looking for any chance they can get to kill him.”

“He took two men with him.”

She nods, but the line of worry between her brows doesn’t smooth. I get it. I spend my whole life worrying about my siblings.

Bella works for two hours. By the time she’s removed the IV therapy bag and walked a half-awake Ophelia into my bathroom, every bruise, cut, and scrape on her body has been carefully disinfected.

The sound of the bath tap running filters beneath the door. I sink to the chair at my desk and rest my head against my palms. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so deeply. Hell, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt.

I’ve known it since I almost ran her over in the car. Since I first watched her swim, since I found out she must be the only person under the age of fifty to wear mittens, since I found out she does puzzles to escape the gray cloud of her own, since I watched her close and reopen the lid of her laptop to try to fix every IT issue under the sun. Since I heard her in her room, laughing and sobbing at a movie in the same thirty-minute period.

I could go on forever.

I’m obsessed with her. Desperate for her. But I could never be good for her, and for reasons she doesn’t make clear, she doesn’t want me to love her.

Belladonna steps out of my bathroom. Ophelia is crying quietly inside. “She’ll be fine. Physically, at least. I’ll ask Carmichael to see if CCTV picked anything up.”

I nod, not sure what to say. I’m tired.

I knock on the bathroom door. I hate crying. I hate it when my mother cries, when my sisters cry. I hate it when Ophelia cries, too. “Can I come in?”

“If you want to.”

She’s sitting in the lukewarm water of the bath, a wet towel around her shoulders. Her face is badly bruised. Two of her fingers are in a bandage. I fight to keep the anger under wraps, because anger is not what she needs from me. I kneel at the edge of the bath. She doesn’t look at me. The circles under her eyes are so dark, a tinge of blue beneath her almost translucent skin.

“Can I help you?” I offer, stroking her hair but careful not to touch her.

She shakes her head, her voice broken and hoarse. “I’m trying to stay away from you.”

It sounds like a lie, no conviction behind her words, but pointing that out won’t do either of us any favors. “I know. Just let me help.” I glance at my watch. It’s almost seven. “Let me help you until midnight. Tomorrow is a new day. We can go back to how we were.”

She nods weakly, and I open the cabinet to take out a spare toothbrush, picking up her left hand to start cleaning the mud caked beneath her nails. This is as selfish as it is selfless. Helping her keeps the gray cloud at bay. “We tried calling your parents, but we couldn’t get hold of them.”

She shrugs, bottom lip trembling. Her gaze is glassy and unfocused, blinking like the bathroom is too bright. She looks like her spirit is broken. “They’re bad at phones. They don’t understand them.”

“I’d never have guessed, looking at your technological prowess.”

A small smile graces her pinkening lips, and my god, it’s a smile that’s going to ruin my life. It’s a smile I’ll replay in my head each night as I lie in that blissful space between awake and asleep.

A tear runs down her cheek. I brush it away with my thumb. “I’ll call them later. Don’t worry them.”

“Okay,” I whisper, lowering her clean hand back into the warm water.

“I don’t like you,” she repeats. “This isn’t…this doesn’t mean anything.”

I sense her panic, though I don’t understand it. I ache to kiss the freckles on her shoulder where the towel has slipped off. “Ophelia, this doesn’t have to be anything more than one heartbeat helping another.”

She nods, falling silent for a while as I clean her hands and feet.

“Belladonna says you saved my life.”

“Not without her help.”

I move behind her, running a brush through the copper waves that run down to the small of her back. A small sob splinters the silence. And then another. “I’ll thank you one day, when I’m grateful.”

I can’t help it. I rest my forehead against her shoulder blades, taking comfort in the rhythm of her heart beneath her skin. “You don’t owe me anything.”

Ophelia feels like replaceing another human after months in the desert. A light permeating the thick black cloud. When my wayward mind wanders, it staggers back home to her.

She’s everything I’ve been asking the universe for, and she fucking hates me.

I brush her hair at the pace of a snail just to drag out the time I can be this close to her, rinsing it with warm water. Only the gentle dripping of the tap and the sound of her sniffling fills the room. “I need to know who did this to you. For my own sanity, I need to know.”

“I need my phone.”

I grab it from her bag, carefully drying the tips of her fingers so she can use it.

She opens a long thread of emails, crying like showing me was the last thing she wanted to do. Like she hates herself for it. Her pale skin turns even whiter. “There’s a new one. From thirty minutes ago.”

“A new what?”

“A new email.”

I peer over at her screen. There’s an email from a name I don’t recognize. It’s a Hamlet quote, so sickeningly perfect for this afternoon that my breath catches in my throat.

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears.

She places the device on the edge of the bath and buries her face into her hands. “I fucking hate this place, but Carmichael won’t let me leave.”

I scroll through the emails. They range from creepy, to strange, to downright terrifying for her. Sofia, the emails, this; she’s had too much on her plate. I put the phone down before I snap it into two. The burning need for blood that I’d quashed after my fight with Shawn comes back twice as strong. “Who is Alan?”

I’ll kill him.

“I don’t know. He comes into my bedroom when I’m not there. He watched me swim at the tarn before, back in September.” She wipes her tears away. “He killed Sofia. He drugged me. I thought it was you at first.”

I try hard not to be offended that she thinks I’d do those things. Maybe she’s right. I might rot into my father as I age.

Her next statement is quiet, like she’s not sure if she can trust me. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s Carmichael.”

Carmichael? It feels unlikely, but I’m wary of not believing her. “Why?”

“You said he had Brontë out on his desk when I was under the sofa in his office.” She scrolls to an email from that morning. “I got this a few moments before. And a few weeks ago, Carmichael shouted at me. He said my mother was no angel, but he said it like he hated—hates—her.”

I reread each email one by one and frown. Carmichael does love classical literature, but I’ve known him since I was seven, and he couldn’t hurt a fly. And he so rarely sends emails. He still uses a typewriter to send letters. “Anyone else you can think of? Could it be Shawn?”

Maybe he was so mad that I almost killed him, he took it out on her at the lake. I should’ve killed the bastard.

The muscles in her shoulders tense, her head rolling on her knees so she’s staring at the dark green tiles on the bathroom wall. “You don’t believe me.”

I run a cloth down her arm, trying to satisfy the deep-rooted need in me to look after her. It’s one of the few good things I’ve got as a result of my father’s shitty behavior. “I believe you have a stalker, Twist. I’m just trying to work out who it is so I can help you.”

When she doesn’t reply, I change the subject and stand, tugging a warm towel off the rail. “Do you want to come out?”

She nods. The wide, innocent look in her eyes almost knocks me back to my knees. “You won’t look down?”

I fix my eyes on hers. On the color of caramel and Scotch whisky. On the brown lashes that fan out above them, clumped together with tears. “I won’t look down.”

I don’t break eye contact as I help her up on shaky legs. As I steady her shoulders while she runs the towel over her naked skin. I don’t break it as I lay out my sweatpants for her to step into, or as I tie them at the waist.

I don’t break eye contact, and I don’t want to.

I want her trust.

I deposit her back onto my bed, swamped in my clothes. She doesn’t complain, or maybe she’s just too tired to. Until I have Alan buried underground, I want her here. I drop a text to Rocco, Vincenzo’s father, asking him to get his men to keep an eye on Ophelia whenever I’m out of the country.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” she repeats.

Not to you.

I know I’m only making life harder for myself, but I lie down beside her. I’ve split myself into so many pieces for so many people, I haven’t got the fight left in me to be selfless anymore.

She rolls onto her side with a wince that makes me want to burn the world down, gazing over at me. The soft expression over her delicate features is enough to slow my racing heart. “Why’d you drop out of Yale, Alex?”

I’m in uncharted territory, unsure whether to trust her when she clearly doesn’t trust me. “Why’d you lie about your parents?”

Fresh tears pool on her lashes. I swipe them away with my thumb. “If I told you, you’d judge me for not telling you sooner. I can’t get close to you. Can’t trust you with my heart. We just won’t work together, Alex. I have to stay away from you, I just can’t replace the strength to.”

Welcome to my world. I trace the subtle curve of her jawline with my fingers, gaze stuck on the bruising that stains her neck. Her lashes flutter shut. “Until midnight you can.”

“And then we won’t speak again?”

“If that’s what you want.” It might finish me off, though.

She sighs. “My life is boring. I don’t have a big family, or an eight-bedroom mansion. I don’t have big, exciting holidays or lavish Christmas plans. Or any Christmas plans, really. My parents aren’t fancy government officials.”

There’s something in her eye that makes me feel it’s not the whole truth, but I don’t push her. Every inch with Ophelia feels like a mile. “You’re not boring. Not to me. You’ve lost yourself, but I can see you. I agree that you’re complicated. What’s the alternative? That you’re simple?”

Now doesn’t feel like the best time for the ogres have layers spiel I give to my sisters.

My thumb skirts onto dangerous territory, over her chapped bottom lip, freeing it from her teeth. “I left Yale because my mother was—is—unwell. I stayed at home for two years to try to…fix her. She didn’t cope well with me moving out, and my father didn’t make her treatment a priority, so I left. Someone had to be at home to help, and I was happy for it to be me.”

“You switched from architecture to business when you came here.”

“I switched from pipe dream to practicality.”

Her tears run over her endless freckles. I fight the urge to kiss them away. “Will she get better?”

“I don’t know.” I roll onto my back and stare at the vaulted ceiling. I don’t know what makes me open up. I don’t know why I spill my secrets to a girl who hates me. I’ve run out of self-discipline for the week. “I know what I need to do. I just can’t do it.”

She’s holding her breath. “Which is?”

The cloud fills every corner of my chest, constricting my veins, shrinking my lungs. “Find her a live-in facility.” Away from my father. “But my youngest sisters are eight and ten. They’d go from breakfast in her bed to weekend visiting hours.”

Her hand wraps around mine. “Your father?”

My father. The monster bangs on its cage inside me, desperate to get out. “The only comment my father has made on the matter for months is that she’s bad publicity. He used to love her. Not so much now.”

She buries her head further into my chest, like she’s as desperate for my warmth as I am to warm her. I wrap both arms around her. Four hours until midnight. I want each and every one. “How did it all start?”

My fingers tangle in Ophelia’s hair. “It was gradual. The fame ate at her. It still eats at her. She spent so long in the spotlight. Every mole, freckle, hair, outfit, gram of fat on her body blown up on the front covers of magazines for years on end. After Josie was born, she had seven children. Her body had changed. I watched the lines on her body be picked apart in a way that lines on my father’s were not; in a way that men’s bodies are not. She started to believe what they said. That she’d lost her value, that she had expired. She started getting more erratic. Chopping her hair off, burning clothes that were out of season. The media call it ‘high maintenance.’”

She holds me like she thinks I’ll snap, but I won’t. While they need me, I’ll be unbreakable. “And what do the doctors call it?”

“Depression. Bipolar. Severe schizophrenia.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says on a broken sob.

I don’t cry. Can’t cry. Emotionally stunted, just like my father says he and I are. Even with the thought of my mother slipping away from me like sand between my fingers, I can’t. If I pricked my finger now, I think I’d bleed gray.

It’s the smallest of touches, but her lips press against the fabric over my chest. It spreads through my skin like a false promise.

I loathe her at that moment.

That she could do these things to me but tell me she hates me. That she could fill my chest with poisonous hope, knowing I can’t stay away. Knowing that she wouldn’t accept my love if I tried to give it to her.

Ophelia is my deadly nightshade. She’s bad for me. I know what she’ll do to me, but she’s too beautiful. Too enticing. She’s too deep in my bloodstream already, painful and ecstatic all at once.

She falls asleep with her head buried in my chest and her legs tangled around mine. I’m not strong enough to untangle them. I’m not strong enough to leave her when the clock hits midnight.

For once, I take what I need, do what I want. For the first time in a long time, I fall asleep with all the pieces of myself united here in Sorrowsong Valley.