If he thought I would forgive him so easily, he was wrong.
I sensed the snow seeping into my slippers. The laughter from the ballroom, the dancers, the music . . . none of it mattered as much as this young man with me amid the hedges.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “You said you weren’t ever coming back. You left me.”
“I am sorry for that,” he said, warm breath clouding the air between us. He stepped forward slowly as if I was a horse spooked by only a falling leaf. “I didn’t want to leave you. I had no choice.”
“You might have told me, instead of shoving me away in a dinghy with your boot!”
“I know,” he said, glancing at the balcony overhead to make certain we were alone. “It was cowardly, but I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t think you’d understand, and I feared you would insist on staying behind with me. I needed to know I’d done everything I could to keep you safe.”
“Safe? I nearly died in that dinghy.”
He ran a hand over his face, searching for words. “If you’d stayed on the island, you would have died for certain.”
The note of regret hanging in his voice gave me pause. He never would have abandoned the island, not unless something terrible had forced him to. What had happened on that burning piece of land after I’d left? I had tried not to think about it, though ever since that time I’d been plagued by waking nightmares of reverted beast-men turning on one another, flesh ripping apart, and Montgomery like an ungodly prince amid the madness.
“If you’re here,” I said carefully, “does it mean all the islanders are dead?”
“Dead, or close enough to it.” His words were flat, but his broken voice betrayed him.
“What happened?”
He glanced again at the balcony, and then frowned at me shivering in the snow. “You’re freezing out here. Let’s go inside, and I shall explain everything.”
“I’m not a fragile child who can’t handle a little cold. Tell me.”
He watched me through the darkness as though weighing whether or not to believe me. At last he removed his suit jacket and wrapped it around my bare shoulders, rubbing them through the fabric. The friction wasn’t nearly as warming as his proximity. I’d forgotten his smell, fresh hay and sunlight even in the midst of the city.
“I had no choice but to leave,” he began. “The compound had burned. The islanders had reverted to feral creatures and taken to the jungle. They didn’t know how to hunt for themselves or feed. I made my home in Jaguar’s old cabin, thinking I could at least help them adjust by breeding the rabbits and feeding the beast-men myself. But their instincts took over, and it wasn’t rabbits they wanted. They hungered for larger prey, and turned on each other instead. After a few months, they forgot I had ever been a friend to them. I was forced to hunt them down one by one, and kill them before they killed me.”
His voice held steady, but the way he ran an anxious hand through his loose blond hair betrayed him. He had loved the creatures, even helped give life to many of them. When I’d first arrived on the island, the beast-men had been civilized creatures, living in villages and eating only vegetables, even praying in a church of their own making. Yet once Father had taken away their treatments, they quickly regressed into the animals they were, and in the end all Montgomery’s scientific genius and high morals were reduced to nothing more than kill or be killed.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He looked away, into the hedges. “You were right when you said they should never have been created. It was mad of him to do it, and folly for me to help him. Killing them mercifully was my penance.” His voice dropped as he glanced at the balcony again and stepped closer. “But one escaped, Juliet. I went back to bury the bodies of those who died in the compound fire, and Edward wasn’t there.”
His words were low and thick with warning. Meant to shock me, and yet how could I be shocked when just the night before I’d been in that very man’s arms? The scratches on my shoulder burned beneath the piece of red silk so hot that I was certain Montgomery would feel them.
“He survived the fire,” Montgomery continued, mistaking my silence for distress. “For weeks I hunted him. He left me notes, begging for a chance to cure himself, wanting me to help him. But I didn’t—I couldn’t. Because that monster inside him left me letters, too. They came from a Mr. Hide, addressed to a Mr. Seek. The quarry writing to his hunter.”