“Shade. Right?”
“Keep his name out of your mouth,” I snap, forgetting for a moment what I’m trying to do. The wound is too fresh, too raw. He takes it in stride.
“My mother said you used to dream about him,” he says. I flinch at the memory, and the thought of her inside my brain. I can still feel her, clawing at the walls of my skull. “But I suppose those weren’t dreams at all. It was really him.”
“Did she do that with everyone?” I reply. “Was nothing safe from her? Even your dreams?”
He doesn’t respond. I push harder.
“Did you ever dream of me?”
Again I cut him without realizing it. He drops his gaze, looking down to the empty plate in front of him. He raises a hand to grab at his water glass, but thinks better of it. His fingers tremble for a second before he shoves them away, out of sight.
“I wouldn’t know,” he finally says. “I don’t dream.”
I scoff. “That’s impossible. Even for a person like you.”
Something dark, something sad, twitches across his face. His jaw tightens and his throat bobs, trying to swallow words he shouldn’t speak. They burst from him anyway. His hands reappear, tapping weakly on the table.
“I used to have nightmares. She took that part away when I was a boy. Like Samson said, my mother was a surgeon with minds. She cut out whatever didn’t suit.”
In recent weeks, a ferocious, fiery anger has replaced the cold hollowness I used to feel. But as Maven speaks, the ice returns. It bleeds through me, a poison, an infection. I don’t want to hear what he has to say. His excuses and explanations are nothing to me. He is a monster still, a monster always. And yet I can’t stop myself from listening. Because I could be a monster too. If given the wrong chance. If someone broke me, like he is broken.
“My brother. My father. I know I loved them once. I remember it.” His hands clench around a butter knife, and he glares at the dull edge. I wonder if he wants to use it on himself or his dead mother. “But I don’t feel it. That love isn’t there anymore. For any of them. For most things.”
“Then why keep me here? If you don’t feel anything. Why not just kill me and be done with this?”
“She has a hard time erasing . . . certain kinds of feeling,” he admits, meeting my eye. “She tried to do it with Father, to make him forget his love for Coriane. It only made things worse. Besides,” he mumbles, “she always said it was better to be heartbroken. The pain makes you stronger. Love makes you weak. And she’s right. I learned that before I even knew you.”
Another name lingers in the air, unspoken.
“Thomas.”
A boy at the war front. Another Red lost to a useless war. My first real friend, Maven told me once. I realize now the spaces between those words. The things unsaid. He loved that boy as he claims to love me.
“Thomas,” Maven echoes. His grip on the knife tightens. “I felt . . .” Then his brow furrows, deep creases forming between his eyes. He puts his other hand to his temple, massaging an ache I can’t understand. “She wasn’t there. She never met him. She didn’t know. He wasn’t even a soldier. It was an accident.”
“You said you tried to save him. That your guards stopped you.”
“An explosion at headquarters. The reports said it was Lakelander infiltration.” Somewhere, a clock ticks as the minutes slide by. His silence stretches as he decides what to say, how far to let the mask slip. But it’s already gone. He’s bare as he can only be with me. “We were alone. I lost control.”
I see it in my mind’s eye, filling in what he can’t will himself to tell me. An ammunitions depot maybe. Or even a gas line. Both need only flame to kill.
“I didn’t burn. He did.”
“Maven—”
“Even my mother could not cut that memory away. Even she couldn’t make me forget, no matter how I begged her to. I wanted her to take that pain from me, and she tried so many times. Instead, it always got worse.”
I know how he’s going to answer my question, but I ask all the same.
“Please let me go?”
“I won’t.”
“Then you’re going to let me die too. Like him.”
The room crackles with heat, sending sweat down my spine. He stands so quickly, he knocks back his chair, letting it crash to the floor. One fist collides with the tabletop before raking sideways, throwing plates, glasses, and reports to the floor. The papers float for a moment, suspended in air before drifting down to the shattered pile of crystal and porcelain.
“I won’t,” he growls under his breath, so low I almost don’t hear him as he stalks from the room.
The Arvens enter and seize me beneath my arms, pulling me away from the table of papers, all of them slipping from reach.