Promised (15 page)

“I can't say the wrong thing if you don't tell me what you're thinking,” he said.

She let out a sad little laugh. “This is terrible. I don't think my parents would have liked you.”

“Ouch.”

“I know.”

“You're wrong, though,” Leon said. “I'd have won them over. They'd have seen how happy you are with me.”

“You arrested them.”

“True. But that was a different me, before I met you.”

“You wouldn't do it now, would you?” she asked.

“I would bring your mother flowers and help your father with his sewing.”

She laughed again, more easily this time. “He never wanted any help with his work.”

“I couldn't even hold his pincushion for him?”

She smiled. “No.”

“Well, then, maybe you're right. Maybe it would be hopeless.”

She slid a little nearer, to where her knee bumped against his leg.

“Any better?” he asked, his voice tender.

She hardly knew what she was feeling anymore. “This day has been insane.”

“It can't be worse than what I was imagining,” he said. “Evelyn told me they took you straight to the prison.”

She nodded, gazing out absently at the dim road and the dark houses across the way. “They took some blood from me,” she said. “Several vials. They said I carry the anti-hemophilia gene and my blood is O negative.”

“Which doctor did this?”

“His name was Hickory.”

“He used to work with Persephone Frank,” Leon asked. “I don't know much about him. Did he do anything else?”

“He injected me with something. I don't know what. And he listened to my heart and lungs.”

“This was in a prison office? You cooperated with them?”

Gaia didn't want to answer any more. She didn't understand why she should feel ashamed for being so afraid in V cell, but she was. She dropped her head, focusing on Maya's little fingers curled gently in innocent sleep. “They strapped me down and gagged me to take the blood,” she said. “Then they put me in V cell and left me there.” She took a tight breath.
I fell apart
.

Leon was very still beside her.

“I can't be afraid,” she said. “People need me now. I can't be afraid.”

“Iris,” he said.

She lifted her gaze. His shadowed face looked like it had turned to stone in the dim moonlight.

“No one even touched me,” she went on, “but all I could think about was you and what they did to you. I've never been so afraid. I became completely unglued, from my own imagination. It's some sick, awful game to him, isn't it? Why is he like that?”

“He just is.” Leon said. “He just knows. It's like he can empathize completely, but then he uses that knowledge in reverse to hurt people. He did it to me, too. When they were torturing me, back when you first left for the wasteland, he told me that they'd caught you. He said he had you in another room and he could do whatever he wanted to you. I didn't know he was lying.”

“You never told me.”

“I couldn't stand it,” he said. “It was unbearable. And I didn't even know yet that I loved you.” He moved then finally, drawing her close so that his arms encircled her and Maya both. “Remember you said we have places where our minds don't meet? I don't want that anymore. Please don't ever close me out,” he said. “There's nothing you could ever tell me that would be worse than you
not
telling me what you think.”

She understood then. It wasn't just that she could trust him, she realized. He
needed
her to trust him. It was his own craving, to be trustworthy. She felt a new, small opening inside herself. This was what it meant to truly be close to Leon, to let him in. She peered into his eyes, searching the darkness there, and his lips curved slightly as he studied her in return. He touched a warm hand to her cheek.

“It's insane what I feel for you,” he said.

She let out a wistful laugh. “I wish we could go somewhere, just you and me and Maya. Leave everything behind.”

“It's too late for that, even if you really meant it.” He loosened his embrace enough to snuggle her comfortably closer beside him.

A cricket sounded, a thin dry chirp after the lush night noises of Sylum.

“I miss the lightning bugs,” she said. “Remember that night? It seems so long ago, but I can still see it so clearly.”

“They were unbelievable.”

“You wouldn't come out with me,” she said, recalling how he'd leaned against a pillar on the porch while she and Maya had circled in the dark meadow grasses, surrounded by thousands of blinking, skimming lights.

“I couldn't,” he said.

“Why? Were you still mad at me?”

“Mad. Lonely. Everything. I was still hoping I could get over you.”

“What a mistake that would have been,” she said.

She felt his arm around her back.

“It's baffling, isn't it? Even then, even when we could hardly talk to each other, I still had to be around you,” he said. “I tried to imagine life without you, and nothing made sense. I'm not sure what I would have done if you hadn't finally seen how much we belonged together. Destroyed Sylum in some way, I suppose.”

“You wouldn't have,” she said.

“I'd have tried,” he said. “We'd still be there. Do you realize that? You'd have married Peter and we'd have all stayed in Sylum.”

“No.”

“Yes,” he said. “Or Will. One of those Chardos.”

She shook her head.

“Yes,” he repeated, like it was a certainty he'd considered at length.

She really didn't want to think about what could have happened with Peter. Or Will. She didn't want to think of them making friends in Peg's Tavern, either.

“Well, you won me over with your pumpkin bread and your smooth moves,” she said.

He laughed. “Smooth I was not.”

“You were smooth. You were waiting for me that night with no shirt on.”

“Maybe a little smooth,” he admitted, rubbing his bearded jaw. “I wasn't going to give up without a fight, that's for sure.”

She smiled, remembering. “It worked. We're here.” She inhaled deeply, trying to keep her tension at bay as she recalled what “here” actually entailed. “Was it good to see Evelyn?”

“Yes. She's incredible. I want more time with her, but I don't see yet how I'll get it.” He shifted slightly. “It's hard to believe I have a baby sister now, too. I wonder if I would be more like Derek if I'd grown up with him as a father.”

“You turned out fairly decent the way you are,” Gaia said. “Besides, if you'd lived outside the wall, you might have died like your sisters and your mother did.”

He smiled. “I'd like to think I would have lived and met you sooner. ‘Fairly decent,' huh?”

You know what I mean
, she thought. “I just wish the Protectorat could see it.”

He straightened slowly. “Did he say something about me?”

She tried to find words that wouldn't revive bad memories, but there was no way around it. “He brought up your sister Fiona,” she admitted. “How come he doesn't know what you're really like?”

“Gaia,” he said, drawing out her name and sliding his arm away at the same time. “You don't want to go there.”

“I'm going to have to deal with him,” she said. “I want to understand what's between him and you. You just said I could tell you anything. You can tell me, too.”

“It isn't something I can just explain,” he said. His voice was different, tighter.

“Just try me.”

He pressed his hands between his knees. “I don't know. Maybe this'll give you an idea,” he said. “Back when I was about ten, my father's old teacher came to visit for an overnight. He had a little wooden puzzle box that went missing. When the Protectorat found out, he got angry. Embarrassed, I guess he was. We were supposed to be on our best behavior, and it was obvious that one of us kids had stolen it.”

“Did you get blamed?”

He shook his head. “I was afraid I would, but they found it in my brother Rafael's things that night. He was about six, but he was old enough to know better, and he'd lied about it, too. That put my father over the edge. I was certain he was going to beat my brother, so I refused to leave the room when my father ordered me out. I thought I could protect him somehow.”

His voice tapered off. She waited, picturing the two brothers, the littler one cowering behind the older boy. Leon ran a hand back through his hair, and then leaned forward and pressed his hands slowly, carefully together.

“My father didn't hit him.” Leon's voice was dead calm. “He yelled at him and scolded him. He threatened him, but he never hit him. He never even touched him.”

She watched his profile. “That's a good thing, isn't it?”

“Of course it is.” He angled his profile upward, toward the night sky. “My father never hit Rafael or my sisters. It was only me he hit. You see, until that night, I thought all fathers hit their sons.” Old hurt and confusion crept into his voice. “I thought what he did to me was normal.”

Gaia hugged Maya more tenderly. “Did he hit you often?” she asked softly.

“No. Two or three months could go by with nothing, and then he might hit me twice in a week,” he said. “It wasn't consistent. Once I ruined his favorite watch and he barely mentioned it. Another time, I dribbled milk down my chin when I laughed at the dinner table, and he took a belt to me. That was a bad one.”

“I'm so, so sorry,” she said. “Didn't Genevieve do anything to protect you?”

“I think she intervened a lot, actually,” he said. “I think she's why he went for longer stretches without touching me. But what could she really do? Tell somebody?” He leaned back slightly, bracing a hand behind him again. “I'm not sure why I'm even telling you this. I know plenty of other kids whose parents were hard on them.”

“That doesn't make it right,” Gaia said.

Leon shrugged. “You get used to it.”

But Gaia knew she never could have. Her parents had never been anything but gentle with her, even when they disciplined her. “It's the contempt that would get to me,” she said.

“‘Contempt,'” Leon said, as if testing the concept. “I suppose that's what it was.”

“Did being advanced have something to do with it?” she asked.

“Possibly. Adopting me was his first wife's idea, not his,” he said. “He never made any pretence about hiding that, but he went along with it. He used to say I ought to be able to rise above my nature.”

“Like you were innately bad? That's awful,” Gaia said.

“More
inferior
than bad. And he had a point.” Leon seemed to relax slightly. “I was a liar, much worse than Rafael. I liked seeing how much I could get away with. It was always worth it. I was lousy at school and sports, except running, and I never raced when my father could see me. That way I didn't have to care that he never showed up. The one thing I was good at was getting the twins to laugh. I could play with them for hours, and they loved that.”

She smiled in the darkness, thinking of how sweet he was with Maya. “I can imagine.” The moonlight dimmed, and she looked up to see the crescent glowing through a slow-moving cloud. “Was Fanny your mother's name? Your first adoptive mother?”

“Fanny Grey, yes. Why?”

She recalled how the Protectorat had said it would hurt Fanny to know Leon had taken a different last name. Passing that along to Leon would serve no good. “I just remember you used her name.”

“Yes, after I was disowned.” His boot made a shifting noise on the step. “I've sometimes wondered if I was his biggest failure,” Leon said. “I think he tried to overcome his prejudice against people outside the wall by raising one of us himself. Then it turned out he couldn't stand me, and I was right there, in his family, spoiling everything.” He brushed a bug off his knee. “Who was he going to blame for that?”

She took his theory another step. “And then the mess happened with Fiona. I think I see, now.” The Protectorat had naturally blamed Leon. He'd been looking for the worst in him for years, and Fiona's death provided the final proof of how evil Leon was.

She suddenly understood a comment the Protectorat had made to Genevieve a few hours earlier:
“He had his hands on her.”
The Protectorat had been agonized by the idea that his other daughter Evelyn was still vulnerable to Leon, because the Protectorat didn't believe Leon was innocent. Leon had played on that.

A shiver rippled through Gaia.

Leon turned to her. “There's so much I wish I could undo with Fiona,” he said quietly. “I still feel like it's my fault she killed herself. I don't think that'll ever completely go away. But it's better than it was. I can see now that I did the best I could. I was hardly more than a kid myself, and selfish, but I didn't know what she was going to do.”

“You are the gentlest person I know,” Gaia said.

He let out a laugh. “I wouldn't say that.”

“With me, you are.” That, she realized, was the kernel of Leon right there. She could trust him about herself completely and knew he'd be loyal to her forever, but she couldn't count on how he might be with anyone who crossed him, or ever tried to hurt the people he loved.

“Gaia, I don't want you to ever underestimate my father,” he said. “He is absolutely, completely, irreversibly ruthless. I want you to be ready for that. This isn't Sylum here.”

“I know,” she said, touching her ear and remembering she still needed to properly clean her cut. “But I have to think of an approach that's going to be right for all of New Sylum. We can't just blow up something. We have to build trust and a long-term alliance with your father. That's much, much harder to do.”