Page 102

And it worked.

That’s the terrible secret of it. It worked so well it became an addiction, a country I preferred to live in, a Crowe so vivid the world forgot to look for a Silas at all.

Only in the rare hours of tranquility does the petal unfurl. When I am lost in art, in the meditative pull of knitting, or—and I dare admit it—in the sacred work of dressing and grooming the dead, readying them for their final celebration amid the hush of an embalming room, there and only there can I be this soft true thing that nothing in the world has managed to wilt.

It is a short list of sanctuaries.

I have guarded it ferociously my whole life.

The dead, you see, never demand a performance.

They make no expectations a person can fail to meet. There is no one left in a body to sneer at the boy who was never quite enough, and so the embalming room became, paradoxically, the one place I could be most alive—most myself, most gentle, my hands moving with a tenderness the living never earned from me.

People find it macabre when they learn of it.

They have it precisely backwards.

It is the kindest work I know. To take what cruelty left behind and make it beautiful again, to send the ruined off with dignity restored—there has always been a prayer in it, for me. A quiet insistence that even the most broken thing deserves to be madelovely one last time. I think now that I have been rehearsing for her my entire life and never knew it.

And yet.

This pretty Peony, watching me now with those raw and undefended eyes, with that addicting scent of hers—strawberries and dark ganache and pink velvet under the bright bite of metal—that has been picking at the mortar of my walls for weeks, yearning them to crumble:she is the first new being in years I have wished, deliberately, to let inside the sanctuary.

To let see the petal.

Perhaps so that she might finally understand the thing neither of us cares to say plainly—that we are far more alike than either of us has dared admit.

The look we share stretches long and intense, firelit and weighted, and I watch her gaze drop to my mouth—watch her weigh the next move with the careful deliberation of a woman who has learned that every door she opens might cost her.

I don’t rush her.

I would never rush her.

Though my treacherous heart skips a beat and then another, because I would be lying if I claimed I didn’t want her, and I do. I want her far more than is wise. Wanting is the most dangerous game I know, more perilous than any blade or any corpse, because once I want a thing, truly want it, I do not relinquish it. Ever.

It becomes mine to keep, mine to guard, mine to follow into ruin.

When her eyes lift back to mine, I see it bloom in them. The conviction. The decision arriving whole and certain. And when she leans in, I hold my breath—actually hold it, the showman struck silent for once—until her lips press to mine. Firmly.

Without a flicker of doubt in the seal of them.

My knitting needles slip from my fingers and fall to the rug, whatever careful row I’d reached abruptly meaningless, because both my hands have found her face, cupping the delicate architecture of her jaw as I take the lead of the kiss I have been quietly starving for since the first time I called her sweet and meant every syllable.

She tastes of the night and of sugar and of something underneath that I can only call surrender, and I drink it like a man who didn’t know how thirsty he’d become.

She has no idea how valuable she is.

That’s the tragedy threaded through all her brilliance—she cannot see her own worth, this precious, priceless creature, this true mastermind dropped into a game the rest of us only think we’re any good at. We speak of life like chess, the four of us, the way clever and dangerous people do.

And in that framing she is the Queen—the piece we would burn the whole board to protect. Except that’s the part the others occasionally miss and I never do: she isn’t the piece being protected.

She’s the one playing.

She has been three moves ahead this entire time, letting us believe we guard her while she quietly arranges the endgame, waiting with infinite patience to slide the final piece into place and breathe the word checkmate over the throat of the man who thinks he’s hunting her.

And that’s what I adore most.

Not the beauty, though the beauty is a knife. Not the madness, though the madness is a delight. The mastermind underneath both, the cold gorgeous machine of her mind humming away beneath all that lovely chaos.