Ellie

A sinking feeling, and not, all at the same time. Like a boat taking on water and throwing it out the other side. My stomach was all at sea, a thousand butterflies floating on nervous thermals. "What are you talking about, Roman?" I asked. "Tell me straight."

He pulled me down onto the couch next to him, soft and gentle, but firm all at once. I collapsed onto it, and resisting, every muscle weaker than it had been at any point during my long spell in hospital. He didn't speak, not for a long time, and every second he waited the tension inside me ramped up another notch, and another, and another. My body was in a strange Neverland, in which every muscle and every limb was powerless to resist, empty of energy and devoid of movement except my chest, which was tight and tiny with tension. I wanted to scream out, and to demand answers on my schedule, not his.

But I didn't do any of that. I felt more powerless than ever before. Roman's head sank into one of his huge hands, but it only lingered there for a second as he composed himself, before it re-emerged. He wore a pained expression on his face as he spoke, pinched with nervousness. "You don't recognize me at all?"

The question hit me like a punch in the gut. Something I felt that I knew a lot about. It tossed me into a muddy pit of emotion, and I wallowed in its depths, struggling to claw my way out. Its plain simplicity added to its impact, and built upon it. The question called into question everything that I had known to be true – little enough as everything was since my accident. I was scared to blink, or to close my eyes lest memories that I didn't want revealed pulled themselves to the surface. Who am I? And more importantly: who was I?

"What are you talking about, Roman." I said, repeating his name. It felt meaningful, something to hang on to. After all, if I was saying it like that, it was almost as though I'd only just met him. Which was true. Wasn't it?

He stared at me, and his icy eyes glistened with a hundred colors, flecks of amber and gold and silver and ivy – a sea of hurt. An ocean. I close my eyes, just to escape before I drowned in it. And the second I did, I was assailed by a vicious attack. Not physical, not from Roman, but worse, far more cutting and impossible to evade: memory.

A man in a hockey jersey. No, more than one. Clustering around me. I'm hurting already, but the reason escaped me. I'm in a bar, it's a place I've been before. I won't come back. They are pressing against me, hemming me in, and no one's doing a damn thing about it. I look around, trying to catch someone's eye, but no one will look at me. They're staring into their half empty glasses of beer, or else playing a game of darts. Too intently. They know what's going on, but none of them is man enough to step in. Nor am I. Any scrap of courage I ever had seems to have drained out of my thighs and down through the barstool. Why don't I just get up? I scream at the dream me, but nothing happens. I can't affect it.

The guy in the hockey jersey caresses me, and I close my eyes just hoping that everything will go away. It's happening again. Wait? What does that mean, again? No – that's another river of emotion that I know just by sensing it that I can't handle. Not now. No one's helping me. Wait. There is.

Just one.

I feel safe.

I gasped audibly as my eyes flickered open. "You."

Roman nodded. "Yes. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I didn't know, not all of it. Not the truth."

I closed my eyes again, searching for an escape, any escape from the crushing weight of truth that was beginning to press down upon my shoulders. "No, no, it can't be true." But even as I said it, I knew that it made sense. I remembered half-snatched fragments of dreams, a vague feeling that I'd met this man before, that I was safe even when all sense screamed the opposite. And the way he looked at me. It was honest, caring – and all too much.

"I'm sorry," he repeated. His voice was apologetic and hurt all at the same time. I guessed that perhaps he had harbored some vague hope that everything would turn out all right, that I would jump into his arms and tell him that everything would be okay, that I loved him, and that now we'd found each other, nothing would ever tear us apart.

But life's not like the movies.

"You're, you're…" I stammered, struggling to get the words out. He nodded.

"The father."

My ears rang, suffering under an almost physical assault. It was like someone had taken a hammer to a huge brass bell and held my head to it. I was off-balance, and I would have collapsed without the couch underneath me. Roman put his arms around my body and pulled me to his side, but he held me gingerly, clearly worried about whether he was doing the right thing. I couldn't blame him. I didn't know either. It felt nice, warm, and safe. But I couldn't tear my mind away from the truth of the deceit, nor the fact that he had lied to me. Roman was my kidnapper, my lover, it now seemed, and who knew what else. Certainly not me.

"Tell me everything," I said, pulling away. Escaping his strong warmth was unpleasant, like pulling away the duvet on a cold, wintry day, but it needed to be done. I couldn't trust myself to make the right decision without it. And like it or not, we were bound together by something stronger than love. We shared a child.

He started speaking without so much as a second's hesitation. It wasn't a practiced speech, more a recitation of a million buried thoughts and feelings spewing out in one volcanic eruption. It felt honest, true and from the heart. The choice I needed to make was whether it excused any of what he had done. "I didn't know when I took you from the hospital. I slept with you what, a year ago?" He continued without waiting for a response, without even looking inquiringly at me. "And then nothing. I didn't see you in that bar again. I went back, more than once, but I don't know whether I really hoped to find you there. You were an illusion, a tantalizing view of salvation – but one I didn't think I deserved." He paused. The silence hung for a few seconds.

"And then?" I prompted, surprised by the fact that my voice came out calm and steady.

"And then I saw your face on my phone," he replied. "A death warrant. Cash for a life. Something I've done more times than I can count on two hands." He said it simply, not bothering to disguise the brutality implicit in his words. I knew the truth, hiding it would have done nothing. Still, I was rocked by the implication. "And I knew right then and there that I couldn't do it again. I'd been wavering for a long time. I told you how I got into this business. Well, not all of it."

He looked up, as if hoping that I would coax the truth out of him. I threw him a lifeline. "Tell me."

"I killed my father," he said finally. A storm of emotions was visible on his face, his cheeks tense and taut with worry and half-suppressed memory. "You know what he did, to me, to us. When Tim died," he croaked, then his voice strengthened. "When he killed him, I snapped. I never trained harder than I did back then, and all for one reason. To rid the earth of that man."

I realized that my hand was trembling, and I pressed it against my thigh. My throat was dry, and I realized that I was living vicariously through his pain. "I'm sorry…" I said, but he didn't hear it. Roman's was a mask now, glassy as he molded it to hide the pain. I suspected that he had been doing that for years.

"So I did it," he said, sparing me the details that I desperately wanted to know, but knew better than to fish for. "I killed him, and I didn't stop. I was barely more than a kid, and I didn't know how to do anything else," he laughed bitterly. "So I did it for cash. Just a little bit, to start, enough to get by. Bad people. Mobsters, gangsters, killers – the scum of the earth. And then I got the good jobs, the ones that pay enough for you to buy a new motorbike, and then a car, and then a house. The first time you kill a man," he glanced subconsciously down at his hands.

"It hurts, like you've ripped a band aid off your soul. But I kept doing it and I kept doing it until it didn't hurt anymore. But by then, I was on the verge of breaking. And then I met you, and something changed. Everything changed. I didn't hurt anyone after that. I still got the jobs, sent to my phone like everyone else. I checked them out of habit more than anything else. And then I saw your face flush up on the screen and I knew I couldn't let you end up as just another cold body in the city morgue."

"And that's when you took me from the hospital," I said. Croaked. My mouth bobbed open and shut like a goldfish as my mind attempted to process what Roman had just revealed, its gears turning as slowly as though someone had poured wet concrete over them. It was a wrecking ball of truth. A hammer, smashed directly against the edifice of everything I thought to be true, and shattering it, sending it tumbling to the ground in a spinning shower of shards, a tower of dust as thick and deep as the fog sweeping through my mind.

He could be lying, my brain warned, a quiet yelp that I could barely hear through the unbearable rushing sound of blood coursing through my ears. My hands were sticky, cold and clammy with sweat. Just spinning a tale that sounds too far-fetched not to be true, too unbelievable to be a lie. Playing with your heart when you're at your weakest. He's a killer. He's a kidnapper. Is it too much to believe he could be a liar as well?

But one glance at Roman's crushed, broken face told me that he was telling the truth.

And that was way more terrifying.

We were linked together, forever.

And I didn't know how to handle it.