I’m holding her. She’s still, finally. I haven’t slept but she’s been sleeping, knocked out, for hours. She hasn’t moved since I stripped off her dress and laid her in my bed. And, I decided, I’m not letting her out of it again. What happened between us tonight, it’s bound us. But we were bound before that. We were bound from day one. I knew her darkness. Her damage. It’s what drew me. I just didn’t realize it would turn into this.

Cilla’s curled into me, her face buried against my chest. Her breath is warm against my skin and I think she’s peaceful for the first time since I’ve known her. Maybe for the first time since leaving Callahan’s house. His protection.

I look down at the top of Cilla’s head. Move my hand a little to brush the hair from her face. She doesn’t move. Her lips are slightly parted, the last remnant of makeup a shadow on her temple. The skin around her eyes is puffy and pink, and yet she is the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Maybe it’s because I’ve seen her bared. Seen her pain. Slain her dragon.

I don’t know how long it is that I watch her but sun is filtering in around the curtains covering the windows when she stirs. She stretches a little, makes a sound almost like a cat purring, feels me beside her, stops. Blinks. Her hand moves to her hip and she sucks in a breath. She’ll feel that for a few days, but she needed it. Needed to be forced to release. She was no longer capable of doing it herself.

Jade eyes finally meet mine. I’m curious what I’ll find. What she’ll say or do. She closes one hand over my shoulder and draws herself up. Her face is an inch from mine, her naked chest pressing against mine.

She doesn’t speak, neither does she smile. She only watches me, touches her cheek to the scruff on my face before bringing her mouth to mine. Her lips are tender when she kisses me. I wrap my arms around her waist when she slides closer, then climbs on top of me. She deepens the kiss, and her legs open and my dick is hard for her, but it’s not release I seek, and I have a feeling that’s the same for her. This is something else. It’s a need to seal what happened between us last night. A need to couple. To be joined and fused together, at least for a moment.

“Cilla.” I roll her onto her back. Her legs wrap around me, drawing me to her. I kiss her again, cup the back of her head, weave my fingers through her hair. Keeping my eyes on her, I slide into her. This isn’t a fucking. It’s not hard. It’s not me or her taking. It’s too tender for that. This is love making, something foreign to me and, I have a feeling, for her.

“Cilla,” I say again. I move slowly and she clings to me, our gazes locked on one another, and this feeling, this tenderness, it’s strange. I feel everything more acutely than ever before. Feel her body absorb me like I’m a part of her. Like she’s a part of me. We’re so close, I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to anyone before, not even to her, not even when I was fucking her.

“I love you,” she whispers, a tear sliding down the side of her face.

I just stare at her as she lies beneath me, hold her in my arms, possess her.

“I love you,” she says again, like she’s making sense of it herself. “I love you.”

Her eyes glisten, shine like emeralds, and her pink mouth opens and her breathing becomes more shallow as the urge to come dictates my rhythm and it’s like I can’t slow down, can’t drag this out even though it’s all I want, to make this last hours. Days. To stay inside her like this forever. But I can’t because I need to fill her up, need to feel her contract around me. Need to finish this. And when I do, it’s with a human sound, no animal mounting its mate, not fucking with the purpose to impregnate, but making slow love. I come for what feels like an eternity and feel her come and watch her like she watches me, and I know something has changed now. It’s not the same between us but I don’t have a word to put to this thought, this feeling. I just know it’s different, that it will never go back to what it was.

That this, last night and now, this, it’s a line of demarcation. Tonight, everything has changed. Every single thing.

“I love you, Cilla.”

* * *

“How did you do it?” Cilla asks once we’re showered. She’s pulling a sweater over her head and I’m buttoning my shirt.

I know what she’s asking but does she really want to know? Callahan’s become crocodile food by now. Crocodile shit.

“I took pound for pound of flesh. Like you wanted.”

“How long until he died?”

“Long.”

“Not long enough.”

“No, probably not, but it’s finished now. You have to let it be now.”

“Have you let it be? With Ginny?”

The question catches me off guard. I button the last button, look at her, see only curiosity in her eyes.

“I think I did the night I went out there.”

“When you came back without your shoes?”

I nod, look off in the distance. “It’s the first time I’ve been back since everything happened. Finding her shoe out there—she always wore ballerina slippers—I didn’t expect to find that. I thought they’d cleaned it all up when they took her away. But seeing it, I don’t know, in a way, it showed me that it was in the past or something. Like somehow, some way, my own feelings about that night, my rage about what happened to her, they didn’t rule me anymore.”

Cilla’s watching me when I turn to her.

“The one thing that nearly destroyed me was the fact that I’d let her down. That I hadn’t protected her like a brother should. Not that she hadn’t come to me, but that I’d been too blind to see. Impotence for a man is a cruel sort of death. That helplessness, powerlessness, I felt even when I killed the man responsible, it stayed with me for a long time. Too long. I don’t know when it left me, actually, but it has. And that night, I was drunk.” I shake my head. “I was so fucking drunk but maybe I needed to be because it felt like she had left her shoe for me to find. Touching it again, putting it between my own, bigger ones, it finished something.”

I walk to the window, look outside. Cilla comes up beside me, slips her hand into mine.

“What I did to my uncle, maybe back then I thought I could bring her back by taking his life. I don’t know. But she’s gone and I think she’s at peace. Maybe more so than she could ever be here.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to you. To both of you,” Cilla says, taking both hands now.

I look down at her. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. To both of you.”

She gives me a weak smile and I have a feeling she’s also let go of at least some part of the past. That now, she can start to heal.