Page 73 of Dangerous Exile

She scampered to the side of the mattress, dragging the sheet with her. “Talen, no. I’m not pushing it—I’m just saying you don’t remember everything yet. I only mean that you’re making a decision that you might regret. A decision not but two days after you found out what really happened to your parents. Of course you don’t want that—what happened to them—in your life. But there was so much more. If you remember more about who your parents were, how they were, maybe that’s your connection back to the good instead of the bad.”

Her toes touched the floor and Talen took a step away from her, his fingers folding into fists.

She stood, clutching the sheet at her chest, advancing on him. “This family, this title. It wasn’t all horrible, Talen. I remember that. I saw you happy here once. Happy like any child that had a carefree life. I envied you that life.” She reached out, grabbing for his arm, but he snapped it away. Yet still she came at him.

“And your aunt even said so—she said you three, your mother, father and you, were happy. Happy. That was all I ever wanted you to remember by coming back here. That you were happy. Capable of it. Worthy of it.”

Every word she said, a nail pounding into his brain. She kept talking about a happiness he’d never known, like it was a given.

But what happiness could have existed if it all ended like it did?

False happiness?

That was the only thing that could have existed. His mother took her last breath in front of his very eyes, reaching for him, and he’d been too cowardly to stretch out even a finger to her.

He wasn’t fit to even sniff around happiness. Happiness had no place in his life. He’d always known that to his core and finally discovering what happened to his parents only solidified that fact.

“You were happy, Talen.” Ness took a final step toward him, her amber eyes pleading, glowing gold in the firelight, and he had to thrust a long step backward, his heels touching the heat of the marble hearth.

“Yet instead of memories of happiness in my mind, you just set the reality of the nightmare that I’ve managed to avoid my whole life into my head.” His words snapped, his voice shaking with a sudden rage he couldn’t control, his yell filling the room. “That’s what you gave me here, Ness. A nightmare that I have to live with every minute now. Horrors that cannot be avenged. That is what you gave me when you brought me here. Not happiness. The exact opposite of it. Hell. Demons I cannot escape. You did this.”

Her head snapped back and she blanched white, her eyes wide.

Without a word, she dropped the sheet to the floor, grabbed her robe from the chair he’d flung it across earlier, wrapped it haphazardly about her body, and left the room.

He didn’t stop her.

{ Chapter 26 }

He should have gone and found her.

Five minutes. Ten. Thirty. That was as far as he should have left it.

But he’d scared her half to death.

Scared himself for how much anger he’d spewed out onto her.

It wasn’t her fault, none of this. She’d truly only brought him here to Washburn so that he would remember her from long ago. To prove to him she wasn’t crazy. And she wasn’t. But now he was starting to suffer madness in his own head he couldn’t escape from.

For that, he’d screamed at her like she was the devil himself. She wasn’t. He knew that, but fury had erupted out of him, uncontrolled, unplanned.

Fury that had caused for an agonizing moment, fear in her eyes. Fear of him.

Even a second of fear in her eyes was too much.

Setting fear into her was something he’d sworn to himself he would never do. Not with her past.

That alone kept him in his room, not going to Ness. Not wanting to admit to himself how he’d just failed her.

So instead, he’d left the last words he spoke to her to fester throughout the whole night. A whole night where he’d tossed and turned in an empty, cold bed.

And now he couldn’t find Ness.

He’d been searching the estate for two hours with no sign of her. He should have gone to find her at daybreak before she could have disappeared on him.

Talen veered left at the main staircase, heading into the lower drawing room with the odd sense that he and Ness were just circling about each other in this giant house, not in the same spot at the same moment.

Time to start retracing his steps.