The gesture did nothing to soften the blow of his words. Questions flooded her mind, barely kept her lucid. “If you knew-”
“It wasn’t a good time for me to…return. Not then.”
“And before? When I-when I left before?”
Something reflective touched his expression then. “The world came calling, didn’t it? You left my card on the dresser and I knew.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and began another slow pace of the airy room.
“I knew tracking you down would just put me in the position of losing you over and over again until you’d handled whatever it was that took you away from me. I was trying to be understanding.” He gave a self-deprecating smile and jerked a hand through his hair.
“Fuck if I knew it’d mean losing you for almost seven years and never knowing…” he looked toward the corridor leading to the girls’ room.
“Hill I-” Persephone closed her eyes to summon the courage that practically vanished when he looked her way. “I know that saying ‘I’m sorry’ doesn’t mean much now-”
“Fuckin’ A,” he snarled.
Persephone held her courage at gunpoint then. “I am sorry.”
“So you said. So what was it?” His tone was soft yet the richness of his voice remained to emphasize its lethal depth.
“You claim it wasn’t me and my pigheadedness. So? What?” He persisted.
Persephone’s sparkling gaze was hazy with bewilderment then. “Eva.” She said, as though she couldn’t quite believe that reason hadn’t occurred to him. To her shock, he laughed.
“Jesus Christ, if I had a dollar for every time you used that-”
“It’s the truth!”
“Oh? We’ve become a fan of the truth, now?”
“That’s not fair-”
“Not fair?” He came after her then, blind fury fueling his advance.
Persephone forgot about standing her ground. She stumbled back and her retreat stopped his pursuit.
“Fuck,” Hill slammed a fist into a sofa cushion in hopes of containing the anger streaking its way through his veins. “What about Eva?” He asked once he felt able to speak instead of growl.
“She found us,” Persephone shook her head when he exploded into another roar of the ill-tempered laughter.
“Like she hasn’t always known where the fuck to find you?”
“I don’t think she did and it was different that time. It was more than her usual bullshit,” Persephone forged on with the story, despite Hill’s consistent laughter and intermittent expletives.
“It wasn’t about getting the gang together for some assassination mission or other insanity. It was all about me and the fact that I was with you and that we were happy. She’s an insane bitch and betrayal- the suspicion of it alone is enough to carry that insanity to a whole other monstrous level. You can’t get closer to betrayal than living happily ever after with the man who raped your sister.”
The words hitting the air were like a blow and they both felt the impact.
Persephone turned her back on Hill. “I didn’t mean it,” she said.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve often wondered-”
“Well don’t. I was there and whatever insanity Eva can cop to, she was telling the truth about that.”
“Well she made sure I knew that and how much she loathed me for being with you.”
“So the fuck what?!” He roared and then clenched his fist as if threatening himself with bodily harm over the outburst.
Persephone shook visibly, more so when she felt him behind her less than a foot away.
“After all that time,” his voice harbored more lost confusion than simmering bitterness. “All that time we were together- didn’t you know by then that I’d have done anything, killed anything that touched you or what was mine?” Once more, he looked askance. The girls were vivid and lovely images in his head.
“Whatever...guilt I felt over what I did to her...she wouldn’t have survived me if she’d touched you...or touched our girls and I knew about it.”
His vow had her eyes blurring with tears as she observed the scenery in the distance. “I was scared for the girls...for you.” She didn’t need to squeeze out the tears, they streamed down her cheeks of their own accord. “She said she'd kill you in front of me and take the girls-”
“And you believed that shit? Course you did.” He snorted a laugh, bowed his head and shielded his face behind his hair. “You always did put more stock in the word of that freak than you did in mine.”
“That’s not true, Hill, but at the time...at the time I was afraid. You have no idea how much and Eva… she was very convincing.” She did squeeze her eyes shut then, not to expel tears but to blot the long ago memory of a knife to her stomach. If she told him that part would he understand? If he didn’t… if he laughed or lashed out with more accusations, it would kill her.
“At the time…” Hill considered the words she had shared. He kept his fist clenched, an effort to resist the need to touch her-to hold her. God, she was killing him. He wanted to hate her. Why couldn’t he hate her?
“At the time,” he meditated on her words. “And look at how much of that we lost, Persephone.”
In spite of his soundless retreat, she could
sense when he left the room. He’d called her Persephone, she mused.
Oh yes...he was good and pissed with her.
CHAPTER TEN
