Mae choked back tears. “The last night he left . . . we had a terrible fight. I lost it. I told him he had to get a job or move out. He yelled back. It got so ugly.” She shook her head, even though she wasn’t sure Sahvage was looking at her. “He didn’t come back. For two weeks . . . maybe it was almost three. I can’t keep it all straight. I tried to find him. I called his phone constantly. I went to his friends’ houses. No one knew where he’d gone. Then one night, I was working here and—he came through the front door. He was all . . . he was bleeding from so many places and he looked like he hadn’t eaten since he’d left. I rushed to him and he died in my arms.” Mae rubbed her stinging eyes. “I didn’t have any idea what happened to him or what to do. I called Tallah. I don’t have anyone else in my life and I couldn’t think straight. After I told her everything and I managed to calm down a little, she got so silent on that phone . . . I thought she’d hung up on me. And then she said the words . . .”
“The Book,” Sahvage gritted.
Mae glanced out of the bathroom to him. “The Book.”
“You can’t do this. Mae, you have no idea what you’re opening up here.”
“But it was okay to prolong Tallah’s life,” she muttered bitterly.
“I never said that.”
Mae threw up a hand. “Rhoger is all I have left.”
“That’s what you said about Tallah.”
“We’re really going to argue about how few people I have in my life right now? Really?” Mae gathered the empty bags of ice around her. And then didn’t do anything with them. “I can’t get off this path. You don’t understand. It’s . . . it’s all my fault. I drove him out of this house and into the hands of someone who tortured him so badly, he died of the injuries.”
Sahvage cursed. “He left because he left, Mae. It could have been any other night—”
“Don’t pretend you know us.”
“And don’t you pretend what you’re doing is right.”
“That’s my brother in all that ice,” she choked out.
“That’s a dead male,” Sahvage countered. “He might have been your brother when he was alive, but not anymore.”
Mae exhaled sharply. “How can you say that.”
“Because it’s the truth.”
“Stop it.” She closed her eyes. “Just stop it.”
When she opened her lids, Sahvage was right in front of her, and as she reared back, he took one of her hands.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t do this to him. If you love him, you will not do this—”
“What, bring him back to me? How is that wrong!”
Sahvage swallowed hard, and his voice was barely audible. “Leave him in the Fade. I beg you. The consequences are not worth it.”
Those midnight blue eyes were boring into her, and his expression was so intense, she knew this was not just a case of someone looking out for her best interests.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she demanded.
“It’s just what I’ve heard to be true—”
“Bullshit. What do you know. And do not lie to me.”
Sahvage broke the contact between them and sat back onto his ass. As his eyes went to Rhoger and the ice, he grew very still.
When he finally spoke, his voice, like his expression, was haunted. “I only know that people are not meant to live forever . . .”
“I don’t want him to be immortal, goddamn it. I just want to bring—”
“And you think you’re setting the terms? You honestly think you’re going to set the rules here. You’re toying with the very foundation of mortality.”
“Fuck mortality! Rhoger got robbed. And I’m going to fix it if it’s the last thing I do!”
Sahvage had only had one other moment in all his earthly years that revealed a blindness this great, a blindness that changed everything about where he was. And it wasn’t that Mae had lied to him. It was that he had failed to anticipate her ulterior motive. He had taken at face value what she had said, and moved on to other things.
Like the sexual attraction he had for her.
Funny, how that shit had a way of wiping the slate clean.
“I have no other choice,” Mae announced.
“You are wrong about that.” He shook his head. “Death is not something that is bad.”
“How can you say that? Rhoger is barely seventy years old. He was cheated.”
“But if you believe in the Fade—”
“You mean to tell me that my father and mahmen, who didn’t get along all that well when they were under this roof here, are enjoying a perfect relationship on a cloud somewhere in the sky? Please. I was fine with the theory of the Fade until I did the math on the people who are supposedly up there. An eternity with our so-called loved ones is just a fairy tale fed to us so we don’t lose our minds in the very situation I’m in right now—and yes, I’m aware I’m crazy. But you don’t know what this is like—”