I close my eyes and wrap my arms tight around him, feeling the agony after the ecstasy. I cling to him as he shudders with his release, his weight heavy on me, his breathing hard. He’s spent. Like he’s given me all he can give me.
He straightens and I feel cold as I sit up. He tucks himself into his jeans, buttons them. Doesn’t bother with the zipper or his belt. His gaze is heavy as I sit up and he closes the robe around me, tying it.
“Dante?” I want to ask what’s happened, but I’m afraid. I don’t want to hear. To know. I’ll hold on to this illusion as long as I can. Because for all that’s happened to me, I’m not sure I’ve felt my heart break quite like this.
“You should go to your bed,” he says, voice taut, tone sharp. He walks away with the bottle of whiskey in one hand.
I don’t miss the wording. “Come with me.”
He doesn’t answer. Just sits down on the couch where the light barely reaches him, leaving his face in shadows. But even then, I know he’s watching me.
“You drink too much,” I tell him again.
I slip off the desk, feel the warm wetness between my thighs. Something drops off the desk and I turn to pick it up. That’s when I see what he was looking at. It’s a folder full of photographs. I bend to pick up the few that have slipped to the floor, sitting on his chair to look at them. I spread them out over the desk. The photos are torn and they’re all of one man. I know him. And I don’t like him. It’s his uncle.
“What were you doing?” It’s as though he’s taken every photo his uncle was posed in and torn him out. I don’t know where the other halves are.
“Nothing.”
“Not nothing. These are all ripped.”
He drinks straight from the bottle.
“Dante?”
“You need to go, Mara.”
But I am not ready to hear that. Because I know what he means. “What are these? What were you doing?” I ask instead.
It takes him a long time to say something. So long that I’m not sure he will speak at all. Then he finally does. “He’s not my uncle.”
“What do you mean?”
He shakes his head. “You’re not safe with me. You’ll never be safe with me. You know that, right?”
I close my eyes, shake my head. He can’t do this. “Tell me about your uncle.”
He takes a deep breath in and when he exhales it’s a sigh. “You want to know why all this happened? Why my family was massacred? Why you were kidnapped and…” he trails off, looks away shaking his head. “Why what happened to you happened?”
I don’t answer. I can’t.
“Because you know, when you said a while back that the Dante you knew wouldn’t have let what happened to you happen—”
“I was just—”
“No, you were right. You were actually more right than you could have known. But I was never that Dante. The hero. Because what happened to you, and to everyone else, happened because of me.” He swallows three big gulps. “It all happened because I was born. And it’s not finished. It will never be finished.”
I stay where I am, glance at the torn-up photos then back to him.
“He’s not my uncle. Well, wasn’t. He’s not alive anymore. I took care of that.”
“What?”
“He raped my mother. Got her pregnant.” He raises his arms into the air and in this strange half-light, a joker-like grin warps his features making him look strange and not like himself, not my Dante. “And ta-da! I was born. A bastard. A rape-child. A hate-child.”
“I don’t believe…your mother loved you.”
“She did. The hate…it was for David. You see, my mother rejected him but kept his secret from my father. Or at least the man I grew up thinking was my father. If she hadn’t, they’d probably still be alive. I may be dead, but they’d be alive. You’d have had a normal life. Grown up on the island, gone to school. Probably be at some university maybe, with Lizzy, dating boys your age and just living like a twenty-year-old should live. Not like this. Not in hiding from criminals. Not having lived as a sex slave to those bastards. Used and sold. And certainly not fucking someone like me. Because I am one of those monsters, Mara. It’s in my blood. You knew it at the start. You know it in your heart. And as long as you’re with me, you’re not safe.”
I can’t quite absorb his words, his meaning. I get up, go to him. I don’t sit beside him but kneel on the floor at his feet and lay my head on his lap.
“What happened tonight?” I ask. “What changed?”
He closes his hand over the back of my head, and I hear him swallow two glugs of whiskey.