I flicked on the lighter. My fingers smelled of gasoline.
“Caroline,” Liam choked out as he likely came to the realization of what I was about to do.
He would’ve stopped me if I hesitated.
If I hesitated setting fire to the beautiful, perfect dress I’d planned on marrying him in. If I paused before I let flames engulf the symbol of our past, of hope for us to have any kind of future that had happiness which had once been attached to that dress.
I didn’t hesitate. I threw it into the trash drum I’d dragged from the side of the property.
Heat hit my face the same time Liam snatched me back from the flames. His arms circled my chest as he yanked my back to his front.
I didn’t fight him.
I didn’t need to.
He let me go as the dress burned.
I had needed to hurt him. I wanted to turn him to ash like the fire was turning my dress to a blackened and ruined mess. I wanted to punish him for what he’d done to me, to his family.
But the second the flames caught, I lost it all. All that anger, all that need.
I didn’t want to punish him.
I needed to understand him.
The flames burned too loud for me to speak. They screamed all the things I’d thought I’d wanted them to say, all the accusations and hurt. They screamed until the fire burned itself out.
We both watched it.
It was only then that I found the nerve to look at him. Tears streamed down his face. Lucid agony.
I felt no victory in that.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He didn’t look at me, even after he tore his eyes away from the charred remains of the dress I’d planned on marrying him in. He half walked, half stumbled to the plastic chair situated outside our motel room.
I followed him, sitting down at the one beside it.
It was sticky.
That didn’t much matter.
I wanted to give him a reprieve. A breath. I didn’t want to hurt him anymore, didn’t want to face those tears trailing down a face already painted, etched with pain.
But I didn’t get a reprieve.
Not in a decade.
And I needed one. I had to have one.
In the form of the truth.
No matter how ugly.
Because the ugly truth was better than all the pretty lies in the world.
“I need to know now,” I said, staring at the murky water of the hotel pool. Looking at the faded and rickety sun loungers, looking at the unattractiveness of our present, maybe I could weather the ugly past here. “I need to know how you came to the conclusion that making everyone believe you were dead was the right decision.” I didn’t look at him. “What was the pitch, the contract?”
He looked me square in the face. “Peaches, the devil doesn’t have a contract. And that’s what it was, that split-second decision made out of shame, cowardice, a misplaced sense of bravery or love, that was me signing whatever was leftover of my soul to the devil.”
I swallowed ash.
It didn’t come from the fire.
It came from the pit.
“I don’t even really know how it happened,” he said, continuing. “Someone fucked up, that much was obvious. But you would not believe the number of fuckups in times of combat.” He paused abruptly. “Or maybe you would, maybe you’ve seen it.”
I nodded, though his words weren’t exactly a question.
“Early on, I kind of fell into a branch of the army that I never planned on seeing. Had a Commander that either liked me or hated me, still to this day can’t decide which one it was for putting me on that team. We were on a mission top secret, total black ops, doing shit we were not meant to be doing, in places we were not meant to be. If we got caught, our commander in chief had plausible deniability. We were told that going in, we knew it. What we were doing would never be sanctioned by the US government. Officially.”
I nodded again. Through my years reporting in times of war, I knew there was a lot the public didn’t know. It was a lot the public didn’t want to know. We wanted plausible deniability too.
“Mission went bad. Either we were fed bad intel or we hit bad luck,” he continued. “War is just a series of bad luck and near misses.” His eyes went glassy, far away. “Everyone died. Everyone apart from me. Still don’t know why they decided to take me prisoner. Minds of men are unstable in times like that. Maybe they thought I was worth something, maybe they thought I knew somethin’.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know shit, and what I did know, I didn’t tell them. And I thought I was worth somethin’, for the longest time.” He looked at me, and I cut my palms with my nails once more. “I thought I was worth something, not because of who I was in the war, it was because of who I was at home. It was because of the promises I made to the girl I loved.” His words were knives, bullets, every sharp object that could draw blood.