My hand drags down my face as I groan. Something tells me there’s no bullshitting Rose. “A long-ass time.”
Rose looks down at her cards and nods sagely. “Yeah. Thought as much. Well, you’re welcome, in that case.”
“For what?”
“My serendipitous presence in this charming abode,” she says, sweeping a hand toward the living space. “Fionn has the primary bedroom. I have the first guest bedroom. That means you, my friend, get to share a bed with your Girl-chick over there.”
A burst of both excitement and nerves flood the chambers of my heart. I run a hand through my hair and look toward Sloane as she scrolls through her phone. I’m not sure if she’ll want that. Or if I should take the couch. Or if I can make myself take the couch. Or maybe I should just sleep on the floor. But I’m also no saint so there’s no fucking way I’m doing that.
“Fuck,” I whisper.
Rose snorts. “Exactly. Shoot your shot, bro.”
I shake my head and huff a laugh at the little she-devil, but her attention is absorbed by the cards spread before her in the shape of a cross on the left, a line on the right. Her head tilts. Her brow furrows. Her fingers dance above the row of images, their meaning unfamiliar to me. “So, you got her into this whole fucked-up shoulder, bootprint face situation?”
“I…I guess. Yeah.”
“Some kind of…game…gone wrong?”
The bottle nearly slips from my hand. I set it down next to the glasses and take a step toward the table. “What?”
“A game,” she repeats without looking up. She points to a card of a man wearing a wreath and riding a horse, another wreath encircling the pole in his hands. Her gaze travels over the remaining cards. “A game of life and death. There’s suffering. Secrets and deceptions. Illusions,” she says, her voice grave as her thumb touches the edge of a card whose title at the bottom says ‘The Moon’。
“I thought I took a pass on a reading,” I say in a wary voice that’s little more than a whisper.
“You did. The cards disagreed.” Rose shrugs. “They do that.”
I find myself at the opposite end of the table, my eyes fused to Rose as she taps a finger next to the top card in the row on the right, a metronomic tick of time.
“The Tower,” she says. Her finger rests on the faded gold lightning that strikes a stone tower. “Destruction. Or liberation. What does it mean to you?”
Her eyes are nearly black in the dim light as they settle on me. My mind reeling, my only answer is a shake of my head.
“A tower of stone,” she says, not looking from me as she taps once on the card. “It should be strong. But built on an unstable foundation, it just takes one lightning strike to bring it down. Chaos. Change. Pain. And when your world crumbles around you, the truth is revealed.”
“And what…you think what happened to her is the lightning strike?”
Rose looks away to Sloane, a thoughtful frown passing through her expression before she turns her attention back to me. “I don’t know. Maybe it is. Or maybe that strike is yet to come.”
And though her gaze shifts away when Fionn comes striding through the door, Rose’s words remain like barbed hooks snagged deep into my thoughts. They refuse to let me go.
I make introductions. I go through the motions of explaining what happened, answer all my brother’s questions as he examines Sloane’s shoulder. We don’t linger in the house, and within twenty minutes, I’m gathering her up to bring her to Fionn’s office. But when I look at Sloane, it’s Rose’s questions that still remain. Maybe they were always there.
Did I ever really free her?
Or will I be her destruction?
16
BROKEN REVELATIONS
SLOANE
M y head lays in Lark’s lap as her fingers rake through my hair. She rocks in time to the melody of her unsteady voice. ‘No one here can love or understand me…’ she sings. Her voice wanes to a shaky hum.
I know I’ve done something I can never take back. Something I would never want to, even though most people would feel regret. But I don’t. I feel relieved. I’ve finally opened the gate where a monster lay rattling its bars on the other side, begging to be freed. Now that it’s out, there’s no way to close back in.
And I don’t want to.
“My parents will fix this,” Lark whispers as she presses a kiss to my hair. “I’ll tell them what you did for me. They’ll help us. You can come home with me.”