The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

Part 3

“And ever,” says Malory, “Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.”

—T. H. White, The Once and Future King

I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M expecting to find when I walk into the building, but it isn’t nothing. Which is exactly what I find. Nothing.

No doorman. No detectives. No one.

My stomach drops as the lift rises, and as the doors open, I hesitate. I force myself forward, key the lock.

I feel her in the space even though I can’t see her. My feet carry me toward the room that holds her.

She’s standing in the study, not sitting amongst the trunks and the boxes. Standing at the window.

“I missed you,” she says without turning around.

I mean to say it back, but the words that come out are different. “You vanished, on the bridge.”

“I wanted to get here first.”

“Why?”

She turns around. Her eyes are glassy; she’s been crying. “Because.”

“Because? What did you do?”

She looks startled by the question. “What?”

I’m thinking the words Don’t ask, don’t tell, even as I say, “What. Did. You. Do.”

She swallows. “When?”

“When?”

Her expression hardens. “Yes, when? What did I do today? Five months ago? Before we met?”

“Start with today,” I say, growing more aggravated by the second. I’m the one in the dark, here. She has the advantage, and she knows it.

“Why don’t you just ask me, Noah.” She steps forward. “Ask me.”

“What did you say to Stella, on the bridge?”

“What do you think I said?”

“You told her to let go. That she was giving up,” I say, searching Mara’s face for anything to hold on to, any hint that I’m wrong.

But she says, “Yes.”

Part of me expected her to deny it, and splits off from the half that always knew. I let that one take over. “She’s in a hospital. Her neck is broken and she’s on life support.”

“I know,” Mara says, calm as anything.

I’m so far beyond anger I’m mental. “You might as well have pushed her off the bridge yourself.”

“No. What she did wasn’t my fault,” Mara says.

“It’s not your fault, Mara. Say it.”

That’s what I said to her when my father forced me to choose between saving her and killing Daniel or the other way around. Mara begged me to give her a shot to stop her heart, and I wouldn’t do it. Not until I heard her compare herself to Jude.

“I can’t let Daniel go,” she’d said desperately. “I can’t let what happened to me happen to Joseph. They’ve done nothing, nothing wrong. I’ve done everything wrong.”

“Not everything.”

“You haven’t been here! Your father isn’t lying. I did those things. All of them.”

And then I said next, “I’m sure they deserved it.”

How many other people had died because Mara thought they deserved it? “Is anything ever your fault?”

“Yes. Your father.”

“What about him?”

“I killed him.”

She announces it. Just like that.

I laugh because it’s fucking gorgeous outside and Stella’s broken body was just pulled out of the river and the girl I love is announcing that she made my sister an orphan. “He killed himself,” I say like an idiot, knowing it’s not true.

“It looked like he killed himself,” she says. She’s studying me, spine straight, stare direct. Not hiding. Not crossing her arms, not defensive.

“Because you made it look that way.”

“Yes.”

I blink and see Sam Milnes, hanging from the buttress. “Like the others.”

“No,” Mara says.

Beth steps off the platform in front of the train.

“Not like the others,” she says.

Felicity burns herself alive. It’s all I see when I look at Mara now. That and my fucking father. Stabbed himself, they said in the fucking obituary, and that piece—“What the fuck was that about the poisoning?”

I regret the question as soon as I ask, watching the words shatter against the stone of her skin. No guilt, no remorse, no fear—there’s nothing there. Nothing anymore.

“Everything Stella said . . .” I let the sentence trail off, thinking of her in the hospital, alone. “I defended you.”

“I never asked you to defend me,” she says. “Not to anyone.”

“You asked me to help you. You asked me to fix you, for fuck’s sake!”

“That’s true, I did, once. And you told me I wasn’t broken.”Copyright Nôv/el/Dra/ma.Org.

What else had gotten twisted up in her mind in the past nine months? She’d endured trauma beyond torture, I always knew, but that doesn’t lead to this?

“My father,” I start, grasping at what I can understand. “How did you do it?”

“I stabbed him in the neck.”

I think back to my conversation with Stella, to just the other day with Mara, in our bedroom. To walking out of the room, my hand dripping blood on the floor after I found—“The scalpel? The one you kept after stabbing Dr. Kells?”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t keep that one. The one I have is different. From a hospital.”

“Have you murdered anyone with it?”

“No.”

I think back, revise. “Have you killed anyone with it?”

“No,” she insists.

“Then why keep it?”

“I told you, it makes me feel safe,” she says, and now her arms are crossed, and she is defensive. “I haven’t lied to you. You never asked, so I never told.”

“I’m asking now,” I say.

She shrugs. “And I’m telling you now.”

“A bit fucking late.”

“You told me you saw me,” she says. “So many times. You said you loved me anyway, no matter what I’d do. I thought you understood.”

“I want to.” God help me. “Help me understand,” I beg her. “My father . . . you were defending yourself—”

“No, I wasn’t,” she says, but this admission costs her. “I waited. I knew it would hurt you even though you said more than once you thought that he should die for what he did. I mostly wanted to make sure he could never come after my family again.”

I do understand that, I do. But the others . . .

“Why everyone else?”

Her silence is horrifying. The flat is so quiet I should be able to hear our hearts beating, but I can’t hear anything at all.

“There were twelve who showed up,” she finally says. Her voice is toneless, robotic. “Jamie and Daniel were in a chamber beneath the factory. Then it was just me, holding you, and Jude begging to die. I killed him because he killed you, which was what he wanted, it turned out.”

“No great loss.”

“No. But you were.” Her voice tightens. “I was still holding the knife I killed him with when the police came. I wasn’t thinking about them. I felt the breath leave your body. I listened to your last heartbeat. And then I was surrounded by people who would do their job and then go home to their families and laugh around their dinner tables and read their children bedtime stories and you and I were never going to get that because you were dead and I was alone.” Her voice breaks, and a cold finger traces the nape of my neck.

“I would have given anything to bring you back.” She looks at me then, reining all feeling in. “So I did.”

There are a thousand words circling my mind, but none can escape my throat.

“My grandmother wrote me a letter,” she says, and I vaguely remember reading it, but nothing in it to explain the expression on her face. “She said, ‘You can choose to end life or choose to give it, but punishment will follow every reward.’ I can reward people, did you know?” She says that almost to herself, looking over my shoulder out at the city. “It’s one of the things she wrote, in her suicide note. One of her memories I have. Along with your great-great-grandfather discovering her. Her moving to England to live with your family.”

“The letters you were reading, the journal”—I gesture to the trunks, the boxes, newly raging—“you knew what it was all about, yet you were giving me shit about keeping things from you?” Everything in me turns in on itself. “Who are you?”

“I didn’t know I could bring you back that way. I didn’t know it would work.” She shrugs. Like she’s not talking about having murdered innocent people, but thought she’d try getting high because she was curious. “But I’m not sorry it did. You’re here.”

“And they’re not,” I say in my newly hollowed-out voice.

Her eyes glass over, hard and fathomless. “ ‘I would do it again.”

It’s unreal that we’re standing in the same room, in the same universe, having this conversation. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now that the power’s out, as it were.”

“Mine isn’t.”

“How do you—no.” I nearly laugh. “I literally don’t want to fucking know. You’ll never do it again,” I manage to say, at full volume and without hesitation.

“I’ll have to do it again. Because you don’t heal anymore. And it’s not temporary. I’ve been reading up.” She looks at the trunks. “Your father was right about some things.”

“Not this,” I say. “Not ever this, not ever again.”

“I’m not apologising for saving your life.”

“It’s my life!”

“And how many times have you tried to end it? Would you let me die?” she asks, but I’m not ready for it, so I say no.

She leans back against the desk, jagged and unmovable. She’s a rock I want to break myself against. Her expression clarifies that she thinks this is a victory of sorts, and I’m so furious and consumed by shame that the last thing I say to her is, “But I never want to see you again.”