Mirrorland by Carole Johnstone (best ereader manga .TXT) 📗

He reaches out a hand, and then snatches it back. His face is a study in baffled anguish.

‘Cat, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what you mean.’ He looks down at the Black Spot. A single tear splashes against the underside of his wrist. I flatly ignore the clench in my belly. ‘I don’t know what this means.’

I stand up, put my palms flat against the tabletop, lean as close as I can bear to. ‘It means give it up, Ross. I can see you.’

When he looks at me, I recoil from his expression, stumble against my bolted-down chair.

‘You’re witches,’ he says, and his smile is pure Ross: crooked and sexy, slow and intimate. Left canine overlapping his front incisor. ‘Both of you. Crazy, fucked-up witches. You’ve ruined my life.’

The last gasp of doubt drains out of me. I smile, and it’s easier than I ever imagined it would be. ‘You just chose the wrong victims,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’

And then I start to walk away from him, towards the waiting room.

‘No!’ Ross shouts, standing up and lunging for me, squeezing my arm tightly inside his fingers. Hard enough that I know I’ll have to see their black imprint for days. ‘You can’t leave me. You don’t get to leave me!’

Everyone is looking at us. The tall guard is striding towards us, followed by at least two others, even though I’m not afraid, I’m not trying to struggle, I’m not trying to get away. I look hard at Ross, and something in him deflates. His face goes slack, his eyes turn wet and pleading. ‘You can’t leave. You can’t leave me. I didn’t do it, Cat. Please! I didn’t kill her.’

He tugs at my arm, pulls me closer. And until that tall guard and his colleagues get too close, I let him. Everyone is still looking at us. I keep looking only at him. I loved you so much. But I don’t dare think it for more than a moment, because he’s taken enough of me already.

‘I didn’t kill her, Cat!’

I close my eyes. Briefly press my lips against his ear. ‘I know.’

And then I do leave him. Raging and screaming and sobbing in my wake. I don’t look back. I close the door behind me. I leave him hanging on his hook to rot.

Outside, the rain has stopped and the sun, low and blurred, turns glass sparkling and the prison golden. I stand in the middle of the car park with my arms and fingers spread wide, head tipped up to the sky. And then I close my eyes and let the world burn warm and red.

I looked, El, I think. And I didn’t go blind.

CHAPTER 31

April 3rd

Dear Cat,

This is the last letter I’m going to write to you. I should have written it before now, but I didn’t know how. And now I can’t put it off any longer.

I’ve lied to you. More times than I can count. More times than I should have. But you need to know that it was for you: everything I kept from you, every lie I told you, every time I said trust me, this is the truth now – and it never was.

Trust me. This is the truth now.

Here is the why:

Do you remember what upset me the most the day we found that encyclopaedia entry about Captain Henry Morgan? It was that Mum had lied to us, and for so long. I don’t think I ever fully trusted her again. I stopped believing in her. I stopped believing in us. All because of one lie.

Do you remember what upset you the most? It wasn’t that Mum had lied to us, or even that he wasn’t our dad. It was the fact that he liked to torture people by tightening bands around their head until their eyes popped out. Because that wasn’t how a pirate king behaved – a father, a hero, a man. And so you instantly forgot it. You withdraw from what you can’t bear to be true and you believe the lie. And when you stopped talking to me – when you refused to ever talk about that last horrible night in Mirrorland – I withdrew from you, because the truth was all I could see. It felt like a slow-spreading disease, one that I couldn’t bear to pass on to you. I didn’t want you to remember.

But then Ross came back. Long before that day outside the National Gallery. For months, he followed me, harassed me, begged for forgiveness. I hated him. I hated him so much for that night. But he was all that was left of Mirrorland and he knew it. That day outside the gallery? It was to show me that if he couldn’t get to me, he could get to you instead. And that May Day in the Rosemount was him proving it.

So I had to make him believe that he wanted me more. I had to make him think that I needed him more. I faked my suicide attempt – you always knew it, but he didn’t. To him, it was the ultimate proof of loyalty. And maybe it was. Because I’ve tried to tell myself that I did it for you. To protect you from a monster just like you protected me. But I don’t think that was the whole truth. Not then. Because I still loved him.

So maybe our marriage was my punishment. My sentence. I didn’t lie to you about that. One day he’d be raging and cruel, the next so loving it was like agony. I’d get these cards, threatening me, telling me to leave – I guess he did it just to mess with my mind. Like the drugs he put in my food and drink. He hides them in his bedside table. And every day, I wake up craving them so much, I can’t think straight. They’re chains. Just like those ‘freedoms’ that I