Witness

I was Damien Trask’s sister.

The initial shock that I wasn’t alone in the world subsided after a couple days and then I was left with something so much worse. I was left with the fact that the deranged murderer who was taunting me at every turn in my life shared the very nucleotides that made me me. The bits I thought I shared with no one else I knew. Suddenly, there were two.

And one of them was trying to kill me.

The emotion was making me sick. I couldn’t keep food down anymore, so I stopped trying. I couldn’t fall asleep until I was at the point of exhaustion, so I stopped trying. I couldn’t leave the inn without some sort of overwhelming fear crushing me, so I stopped trying.

In Damien’s wake, life as I knew it simply halted. Which was basically what he wanted anyway. So I prayed he would just give up, would just leave me alone to this misery. Because I was so desolate I began to worry that nothing would ever be the same again.

“Mar?” Harry greeted as he crept into the dark room. I only knew it was him from his voice; I curled myself into the corner of our bed, facing the stark taupe wall, with the lights off and the blinds drawn.

Being alive was beginning to give me a migraine.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come outside?” he asked when I didn’t respond. “Or at least open a window? It’s gorgeous outside.”

“No,” I mumbled into the mess of blankets and pillows covering me, a layer to keep me safe from any attack.

I wanted to take a hot shower and wash Damien off me, out from within me. I wanted to drink bleach, to inject my veins with lighter fluid, to get every last shred that we shared out and wash it away in the drain. But if I were to succeed, there would be next to nothing left.

I could not exist without Damien Trask. I could not exist with Damien Trask.

So I just wanted to stop existing entirely, Damien or not.

“Mara, love, come on,” Harry begged, his sweet, rich voice enticing me to at least roll over and see his face. He stood by the window, fingers moving dexterously around the post that opened the slats. Slowly, lines of light appeared on the facing wall, until finally the room was flooded with pale, late afternoon glow.

“See, now isn’t that better?”

He’d been outside in the field, I could smell it on him. I could smell the warmth of sheep’s wool, the sweet grass, the bite of winter. Though the sun was bright, Harry’s cranberry sweater carried the crisp scent of the season, one that reminded me of where we were. Would this last past Christmas? Would Harry be able to go home to his family? Would I still be alive to go with?

Or would I waste away?

“Can I try something?” he asked, the corners of his lips turning upward. “Try and make you smile?”

I nodded, trying my very hardest to be present. He knew what I was going through but could never understand. We were in this together, but now so much more rode on my shoulders. Now the fear had been filled with emptiness, and I wasn’t sure which was worse. Harry still basked in his own hope when mine was lost.

He pulled a guitar from behind our small table and crawled onto the bed next to me, propping the curve on his folded thigh. I glanced up and down at him, my lips parting just slightly in confusion.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, knowing at least that it had not been there a day ago.

“Rick – the bartender, he lent it to me when I asked,” Harry explained, placing a capo on the third fret. “He’s proper brilliant at tabs, apparently, helped me work some stuff out I needed help with.”

“What did you need help with?” I asked, now sitting up in bed with a bit of intrigue. Harry didn’t often need help with music.

Without saying anything, he developed a little smile and gave me a wink before beginning to pick at the strings with his fingers. A familiar tune came from the guitar, something I was surprised at for two reasons. Firstly, I’d nearly assumed Harry was working on something new for the band. Secondly, it was one of my favorite songs, one that I’d never really told him about. Ben Howard’s Only Love.

“Darling you’re with me, always around me,” his voice sang, catching a string in my heart. “Only love, only love.”

He’d arranged it in a new way, one I never would have expected. His lips curled in the same way they always did when he sang along to the radio, but this time, things sounded different. The tone of his voice was tailored for me this time, not like he was simply singing, but he was singing specifically to me. He kept his eyes on the strings, concentrating hard on doing everything perfectly.

I couldn’t breathe.

I’d never felt such an intimate moment, like nothing and no one else existed, like no other problems were floating around us in the dusk of our time together. With the deep growl of Harry’s voice, we were okay. In fact, we were better than okay. My heart raced with the words.

It wasn’t just any song. It was Only Love.

“Darling I feel you under my body,” he sang, his fingers flying across the strings. “Darling you're with me forever and always. Give me shelter or show me heart. And watch me fall apart, watch me fall apart.”

As the guitar went silent, so we were we. His emerald eyes finally glanced up to mine, his lip caught between his teeth in hope. For a moment, it was like looking at him across our street that first day in Holmes Chapel, catching sight of that halo of brown curls and his knowing, crooked grin.

“How did you know?” I asked softly.

“You used to hum a lot,” he answered. Used to being the operative phrase. I couldn’t miss the sadness in his voice. But I also couldn’t mistake the endearment. Not knowing what else to do, I nodded.

“Mara, I – “

And just as he started to speak again, my phone began to ring and vibrate ominously from the table. Both of our heads snapped around to see the light glowing from the screen and in moments we were both on our feet to investigate. A New York number was emblazoned on the front.

Immediately, my hand went to answer it. Harry looked apprehensive, his mouth pressed into nearly a twist of disapproval. But I’d received a call from that number once before – it was one from the agency, I knew that much. The O.E.O. had to be calling.

“Hello?” I answered, my heart pounding in my throat. It could be good news or it could be bad news. Or it could be Damien. My life seemed to come down to a coin toss those days.

“Lilia.”

My heart stilled a bit. Agent Hudson.

“Hudson,” I gasped, and I could feel Harry relax next to me. “Tell me you have good news.”

“For once, I do,” he replied, that voice that normally bore bad news instead sounding optimistic.

My gaze flitted to Harry, nodding excitedly as I ushered us toward the bed to sit. It felt like the kind of news was coming for us that needed to be heard sitting down. Harry grasped my hand and squeezed it.

“While we haven’t been able to trace Damien’s whereabouts since he hacked your cable, we were able to trace the whereabouts of some of his old hacking ringmates,” Hudson explained, my pulse quickening. “As a matter of fact, all the known suspects are now in custody. And they’re talking.”

“How many are there? What are they saying?”

“Six. Some were Trask’s classmates at Brown, and the others we’re still discovering the connection. They aren’t too happy about the way he dealt with Agent Spengler, and now his outrageous display involving you. It put them in danger and now they’re in custody. So they’re going to take him down. Or at least try.”

I could feel the blood rush from my fingertips, I was gripping the phone so hard. “How are they going to do that?”

“I can’t tell you the specifics,” Hudson explained. “But they are telling us the hacking techniques he uses – the ones they know of, at least. And the spaces that he’s been known to frequent in the past. They want him to go through all the misery that they’re going to have to go through for their crimes. I’ll send you the official report when it arrives.”

“Okay,” I gasped, meekly, not knowing entirely what to say.

There was a silence between us, the line crackling with a gust of wind on his end.

“I just wanted you to know that we’re going to get you out of this,” Hudson spoke finally, his voice in a tone I’d never heard from him before. “We’re going to get you to safety and put Damien where he can never harm you ever again. We’re going to get this bastard Lilia, and we’re going to get him soon. I know it.”

My heart pounded at his words. Agent Hudson had never been particularly warm toward me, always delivering information and nothing more. I’d never suspected any form of fondness to have grown between us, at least not on my end. But with his words, I realized that I was a special case for Agent Hudson. This time it was personal. And we were in it together. It was up to him to make this right, and he wasn’t going to let Damien slip through his fingers.

Not when we were so close.

“Thank you, Hudson,” I breathed. “I needed to hear that.”

“I wouldn’t have said anything if it weren’t true,” he confirmed. “I’ll call you when I know more.”

We said our goodbyes and hung up our phones, and for the first time in days, I turned to Harry and smiled. It was weak and awkward, crooked on my lips, but still the sun peeked through the clouds. And that was all the signal Harry needed to scoop me up in his arms and press kisses all down my neck and shoulder, as though there wasn’t an inch of my skin he was willing to miss.

“You don’t even know what happened!” I protested through a small laugh, burying my face in his hair regardless.

“I heard enough,” he insisted between kisses, moving up my neck to my lips. “Hudson is too much of a New Yorker to talk quietly. And apparently he’s too much of a New Yorker to give up.”

His lips moved across mine softly, ghosting them just barely. “And so are you. You know that perseverance is in your blood. You’re the bravest person I know and I can’t watch you give up. I can’t.”

I pulled away from him, allowing my eyes to travel over his features, taking them all in. The face I’d come to know so well because of the hell Damien had put me through. The only silver lining to my sky of endless clouds – the upturned face of a shiny copper penny. The one who had always been there for me, whether he knew I needed him or not. The one I longed to see every morning when I woke up and every night before I fell asleep, and every moment in between.

“Mara, I love you.”

The words were out of his mouth in a heartbeat, as easy as that. As suddenly as it all came to be, suddenly I knew he loved me. I knew he loved me all along. I could see it in his eyes.

“Harry,” I murmured, casting my gaze to the ground – I couldn’t bear to look at him. “You can’t love a person like me. Not with all the things that come with. I’m only ever going to put you in danger.”

Though my words ought to have deterred him, his lips instead curled upwards. I caught the sight when my eyes flickered back to him; I couldn’t resist that face. “I’ve always liked a little danger,” he murmured back, turning my head back to face his with two fingers placed gently on my jaw. “And who would have known I’d fall in love with her.”

He pressed his forehead to mine and then kissed me, the warm glow of his proximity blossoming in my chest. That kiss was a prism, splaying out the complicated fabric of our history for me to see, for me to understand. It was always there, and I’d always wanted it to be this way – through the annoyance and the fear and the happiness, I’d always known.

So I said, “I love you too.”