The Pawn and The Puppet (The Pawn and The Puppet series Book 1)

I manage to be impressed by his quick ability to build a fire.

We sit against the walls of the cliff, looking out at the lagoon over the large fire he created. My dress releases slow drops of water down my legs, and I hold my hands out to the fire to stay warm.

Dessin sits down next to me and glances at my wet body. He pretends not to notice the dilemma we’re in with wet clothes—that we have to ride on a motorcycle back to the asylum. I wonder how he would react to me making a bold move. I wonder how he would react to my body without my dress on. I tell myself it is an experiment. He wouldn’t kiss me before. It’s as if there are written rules with the previous host in his mind. Is he stopping Dessin from pursuing me?

“I’m freezing,” I prompt. He gives me a sidelong glance and focuses back on the fire, poking it with a stick.

“Move closer to the fire. You’ll warm up.”

I watch him a moment longer, smiling on the inside. My hands begin to shake as I make the internal decision to do this. I rise next to him and peel off my uniform dress, pulling it up and over my head.

“Are you insane?!” Dessin is on his feet in front of me, gripping my dress above my head, attempting to pull it down. I remember the undergarments are ones that Aurick got me. White lace. I’m sure he stocked my dresser with these revealing items in hopes of seeing me in them one day.

“What’s your problem?” I gaze up at him as he holds me by my wrists over my head. A tingling heat warming my legs, my gut. “I’m cold, and this wet dress won’t get any dryer on me.”

“Skylenna—put it back on,” he says sternly. His eyes stay firmly on mine, refusing to let them wander.

“Or what?” I taunt. And that flirtatious smile is brought on smoothly as I bat my eyes slowly. Thank you again, Ruth.

I pull the rest of it off, my body fully exposed in only my white lace. I worry that it may not be appealing to a man. My breasts are decently sized, I’d say. Enough to swell above my brassiere, enough to catch Aurick staring at my chest, often.

His eyes fall over my bare body, and his gaze feels like hands wandering over my breasts, my waist, my thighs. A slow burn of thirst building behind his expression. But he catches himself, eyes retreating back to the dirt beneath his feet—and he’s listening. A voice inside his head.

“Look at me,” I say in a voice not much stronger than a whisper.

He glances up at me, making intense eye contact but nothing below the neck—and it’s manifested from thirst to hunger. A predatory way that he parts his lips as if to run his tongue over his teeth. And warmth fills my gut, tingles through my fingertips.

What is happening to me?

His chest moves up and down fast. Faster than when he fought the guards. Faster than when he snapped the man’s neck. And it’s the hitch of a gasp in my throat that snaps him out of the wild trance. He looks away and sits back down in front of the fire.

“Scarlett was depressed. But I was helping her find the will to live again.” I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m ready to tell him.

His eyes widen, and his back straightens up.

“Her downfall was always her anger. She hated our parents for what they did to us and couldn’t let it go. It would eat her alive. It would cause episodes of violence and self-harm. When Scarlett told me her fear of becoming a patient in the intricate section, I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t let her end up in there. I couldn’t let her rot away from not being capable of forgiveness.” It’s all coming back now, the screams, the rush of panic. “So, on the day that marked three years after our father had died, I decided it was time for her to visit his grave and forgive him.” I pause. The easy part to tell is the decision behind the tragedy. My hands begin to tremble.

Dessin reaches out his hand, signaling for me to sit down in front of the fire. I shake my head. I have to stay standing for this; otherwise, I won’t be able to finish.

“I began the day feeling a sense of pride for Scarlett’s actions. Her emotions and stubbornness ultimately characterized who she was, but not that day. With my best efforts, she had put them aside to take a much higher road with me. And even though Scarlett never forgave Jack for hurting me—and she never forgave him for leaving her with our mother to suffer a different form of abuse—she made the much-anticipated decision to come with me to his grave. No, she had not forgiven him. I highly doubted that she ever would, but part of me thought she did it for me, or maybe she did it for her. Maybe she had fought with a dark and blistering fire for so long, she was ready to try out the water with me.

“We gathered a bouquet of sunflowers on the walk over, through a small passage in the woods, and she reached for my hand. Something in her was uneasy. ‘Do you ever wonder what life would be like if we grew up together? And Mom and Dad were just normal people?’ I told her that I had thought about it a lot, actually. ‘What do you think I would be like, Sky?’ This was an easy answer for me. ‘I think you would have been happy. Married.’

“‘You think I could have really ended up like that?’ I told her I still thought she could. I remember her looking at me in disbelief. ‘You still can. Your soul is capable of moving mountains. You just have to believe it too!’ I remember her looking at me with the eyes of a child. ‘I want to be all of that. I know I haven’t been easy to live with, but I want to be happy. I want to be loved.’ She looked at the cemetery only a couple hundred yards ahead of us. ‘Only because you believe in me.’ I squeezed her hand three times. She squeezed it back three times.”

A pulse of regret and pain vibrates through my body. I feel unsteady and nauseous. A hole burns through my stomach like hot coal falling from my esophagus. And the tears scream at me from behind my eyes. They want to be set free. But I can’t, no, not yet.

How could I have done this to her? She wanted to change. She wanted a better life.

Dessin stands, placing his hands on my shoulders, looking deeply into my eyes. But my breath turns jagged, and the world around me catches fire.

“It’s okay,” he whispers.

I shake my head, my eyes darting in every which direction again.

“You’re ready to say it out loud. It’s time.” He places his hands on my clammy cheeks and forces me to focus on him. “She’d want you to forgive yourself. You can say it now.”

I grip his wrists like I’m dangling from the edge of the cliff, begging him to pull me back up. Please don’t let go. I keep my eyes on him. “When we walked up to my father’s grave, a woman was standing there. She had our honey-blonde hair.”

Dessin’s brow furrows in understanding.

“Our mother, Violet. The woman that allowed Scarlett to be molested for all of those years. The woman who destroyed her little girl. This woman was standing over our father’s headstone in tears. When she looked up at us, she wouldn’t look at me, only at Scarlett. I could see she knew who she was. And for a moment, I thought this might work. Maybe she changed. Maybe she was the antidote Scarlett needed to heal. But I was wrong. I was so wrong. I was naive and wrong, and I was a stupid girl!” My voice is an earthquake, quivering, rumbling, setting the stage for a disaster.

“What happened?” he asks.

“Scarlett and I stood there in shock. Neither of us knew what to say to her. Violet looked at Scarlett like an insect. A poisonous insect. She spat on the ground and said, ‘I remember you. You’re the little monster I made a few shiny coins off of.’ I responded quicker than Scarlett could blink and asked her how she could do those things to her own daughter. Scarlett held my hand, and her whole body shook. Violet laughed at us—she laughed so hard tears slipped from her eyes. ‘Scarlett deserved everything that happened to her. She’s nothing to me. No daughter of mine.’

“And then she was gone. Left at that moment. And—when I looked at Scarlett’s face, there was no color. No tears. Only emptiness and utter shock. I began apologizing profusely. I couldn’t believe I made the decision to come here. To introduce her to everything that would reopen her wounds and break her soul. I practically dragged her back home, where she fell into tiny pieces. Her cries weren’t out of anger this time. They were out of agony and catastrophic devastation. She sobbed and crashed to the floor, holding her stomach as she tried to set a perimeter around the pain.

“And in that moment, I made the second of bad decisions I made for that day. I told her we were going to make a blueberry pie together. Just like how she would do for me when I was sad. I was going to run out and grab the blueberries, and we’d read an old book together, and she would feel better. However, that was what Scarlett would do for me. I normally would hold her while she cried. I’d sit behind her and rock her back and forth. That is what Scarlett believed she needed. Instead, I strayed and tried something new. Before I left her, I begged her to tell me she still loved me.

“But she kept crying in a puddle of her own despair. I gathered a basket of blueberries from the woods while chanting, ‘She’s going to be okay, she’s going to be okay.’” Oh, God. The tears. They burn at the backs of my eyes. They are filling around my lids.

“But in my stomach, I knew this was the worst it ever was. And if anything in the world could break her for good, it was going to be this. And I was stupid—I was so stupid. When I came back to our house, I couldn’t find her. The house was so quiet—” My knees begin to buckle. “Mmm. No. No.” I shake my head again.

Dessin wraps his arms around me. “You can do this. You can finish it. Tell me what you found,” he pleads with raw emotion in his voice. The fire crackles behind him.

“As I ran through the house searching for her, I knew deep down where she would be. But I was—petrified. I didn’t want to see what had become of her mental state in the minutes I was gone. The closet door in our mother’s old room is where Scarlett was locked away as a little girl. It was a frightening place for her. But the door was closed. I felt a sinking evil residing over that room as I opened it. And…”

Dessin nods. “You’re almost there,” he says.

“And she was hanging!” The cry comes now, blustering out of my chest. Tears pooling in my eyes and streaming rivers down my cold cheeks. “Her body swinging back and forth. She had hung herself. My Scarlett had—hung herself in the closet where she was kept a prisoner. Fresh tears were still on her cheeks. Her neck was the color of a plum and elongated—the image of her was mortifying. And I was in shock. I couldn’t breathe. But then I saw the note on the ground in front of her feet hovering above it. In fresh ink, it read: ‘I still love you.’”

The sobs rattle my body in the stronghold of his arms down to the bone. My glass shell has burst into tiny shards.

“And that was it for me. I broke. I lost all will to live, and I burned the house down. I held her lifeless hand as my world burned down for her. My only regret was that I didn’t keep the note. I was pulled out of the fire and left on the side of the road, mere moments before rescue arrived. I woke up to see our home turned to ashes. It was and will always be the worst day of my life.”

Dessin remains, holding me close to him, his arms tightly around my body like I might disappear. Like I might float away. I don’t want him to let me go. His embrace is by far the most comfort I have ever known.

His arms are what made saying this tragedy out loud bearable.

Saying it out loud to him forces the sketch of the puppet to reenter my mind, pushing past my grief like an earthquake breaking through the ground.

“Do you think that’s why I sketch the puppet? Is that why I draw the strings around the limbs? Is it to keep me from losing my mind?” My words spill out over his shoulder, garbled and choked.

His brows knit together. “You draw a puppet?”

“Almost every day. I draw it when I think about her. I draw it when I’m hurting.”

“I think the puppet was your way of coping. It was your minds way of taking a tragic death and turning it into something harmless. A puppet attached to strings.” He clears his throat, strengthening his hold on me. “Skylenna, for you to blame yourself for her death is a dishonor to her memory. Scarlett would hurt knowing that you were suffering believing this every day. It wasn’t your fault. She was on the brink of death for years. You kept her alive with your love. But unfortunately, she remained broken for too long. There was nothing you could have ever done.” Dessin says every word as a matter of fact. No question. No doubt.

“You talk about her like you knew her.” I pull away from him slowly.

“I know what I’ve observed through you.”

A brief wave of déjà vu overcomes me. I stare into his eyes curiously, like a crystal ball revealing an unraveling ribbon of secrets.

“Thank you.” I wipe my eyes. “That truth was burning me alive. As if I never made it out of that fire.”

He nods. “I wouldn’t have let you burn alone.”

And that notion sends me into his arms again, letting him hold me tight as I cuddle my face to his neck, breathing in his sweet scent, praying he’ll never let me go again.

He presses his mouth and nose into my wet hair, inhaling strongly, and curls his fingers around my waist like I’m about to be dragged away from him.

“Look up,” he whispers peacefully.

My eyes flicker to the night sky, sparkling with millions of diamonds suspended in the darkness. And my world doesn’t seem as significant anymore, not where we stand, below the glowing white lights. The dazzling map of stars.

“They’re brighter here,” he tells me, still holding me tight. “What does it feel like standing under them?”

“Like home.” I smile.