Chapter 146
Chapter 146:
The lie hung between them — thin, tattered, barely holding its shape.
Cailin went still. Her heart slammed against her ribs like something caged. She had moved too fast, too desperately. The dive had said everything that five years of careful silence had worked to conceal.
“She is a child, Hilliard!” Cailin snapped, forcing herself to hold his gaze. “Anyone would have done it. You did it p>
“I did it because I felt responsible,” Hilliard said, his eyes moving across her face with the slow, methodical precision of someone reading a document for hidden meaning. “But you? You moved before she even hit the water. You moved like you were tethered to her p>
He reached out again, this time closing his fingers around her chin, tilting her face upward. His grip was firm. Deliberate.
“Your eyes,” he said quietly, studying them from inches away. “They are the same. The shape. The color. It isn’t just a resemblance, Cailin. It’s a mirror p>
Cailin’s breath caught. She drove her palm against his wet chest, pushing his hand away. “You are delusional. The cold is affecting your judgment. You’re seeing things that aren’t there because you feel guilty p>
Hilliard didn’t move. He was a wall of muscle and certainty. “Tell me the truth,” he said, his voice dropping to a low growl. “Right now p>
Elia coughed — a deep, wet, wrenching sound that brought up a final stream of seawater onto the deck.
The spell broke instantly. Cailin turned away from him and gathered Elia close, her hand moving in slow circles across the girl’s back. Hilliard watched. He couldn’t stop watching.
𝗗𝗈𝗐𝘯l𝗈а𝖽𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘗𝘋𝗙𝘴 𝘰n 𝗴а𝗅ոov𝗲𝗅ѕ.𝗰𝗼m
Then he noticed her other hand — the way her thumb moved automatically across the bare skin of her ring finger. A ghost of a gesture, unconscious and unguarded. She had done the same thing years ago when she was nervous, when she was lost in thought, when she was his.
The birthmark. The eyes. The dive.
Logic and instinct were at war inside him, but his instinct was winning — screaming the truth so loudly now that it was drowning out everything else.
“We are going to have a long talk,” Hilliard said quietly, rising to his feet.
He didn’t go anywhere. He stood over them like a sentinel, watching a woman he was slowly, irreversibly realizing he had never truly known at all.
As the medics moved Elia to a more sheltered part of the deck, Hilliard pulled Cailin into the narrow gangway between the cabin and the rail. The space was intimate, claustrophobic, with nowhere to retreat.
“Is she mine p>
The question hung in the salt air, heavy and absolute.
A wave of nausea moved through Cailin that had nothing to do with the sea. She looked at Hilliard — really looked at him. He was a wreck. His eyes were red-rimmed, his lips edged with blue from the cold, but the intensity behind his gaze was a fire capable of burning everything down to get an answer.