Chapter 9 - THE SCARS HE STOPPED ASKING ABOUT
Gideon talked.
Men like Gideon often believed loyalty was sacred until prison became real.
His testimony dismantled much of Patrick Blake's remaining organization.
Arthur Collins cooperated too.
He faced charges connected to money laundering, obstruction and the original conspiracy.
Mave visited him once.
He looked smaller in a detention uniform.
“I loved you,” he told her.
Mave believed him.
That was the tragedy.
“I know.”
He looked surprised.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“Then—”
“Love doesn't make what you did less real.”
His face crumpled.
“I was afraid.”
“So was I.”
“I thought I could protect both of you.”
“You protected Chloe.”
Arthur closed his eyes.
“I know.”
Mave stood.
“I spent years wanting you to tell me I mattered as much as she did.”
“Mave—”
“I don't need that anymore.”
She left.
Outside, she cried for twenty minutes.
Healing wasn't the absence of grief.
Sometimes it was simply refusing to carry grief back into the room that created it.
Chloe moved to another city.
They spoke occasionally.
Carefully.
Sean continued rehabilitation.
Speech came slowly.
Movement slower.
Declan visited every day he could.
One afternoon, Sean told Mave the rest of his message.
“The ledger... piano.”
“I know.”
“Dec... stubborn.”
Mave laughed.
“Also know.”
Sean smiled.
Then he touched the scar near her shoulder.
Not the skin itself.
The air beside it.
“Sorry.”
She shook her head.
“Stop apologizing for what someone else did.”
He nodded.
She realized she needed to follow the same advice.
For eleven years, she'd dressed around her scars.
Avoided swimming.
Avoided mirrors under harsh light.
Avoided intimacy.
Not because scars were ugly.
Because they made the past visible.
One evening at her new apartment, Declan helped assemble a bookshelf.
Badly.
“This is crooked.”
“It isn't.”
“It has a philosophical disagreement with gravity.”
“I run six companies.”
“None involving shelves, apparently.”
He looked at her.
“You're enjoying this.”
“Immensely.”
She laughed.
Then the sleeve of her shirt slipped.
Her scar showed.
Declan's eyes moved toward it.
Then away.
Mave noticed.
“You can look.”
He met her eyes.
“I know.”
“Then why don't you?”
“Because the first time I saw them, I turned them into Sean.”
That answer surprised her.
“They're yours.”
Silence.
“They aren't clues anymore.”
Something in Mave loosened.
Declan had finally stopped asking who had done that to her.
Because the more important question was who she had become afterward.
She sat beside him.
“Declan.”
“Yes?”
“You kidnapped me.”
“I've apologized.”
“Not very well.”
“I can make another attempt.”
“Later.”
She kissed him.
He froze.
Actually froze.
Mave pulled back.
“That was disappointing.”
“I wasn't prepared.”
“The feared Declan Hayes?”
“Apparently vulnerable to surprise.”
She kissed him again.
This time he recovered.
Months later, when newspapers eventually discovered they were together, they told the story wrong.
THE HOSTAGE WHO FELL FOR HER KIDNAPPER.
Mave hated it.
So she gave one interview.
“I did not fall in love with the man who kidnapped me.”
The reporter blinked.
“But—”
“I fell in love with him after he let me leave.”
That distinction mattered.
May you like
To Mave most of all.
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