The constable turned toward us. His brows pulled into a subtle furrow.
Sylum forced a smile. “She’s overwrought,” he called out evenly. “The shock… It’s a dreadful scene, you understand.”
He backed us slowly away from the corpse. I was panting beneath his hand, my fingernails digging into the sleeve of his shirt. I wanted to scream again. I still heard it. That sound. Louder still.
The constable nodded absently, turning to speak with one of his men.
Sylum took that moment to seize me. His fingers clamped around my arm as he dragged me from the hall, past the corpse, past the pounding that still drummed through my bones.
Th-thump. Th-thump. Th-thump.
He wrenched open a side door and shoved me inside an unused drawing room. The latch clicked shut. Dust drifted in the stale air. My back hit the door, breath knocked from my lungs.
Sylum stepped close, so close the air between us vanished. His hands braced on either side of my head. His body caged mine. The pounding ceased abruptly, leaving a vast and unnatural silence, like the calm before a storm breaks.
The silence was total now, deafening and taut. There was only him and me, and the sensation of his warm body pressed to mine. I inhaled greedily, allowing his familiar scent to ground me, to chase away the madness clawing its way through me.
“Sylum…” I agonized softly, my voice breaking as tears spilled from my eyes. “Is there any part of you that ever truly loved me?”
Dearest reader,
Edgar Allan Poe once confessed in a letter to his beloved aunt:
“I was never insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
I thought of that line often. I clung to it, really—like a ribbon between my trembling fingers, fraying more with each passing day.
Because I did love him.
I still love Sylum.
Even in those hours when I was all but certain he meant to unravel me—slowly, sweetly, the way one might tease a ribbon loose from a bodice.
There were moments—terrible, blissful moments—when I saw him not as the villain of my story, but as the man I married. The man whom I had loved with my whole heart since I was nineteen. The man who had kissed my temple when I confessed I feared I’d never be anything but strange and alone. The man who brushed the hair from my brow with such gentleness that I could almost forget the things I’d seen.
Almost.
In those brief, unbearable spells of sanity, I saw him clearly.
He was a man torn. A man in love. A man who might very well have been protecting me from something worse than madness.
You must understand, there were nights I doubted everything, even myself. Nights when I feared my mother’s fate was threaded into my very blood. When I wondered if I had stitched fantasy to memory, grief to imagination—until no seam remained between them.
What you are about to read may confirm all your worst suspicions about me.
You may decide, quite reasonably, that I am beyond saving. That I am a woman possessed. A woman haunted.
But before you cast judgment…
Remember, Mr. Poe also said:
“Tell me every terrible thing you ever did—and let me love you anyway.”
—L
Chapter 21
For a single heartbeat, Sylum did not move.
