Something breathes. It is darkness condensed into a black so pureit pulses in the corner. A cold terror closes over her throat, because it looks for all the world like a body standing there, water dripping slowly onto the floorboards with apat, pat. Then it steps backward and dissolves into the walls.
It takes everything in her not to start crying.
She has to get out of this house.
Peeling herself from the bed takes excruciating effort, her limbs toneless and uncooperative. She pulls on another sweater as she slips into the en suite to pee and splash cold water on her face with trembling hands. She looks worse than harrowed, thinned in the way of unraveling things, of food left half-eaten on a plate. Tangled curls curtain her face, limp and tacky and twisted.
She should never have slept this long.
A sleep that deep, that hard to wake from, isn’t normal. It had to have been six hours, maybe seven.
She shoves away from the sink and yanks the trash can toward her, rooting around with manic fervor. Tissues. Fistfuls of her hair pulled from the drain. Something gross wrapped in toilet paper. Old box of cold and flu meds. And… an emptied sheet of sleeping pills.
She’s going to kill him.
Downstairs, the house feels as hollowed as a stripped carcass, the shadows arched like rib bones around hallways and the floorboards iced underfoot. Most of the lights are off. She stumbles around the usual toolboxes and ladders and work supplies stacked in the corners and spilling out of half-renovated rooms, and it feels as if the house has grown. Rooms stretching, narrowing, swapping places, all a vindictive game to make her feel lost in this rabbit warren.
She drags herself to the living room, breathless and shaky, but she already knows what she’ll find.
The walls have been papered afresh, everything returned to thelovely florals and olive leaves and delicate embellishments that befit a sweet old, renovated house. No trace of the red stains remains, the luminous, throbbing flesh, the pustules oozing down the wood. The entire room smells of sanded wood floors and wallpaper paste.
Elodie considers snatching up tools, anything she can get her hands on, and ripping it all down again. If she claws back the paper with her fingernails, she’ll expose everything malevolent he’s trying to hide.
That’s what this is.
He’s not fixing anything about this house; he’s simply covering up the horrors.
Voices sound from the kitchen, cutlery ringing against plates, and she’s jolted out of her vicious focus on the walls.
Confront him.
She has to, quickly, before it’s too late.
Light spills around the archway into the kitchen and she drifts toward it, a helpless moth toward a beautiful execution, her head throbbing with such ruthless intensity she can barely think. Water, she needs water. And then to lie down—No.Jude has already been without her for six goddamn hours with a man she cannot trust.
In the archway, she sways, a hand up to shield her burning eyes from the abrasive, honeyed glow of the kitchen lights. The scene before her feels upside down, floors and ceiling reversed, windows blown out and the air glittering with the debris of exploded stars.
This can’t be real.
They’re having dinner, Bren and Jude, without screams or bribes or threats, both of them caught in a snapshot of domestic, cozy bliss. Pans pile in the sink and the counters are strewn with bowls and spilled seasonings and escaped slivers of raw onion. Half the table is covered with the usual junk accumulated over a weekend, but the other side has been cleared for stacks of plates and a bowl of fluffy rice, gravy in a milk jug,and grilled steaks still in a charred pan. A savory, alluring smell threads through the room. Cutlery rings against the sunflower crockery. Apple juice splashes into a glass.
Blood oozes from the steak and rings around it in a leering grin.
Jude is sitting at the table, his little legs swinging, cut-up meat on his plate. Sauce smears across his mouth and grains of rice stick to his cheeks.
He’s chattering away, putting steak in his mouth with dirty fingers.
“Hey! You’re up. Are you hungry?”
She blinks, trying to focus through the foggy glaze. Her lungs spasm, her mouth parting in a gasp, because perhaps she forgot to breathe as she watched them.
“I did steaks for dinner,” Bren’s saying. He’s at the stove, humming cheerfully as he pokes tongs into something bloody and bubbling in his pan. “Jude’s super into it.”
She strides into the kitchen and shoves Jude’s plate out of his reach while he lets out a mewl of surprise. “He can’t eat this. He’ll throw up. It’s—it’s too rich.” She slides hands under Jude’s arms. “It’s bedtime.”
Jude gives a dismayed wail. Rice sticks to his pants, and she realizes he isn’t in the same clothes she dressed him in this morning. These are nice jeans, a mustard sweater he hasn’t irrevocably stained yet, though there’s now rice scattered across his lap and he’s dragged his cuffs through sauce. Evidence he’s been eating.
He’s been eating a lot.
