The numbers glowed like red embers. Another day and night in the underworld. Time marched on, but that hardly seemed to matter. Amelia pulled the stiff covers over her head.
Everyone there meant well in the worst ways. The bed’s starchy sheets were pulled taut against a hard mattress and chaffed her bare legs.
Brian’s sweater had mysteriously vanished too, whisked away to the dry cleaners, or so Mirabelle speculated because she didn’t honestly know. What a useless gesture. It’d come back smelling like any other striped sweater, but not like Brian.
In its place, Mirabelle had taken Amelia’s measurements and ordered clothes. Boxes came for days on end, big and small andfilled with beautiful things. It was a grand luxury in the confines of a nightmare.
“You’ll want for nothing. Even Emory agrees,” Mirabelle had told her.
Oh, how she’d beamed at that last bit, a bold effort to engender trust. She hung her fragile hopes on it, and Amelia whacked them down with a biting retort.
“You mean nothing except my home and family, right?”
Mirabelle had excused herself then and came back later with puffy eyes and a sniffly nose, but a fresh round of bright smiles and another big box. Amelia had burned with shame and apologized, but Mirabelle feigned ignorance at the slight.
Amelia shot up from the sheets. The clock with its colon-for-eyes blinked flatly at her. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, got on the floor, and, beneath the nightstand, yanked the clock’s cord from the wall.
A muffled conversation filtered from down below. Emory’s deep and commanding voice was unmistakable to her after her time there. Amelia often heard it rumbling through the mansion and sometimes his resonant laughter too. She pressed her ear to the floor and steadied her breaths to listen but couldn’t make out the other voice.
With a pang of curiosity, Amelia pushed from the floor, and the voices melted into the darkness as she tiptoed across the room. She cracked open the door and hovered beneath the frame.
Angry footfalls paced the foyer below. She knew the cadence of Emory’s stride and the way his boots hit the floor. He’d once pounded after her like that.
The night he held her in his arms and slid his fingers inside. The night he almost kissed her. The night she almost ran away.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Liam said. “Damon murdered that boy, and if you didn’t have a vested interest, he would’ve done the same to Amelia. The very thing you were trying to protect her from would’ve happened anyhow.”
Brian.Like his sweater, Amelia assumed they forgot. Her heartbeat hastened as she crept into the hall.
“I already admitted Damon was a mistake,” Emory argued, “that I should’ve done it myself. What would you’ve done?”
“Oh, good! No harm, no foul then. It all goes away.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“A prayer that the motel clerk doesn’t get chatty when he wakes up.”
“Ifhe wakes up.”
Eric.Amelia didn’t know that Damon had hurt him too. The poor boy was so young.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Liam warned. “You better pray he kicks it. Her being here set something in motion we’re not prepared to deal with.”
“It was already in motion.”
“Don’t be so fucking naïve. There’s something else going on. You and I both know it. The things the Velascos are doing, have already done, are beyond the pale. Philippe was a lot of things, but never a butcher. If he weren’t dead, I’d say it reminds me of?—”
“Enough!” Emory barked. “Leave it alone.”
The hallway darkened, Amelia could’ve sworn. Emory stopped pacing, and silence stretched on. She coiled her arms around her middle to ward off the chill, and the starchy bed seemed a splendid comfort, but her legs carried her farther down the hall instead.
“Answer my question,” Emory said. “What would you’ve done?”
“You know my thoughts. You brought Amelia here, went through all the trouble. Make her sing, Emory.”
Amelia’s stomach twisted. Dressed as a threat, it hid the depraved. A bad man might’ve seized on it as permission to do awful things, whatever those might be.
“Answer the fucking question. If you’d been at that party, seen her huddled in a pile of bodies and crying for help, what would you’ve done? Left her for them, left her to die? Is that the kind of man you are?”
