The crunch of bone beneath her boot stifled her inquiry. No. Not bone. Glass. Not glass, stone. The crack shivered through the space and she dropped her phone, letting out a curse as it skidded out of reach. Squatting down, she felt though the dark with blind, fumbling hands.
Her fingertips brushed something solid and she grabbed for it, thinking it her phone. Instead, her fist closed around something shattered. Something sharp. Pain bit into her palm, and she dropped the object with a yelp, launching back to her feet as the first well of blood rose along her skin.
Across the foyer, a foot scraped over tile. She was at once interminably conscious of how stupid she’d been, entering Colton’s house without any sort of protection. Break-ins happened all the time in the city. What was she planning to do? Beat the intruder with her fists? She took a step backward, hoping she was moving toward the door. A few feet away, a figure stepped into a trickle of moonlight.
“Wednesday?”
Her relief at hearing Colton’s voice was immediate and tenfold. She took a big swallow of air, clutching the cut-glass bleed of her hand to her chest, willing her heart to slow. In the open door, Colton stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat, the collar pulled up around his throat. He angled his head, regarding her across the foyer.
“What are you doing?”
“What areyoudoing?” she shot back, though she knew it was not at all the correct thing to say to someone after entering their home uninvited. Colton’s face looked strange, pitted in shadow as it was—his left eye diffused with a dark that didn’t quite match the fall of moonlight on his face.
“I live here.”
“In the dark?”
“Sometimes,” he said wryly. “As you’ve seen.”
“With the front door left wide open?”
He didn’t reply right away. She saw him scuff the floor with the glossy toe of a shoe. Something small and shattered went skittering toward her, like a pebble skipped across a frozen pond.
“Maybe I was hoping you’d come through it,” he lied.
She couldn’t stop the scoff that came out of her. “Don’t do that. Don’t be insincere.”
She was met with his laugh, though the sound came out strained, like he’d recently taken a kick to his windpipe. Pushing out of the door, he shoved it all the way shut. A light clicked on, flooding the space in too-bright yellow. Delaney felt suddenly and supremely ridiculous, pressed against the wall with her scarf coming undone, wet, skeletal leaves suctioned to her boots.
A few feet away, Colton looked like Hell itself.
His face, which she could now see clearly, was discolored with a myriad of contusions. His left eye was swollen shut, the skin puckering around an angry cut just below his temple. A bruise flowered at the corner of his mouth, an angry wound splitting the skin in an interrupted joker’s grin.
“Colton.” His name came out of her on a breath. “What happened?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Yeah? Well, it looks like someone stuck a knife in your mouth.”
“Huh.” He brought two fingers up to his cheek and prodded, resulting in a wince. “I forgot about that.”
Delaney took quick stock of the foyer. With the lights on, she could clearly see the damage that had been done. A heavy vase lay in fragments across the floor, hand-pinched clay severed into jagged puzzle pieces amid a heap of potting soil. Uprooted, the plant reached sad snake-grass fingers toward the ceiling.
When she looked back at Colton, it was to find him watching her in a curious sort of way. As if he were at a zoo, and she were a predator in an enclosure. As if he expected her to lunge. He hadn’t come any closer.
“You’ve had a break-in,” she said.
“Well, yes,” he agreed after too long of a pause. “That’s patently obvious.” The look he gave her was wry, the hollows of his cheeks colored wrong, as if someone had tried to paint him from memory and failed. “I didn’t see who it was, though. You chased them off before I could get close. Thank goodness you’re so frightening.”
She scowled. “What do you mean, you didn’t get close? Looks as if they got a pretty good look at you.”
“What, this?” He jabbed a finger at the mess of his face. “No, this is unrelated.”
She let out a huff of air. “Of course it is.”
For several moments afterward, they took silent stock of the mess. When Delaney chanced a look in Colton’s direction, it was to find him scrutinizing her with that same enigmatic stare. He looked skeletal this way—as though he’d been hollowed out with a chisel, the curve of his mouth carved into a bloodied grimace.
“At the risk of sounding trite,” he began, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
