She expected him to take her back to her room but he took her into the parlor instead. She didn’t want to go in there, though. Not even while drunk. Not with the lights out and the shadows stretching long and strange over the mounted heads and the cabinets filled with death.
But he took her in anyway, whirling the two of them into a shadowy corner beneath that portrait of Evangeline when she was still a young woman.
Before the dark lines of fate had gradually overtaken her face.
“I used to hide in here as a child,” Cal said unexpectedly. “Odessa used to tell me that the animals would come alive when no one was looking. I wanted to see them. Catch them.”
The thought of a young, wide-eyed Cal hiding behind a cabinet, hoping to see the flicker of life in a stuffed, dead creature was both poignant and chilling. She didn’t want to feel things for him. Not like this. Not now. “Dead things don’t come back to life when they’re dead.”
“Yes, I know that now,” he said. “My father is a diligent teacher in that regard.”
“He doesn’t like me,” Nadine said, staring at the picture of Evangeline.
“Oh, I’m afraid he likes you well enough. Although perhaps not in the way you’d think.”
“What?” she stared up at him in confusion. “What does that mean?”
“It means he’d like to fuck you before he kills you. And my brother is the same way.” He turned from her sharply. “That’s why I bit you. That’s why I marked you. My father was going to give you to Ben to play with—right up to the moment he shot you after at the festival.”
(Ben plays for keeps)
Bile rose in her throat. “And your mother . . . is okay with that?”
“She’s a sparrow. She made her choice. She knows full well what we are. Believe me.”
“And that’s what you do? You just run around—fucking and killing and hurting everyone, and the people you drag into this mess just have to sit there and watch?”
Cal stepped back, rattling some of the portraits as he rose from his awkward crouch. He often stooped to talk to her, she realized. So he could look her right in the eyes.
“It’s tradition, Nadine. The past follows us wherever we go. It dictates the fucking future thanks to that will and its codicils. Everything that happens outside of these walls is, ultimately, meaningless.” He gripped her hand, thrusting it against his face. “Look at me. I’m my great-grandfather’s spitting image. Everybody says so.”
She curled her fingers. “That doesn’t mean you have tobehim!”
Cal cracked a humorless smile. “My brother’s right for once. You do have a tender heart. It almost makes me want to spare you, just so I don’t have to watch it break.”
“Then let me go,” she pleaded. “Help me get out of here.”
“Maybe I’ll marry you,” he said, casually. Devastatingly. “Do you think you could satisfy me, Nadine?” He reached out to straighten Evangeline’s picture. “I’m willing to let you try.”
The light tone was jarring after everything she’d just heard. She was starting to see that he employed it whenever he was trying to distract her or push her away. If only she had realized that sooner, perhaps she wouldn’t be where she was right now.
A prisoner in this house of horrors.
“You said you would show me what happened to Noelle.”
“Yes. I also said you would have to give me something in return.”
“What do you want it? I’ll do it.”Even sleep with you, she added silently, though she didn’t say it aloud, just in case she thought she enjoyed fucking him.
“You’d sign yourself away to me so easily? What if I asked you to be my sparrow?”
“Even that,” she said shakily.
“How brave of you.” But he exhaled a little too deeply and she saw in his eyes, and from the slight lifting of his brows, that he was tempted. “I’ll be generous, then. Come to the woods with me, and I will.”
She shot a frightened look at the dwindling light coming through the window. “Now?”In the dark?
“Not now. Later. When I ask.”
