“Am I a sparrow?” she asked sleepily, needing to hear the words from him.
“You’re my sparrow.” He rested his chin on her head. “My sweet little sparrow. I would have chosen you that first day if you hadn’t run away. But I enjoyed trying to catch you.”
She let out a breath and closed her eyes, sinking back against his now-familiar warmth.
Tomorrow was the festival.
She had chosen.
C H A P T E R
N I N E T E E N
? she belongs to me ?
Nadine woke to the sound of gunfire, although she didn’t know what it was at first. Nobody in Pineview had guns—or if they did, they kept them locked away like normal people, and they certainly didn’t fire them off in the middle of the day.
The sharp cracks jolted her from sleep and when she rolled over, she felt a sharp pang in her backside. Cal had already gotten up. There was a divot where he had lain beside her in the sheets but when she ran a hand over them, the fabric was cold.
I’m a sparrow, she thought, getting carefully out of her bed.
There was a dress waiting for her on the vanity table. It was a linen wrap dress with a tie waist, like the ones Corrine often favored. This one was black and there was a note on it.
STAY IN YOUR ROOM.
It wasn’t signed but Nadine recognized the handwriting.
Cal.
She picked up one of the books she’d taken from the library and began to flip through it, but the language was difficult and the setting was gloomy and the sound of firing guns kept making her look up from the pages. Eventually, Nadine set it down when she found herself reading the same page for the sixth time. She lay back on her bed with her arms resting over her head.
In his journal, Caledon Cullraven had not expanded upon the life of his sparrows. He didn’t say what they did all day, or what his expectations were for them beyond letting him use their bodies to beget more sons. Sons who were also murders: One son chased his wife across the globe to murder her for leaving him and break the cycle, the other killed his sparrow with a regret that had allegedly made his post-hunt champagne taste sour.
She stared at the watermarked ceiling and that glittering compass rose, remembering Nathaniel’s entry about the two deer. He’d said that Corrine had come to the festival with friends. Had he killed them in front of her before dragging her off to make her his sparrow?
Had he taken her against her will?
Another crack sounded from outside, making her jump. She went to the window, pushing aside the curtains to peer through the pitted glass. There were people in orange hunting vests in the woods, all of them the size of ants at this distance. She watched them until they disappeared from sight, before craning her neck to look at the rest of the grounds.
This side of the house didn’t offer much of a view of anything beyond the woods and the western part of the grounds. It was the other side of the house that faced towards town, with a limited view of the town square and the statue from beyond a curtain of tall redwoods.
Nadine opened the tapestry door and went into Cal’s bedroom again. The laptop was gone, and now the desk was bare except for an old, antique letter box. If she had written to him like he’d wanted, would her letters have gone in there? she wondered, touching the worn edges.
If she had come to him when he’d asked, would Noelle still be alive?
The bed was made and clearly not slept in. Her face heated and she looked away from it, going to the chest of drawers on the opposite side of the room, just next to the tapestry. This, too, was nearly bare, except for a bottle of what appeared to be aftershave. The label was not in English but it smelled like the cedar shavings she’d come to associate with his skin. Beside that was the Victorian dome that had captured her attention the first time he’d brought her in here, with the small stuffed sparrow trapped underneath it, a perturbed look in its small glass eyes.
There was a faded label on the base, written in the same slanted hand that Nadine recognized from the green book.MY SWEET EVANGELINE, it said.
Nadine shuddered and went back to her own room. The image of Caledon stuffing that bird as a threat to his wife wouldn’t leave her mind. She imagined him stroking those feathers, secure in his possession of it—and her. Perhaps imagining the fear that he’d put on her face . . .
Nadine stopped by her window again, arms folded, as she looked out at the forest. The hunters she had seen earlier were gone now, disappeared into the woods.
She checked the lock on her door before going to her bed, where she dozed restlessly, jolted into partial consciousness with each fresh round of gunfire.
Soon, it’ll all be over.
She just hoped she’d still be alive when it was.
