Page 133 of Bonetide

And there it is. No hesitation, no softening, no let me explain. Just aye, the aye that doesn’t know how to be ashamed.

“That’s…” I press the heel of my hand to my mouth, then take it away. “You say that like I’ve caught you forgetting to put the bins out. Aye. A woman is fucking dead. Becca Rhys, thirty-four, she had a job she didn’t turn up to, she has people who reported her missing, and you got up out of my bed and you went and killed her.”

“I didn’t break faith with you,” he reiterates, and the awful thing is that he means it as comfort. He thinks if he can just make me understand that he was loyal, that he didn’t want her in that way, it will make it all better. “She was nothing to me, Iris. She was…” He licks his lips and looks away.

“Food,” I mumble flatly, starting to go numb. “She was food, right? She was just food?”

“Aye.”

“Don’t—” My voice cracks and I let it. “Do not say aye to me again. Not like that. Not when we talk about you murdering people!”

He stops. He goes quiet. And he watches me with that confusion still on him, working at it, genuinely working at it, trying to find the place where he’s wronged me and not finding it, because in whatever ancient reckoning runs under those pale eyes, fucking and food are different books entirely. One of them he understands he must never do. The other is just what he is. He has kept the vow he thinks he made me. He cannot for the life of him see that I’m grieving a woman whose name I only learned ninety seconds ago.

“You know what I am. I warned you many times, and you’ve made peace with it. You know that I’ve killed, what I eat, and that I’ll do it again. Christ, I’ll do it more and more now that the bargain is through, you know I will. I can feel myself slipping, it’s as if the only thing tethering me to my humanity is you, Iris.”

Gee, no fucking pressure!

“You need to stop, Alasdair,” I tell him, the words grinding out. “I know what you’ve done in the past, but that’s behind you now. That’s behind us. If you’re going to be with me, you need to behave. You can’t be with me, live in this house, be in my body, and go out there and take women when you feel like it.”

“I only ate her,” he protests, “just as you eat your breakfast right now.”

I erupt. “Oh, this breakfast?” I pick up my oatmeal and fling the bowl at his head. Of course, he has lightning-fast reflexes and ducks before the bowl goes soaring across the kitchen, crashing against the wall and splintering into porcelain chunks and soggy oat splatters.

He stares at me, wide-eyed, perhaps the most surprised I’ve ever seen him.

“Get out,” I shout, absolutely seething.

His brows raise even further.

“Get out, Alasdair! Out of my house. I can’t…I can’t look at you. Go!”

I expect…I don’t know what I expect. An argument, perhaps. Him telling me again all the reasons I knew what he was when I let him in—which would be true—which is the worst of it, because I did. Something akin to, if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best.

But he doesn’t do any of that. He stands up from the table and he looks at me with the confusion not gone but set aside, folded away, because I’ve told him no, and honoring my no is the one law he keeps.

For now, anyway.

He goes to the back door and pauses there, one hand on the frame, his back half to me. For a second, I think he’s going to say something, and some treacherous part of me wants him to, wants him to give me a reason to make him stay. But he doesn’t. He opens the door and the cold whips in, ruffling my hair, and then he’s gone, and I’m alone inside.

The cottage is mine again.

It’s the first thing I notice in the silence after, that it’s mine again—the way it was mine before any of this, before the castle across the bay, before the box and the key and the paintings, before I knew there was more to this world than what I was told. Just me and Effie’s life all crammed together into one cottage. And I wanted this. This is what I came here for. The two weeks of a monster at my table, in my bed, and at my back, and some part of me has been quietly screaming for exactly this, the cottage emptied of him, the air gone so utterly ordinary.

Yet I hate it instantly.

The quiet isn’t peace, no, it’s a held breath. I stand in the middle of the kitchen with the broken dish on the floor, and the size of the emptiness is enormous—far bigger than the cottage itself. I understand, with a sick lurch in my stomach, that his presence had been filling something I’d stopped noticing was a hole.

I go to the window at the door, expecting to see him disappear into the water, but the bay is already empty. No pale shape on the rocks. No man, no horse, no sea creature, or drowned wives.

I should call Maddie, but once again, I know I won’t. It makes me feel better, slightly, to know that I could call her and maybe she’d fly over here and make it all better. Maybe convince me to leave. But I don’t want to put her in any danger and, besides, I’m old enough now to pull up my big girl panties—I’m a recent divorcée for crying out loud, that’s some real adult shit—and figure this stuff out on my own, without anyone coming here to save me.

I just hate it, that’s all.

I sigh, my heart feeling like it’s breaking, and I hate that, too. I’m alone for the first time in a long time, and it’s so much worse than I thought it would be.

Chapter

Twenty-Six