Page 37
“And?”
“The paperwork.” His expression changed. “Did you actually read the contract, Marlowe?”
“I looked for it yesterday. It’s gone. They deactivated the link,” I said. “But I’m guessing I signed a ridiculous contract with a mutual non-disparagement agreement in it. Confidentiality. Arbitration, so it never sees a courtroom, and it never sees a journalist.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I scrolled through it on my phone at my boss’s house, somewhere between folding a hundred cashmere sweaters and firing the landscapers.” My face was hot. I pushed my hair back with the palm of my hand. “I signed it in four seconds. If I’d known I was signing up for a demonic cult wedding, I would have read through it more thoroughly.”
For a moment, I was so annoyed with Vivienne that I forgot about the cold sensation worming through me.
Damian paused, and the look on his face told me he felt sorry for me. This man, trapped by a coven, feeling bad for me. I almost laughed.
“If you try to blow the whistle on this, they’ll come after you.”
His words put a weight on my chest.
“Damian.” The cold thing in my core grew limbs. “Yesterday I left a comment on a Sacred Flame reel. Under my own name. Asking if anyone else had a bad experience.”
He closed his eyes. “How long was it up?”
“It’s still up.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Worrying about it doesn’t change the fact that they’ve seen it.”
I was going to press him on what that really meant, but then I looked at him and saw the weight he was carrying.
“And if I say no, if I refuse to sign up for another retreat, what happens to you?”
He looked down at his bandaged hand. “You shouldn’t worry about that.”
“And yet here I am,” I said. “What happened, the last time one of these women said no?”
“Nothing I’m going to burden you with.”
The daylight diminished all at once. I crossed my arms.
“There has to be some way out of this. Some way that doesn’t…” I didn’t finish the sentence, because I didn’t want to say it aloud. Hurt you.
I saw a flicker in him that could have been hope, if he’d allowed it.
“I found someone recently, someone I never thought I’d get to have in my life. I can’t tell you who. Not yet. But that someone has been trying to help me.”
I hesitated. “But in the meantime—”
“I’m not here to tell you that you need to hang around to help me. I’m here to tell you that you’re in danger.”
I thumbed the edge of the table, smoothing something that wasn’t there. “So if I play along and sign up, you’re okay, and I’m not. If I don’t, I’m okay, and you’re not?”
“If you play along, I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe and get us both out of this. If you don’t, I’ll understand. This is my burden. I’m not going to put the weight of that on you.”
We stared at each other for a moment, then he continued. “There’s something else you need to understand.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled, then turned the screen toward me. A photograph of my sister’s house, taken from across the street. Her wreath on the door. The one we’d picked out together. He swiped. My father’s apartment building in Tampa. He swiped again. My best friend Maya’s Instagram, with a small red dot drawn next to her face in a photo editor. Another swipe. My building. From across the street.
Then he swiped once more, and for a moment I didn’t understand what I was looking at, because it was me. From my own Instagram account. A photo from two years ago at the farmer’s market, a Saturday in June, my face sunburned and laughing, holding a jar of hot honey up to the camera like a trophy. Someone had scrolled two years into my life, taking notes, learning what to put on my nightstand so that a drugged woman would feel, in some cell-deep way, that she was already home.
