In My Arms You Shall Hide

Chapter 9

Dorian

M y uncle stands in the center of the boardroom, leading a meeting with upper management. I half-listen to him, pouring myself over even the most banal emails. No matter the efforts of distraction, I keep drifting back to Katherine. Walking alongside the man, knowing Paul might be gunning for her, is not easy.

I try to tell myself his words are an empty threat. Historically, Paul hasn’t been above threatening a college girlfriend or two when he thought they would be a problem. However, it has always been more discouragement than a veiled threat toward their lives.

Katherine is being released from the hospital today. Even if it would be the easiest thing in the world to not uphold the financial promise I made to Dana and never contact them again, I know I can’t just cut myself off from Katherine.

A sickly voice echoes in my head that sounds eerily like my father. What is that Kittie girl to you, anyway? You love her or something?

Love. Now that’s a word.

What is Katherine Starling to me?

Katherine filters across my barren and thoughtless brain in the first hours of the morning. I’ve spent hours at her bedside while she was none-the-wiser. We’ve shared soul-bearing conversations as well as innocuous ones. I count on her to be alive and in my future, whether in her mother’s home or eventually in my own…

If she lived with you, you could keep an eye on her, the demon on my shoulder jeers. And she’d look so good against the color of your sheets.

I slam my laptop shut in the middle of Paul’s presentation. I know it’s rude; everyone’s eyes lift from their notepads and screens. I slide my chair back and get to my feet.

“Are we interrupting you?” Paul snaps.

“Sorry,” I tell him in a clipped voice. Then my pocket vibrates. As I fish it out and notice an unfamiliar number on the screen, I ignore my uncle’s impatient grumble. “Excuse me, I need to take care of something.”

“Did you have anything to cover on your end of things, Dorian?” The head of Tacron’s marketing department asks from the corner of the table. Like everyone else, she’s become very good at ignoring my uncle’s aggression.

“No,” I reply, a touch sharper than I intended. With a quick inhale, I tuck my computer under my arm and try again, sounding more polite, “Nothing different from last week anyway. If there’s something I meant to address, I’ll send a memo out.”

“Alright,” she says, frowning. “Take care.”

I nod and leave the room, shutting the door behind me. It isn’t until I’m several paces away that I hear them pick up where I had cut them off.

Usually, I’d assume that a random, unsaved number is just spam, but in my line of work, clients and prospective customers have gotten my personal number far easier than I like.

I answer it and hold it up to my ear. Before I can even greet the caller, I hear soft crying on the other end.

“Hello?”

“Dorian,” Dana gasps, “Kittie’s gone!”

I’m doused with ice in an instant. Sounds continue in the background, even as it feels the earth has stopped on its axis. “What are you talking about?”

“She walked right out of the building!” she shrieks, her voice cracking. “We were just about to sign the discharge papers, and I went to the bathroom, and she was just gone!”

My heart drums in my ears, and it’s a miracle I can hear her over the droning of my pulse.

“She’s wearing regular clothes, so no one thought to stop her. I’ve tried to tell everyone she wouldn’t do that, but only her doctor’s taking me seriously! She’s confused ! They keep telling me she’s fine, but I can just feel that something’s wrong.”

A cog in my brain falls into place, and numbly, I fall into autopilot. “I’m headed to my car now, Dana. I’ll start driving around and looking for her. She couldn’t have gotten far.”

“Please find her!” she wails, and I hear someone—a nurse or doctor—trying to talk her down. “I’m worried something’s going to happen to her again.”

I try not to process a sense of dread weighing on me.

“Trouble in paradise?”

I glance back, but the world around me is surreal; static coats Paul’s words. He leans against the wall, arms crossed with an expression of smug satisfaction, and suddenly, I hear my father’s frantic voice in my head again.

“Maybe not,” Paul says, surveying my expression—which I can only assume isn’t anything less than horrified. “Hope everything’s okay with that girl. It’d be a shame if anything happened to her after all the two of you went through.”

I stare through him, the hallway narrowing to a tunnel and the floor beginning to tip. Somehow, I manage to stay upright.

He’s bluffing , I tell myself. This is just another one of his games of chicken—he’s grabbing for leverage to get me to fall for his lies and come to heel. He’s waiting for me to blink.

He has to be bluffing, right?

“Although, and forgive me for my crassness, maybe it’s for the best.” Paul’s mouth twitches for a second, nearly breaking out into a smile before he controls it. “Shelling out any more money for the girl wouldn’t be in your best interest…or the family’s.”

I don’t wait for him to finish. I whirl around on my feet and storm out of the office, ignoring the young woman at the reception desk when she asks where the fire is. I fidget and shift on my feet in the elevator, plagued by the swirling thoughts of my parents.

Memories of limping out from the crumpled remains of a vintage car pop to the forefront of my mind. The shard of metal cut into my hand when I clutched it. I could hear my father’s labored breathing in the driver’s seat.

I quicken my pace through the lower deck parking garage. So many thoughts blend together; the dream, my mother’s blood, Katherine’s pained smile.

By the time I reach my car, I’m in full crisis mode. So many axles fire off at once, and I spiral downward. I don’t know what will become of me if I can’t find her. And when I do find her…

It’s hot inside the car, made worse by the strange, nervous heat consuming me. I start the engine and turn the AC to max.

Katherine could be anywhere in the city. She could be lying in a gutter somewhere, unnoticed by passersby. And while that image causes me to cringe in the driver’s seat, something burrows up from the kaleidoscope of painful memories.

“Sometimes, I pretend that I’m the person the postcards are written to… I used to take a bus to the Southside Park, sit on a bench, read them…”

The memory jolts me to my core. I throw my car into drive and speed out of the parking garage. I can only hope that my uncle capitalized on the situation—it’s not unlike him to swoop in when things get messy and take the credit. My father would attest to that, were he among the living.

But suppose I can’t find her tonight. In that case, I’ll drive back to the office tomorrow and kill my uncle, in front of all the board members, regardless of his involvement, irrespective of what becomes of me afterward.

I fight off a mental breakdown during my fifteen-minute drive out of New Birch toward the edge of Duffey. I study every stranger I pass on the street, almost furious when any woman with her shade of hair turns and reveals themselves not to be her.

And when I speed past Southside Park, an anvil falls off my chest. I’m nearly high on the relief when I spot a familiar woman with auburn hair.

Katherine sits on a faded green bench beneath one of the low, barren trees. She’s just staring across the mostly empty playground, looking disheartened. I can’t remember if I told her my car model, but she doesn’t react as I drive around the corner and park in one of the spaces a few feet from her. I kill the engine, watching her back, drinking in the sweet relief as my uneven breathing slows.

Just what will I do with you, Katherine?

The frantic images that plagued me on my drive peel back, swirling away, flowing down the drain to the back of my mind. The twin tombstones in the Duffey cemetery fade. All I’m left with is images of Katherine in a jar.

I try to shake away the thoughts, even as the demon raves on my shoulder in an incomprehensible chant, take her, take her, take her, take—

I’m not sure if it’s me in control or something that’s been brewing for years, long before I even met Katherine. Perhaps she unleashed something in me that’s always been there. Either way, I’m terrified out of my mind that such a dark part of me has slithered to the surface.

I have plenty of time to stop. I haven’t done anything irreversible yet; there’s still time to come to my senses. The angel on my shoulder pleads with me to see the light, but she’s been so quiet all my life that she’s easy to ignore.

I pull out my phone and scroll through my contact list.

When I inherited the massive property with no one to fill the dozens of bedrooms, I had no intentions of living in the Ward Estate alone. And if I’m about to commit such an egregious sin, I need everyone on board.

The phone rings twice before an androgynous voice answers, “Hey, what’s up?”

“Raney,” I sigh, and the line goes quiet just by the stilted tone of my voice. “I need your help.”

“Okay, what’s the matter?” my cousin asks without skipping a beat.

Raney Ward: a young woman, a few years older than Katherine, who brought a touch of warmth to the otherwise cold estate. Her presence there has always been welcome, even if the bloody history she runs from could rival my own.

“Does the security system still work?” I ask. “All the sensors are still in place, but does it still function?”

“Uh, yeah, but it’s not connected to anything. You didn’t renew the contract with the security company, so it’s basically all bark and no bite. Look, you know I hate turning that thing on. Cory busted the screen door last year, and the alarm scared the bejesus out of me—”

When I sense she’s about to go on a rant, I cut her off. “Do you remember when I first brought you home, I told you I would take your secrets to the grave?”

Another pause. Raney begrudgingly responds, her good mood vanishing, “Yeah, I remember.”

“I’m about to ask the same from both of you,” I say, glaring down at my lap, feeling the uncertainty and panic rattle through me. “No matter what happens, I need you not to tell another soul.”

“Sure,” she replies, letting the word slip out slowly. A spell of quiet passes between us, and just when I’m worried I’ll lose my mind, her tone softens. “You know we’re loyal to you. Are you going to stop being weird and tell me what’s happening?”

I lift my eyes from the dash to find that Katherine hasn’t moved. Her head turns as she seems to process the sights around her.

“I need you guys to do a couple things for me. There’s someone I need to protect from your father.”