In My Arms You Shall Hide

Chapter 16

Dorian

I avoid Katherine for five days. It’s ludicrous, especially in my own home. Shame follows me closer than a shadow down the estate’s corridors, and I wonder if the walls judge me.

It’s Saturday, and I’m tempted to find some excuse to leave the house. I brought her here because I thought of myself as the only one capable of protecting her, and here I am, ducking her like some nervous schoolboy. Every time I see her as Raney takes her from one room to another, I want to gather her up and take her somewhere to make love to her again, and I hate that. I’m a slave to my impulses, and I need control.

When I find no excuse to leave, I remain my study. I get caught up on some work that morning whenever I peel my wandering thoughts from Katherine and stick them to the task at hand.

A knock at the door snags my attention. Raney pokes her head in, smiling from ear to ear. My cousin has always been a sunny presence, but Katherine’s arrival brightens her glow. I can only hope that they’re able to foster a relationship since I’ve so clearly killed mine with her.

“We had lunch. Do you want anything?”

“No, I’m fine,” I mumble, returning to my laptop and the unending spreadsheets. I hesitate, and despite myself, I ask, “Where’s Katherine today?”

Raney’s grin turns smug. “She’s in the sunroom. We’re working on some artwork right now. It’s actually looking really good. You should go see it.”

“Sure,” I reply half-heartedly.

Katherine absolutely does not want to see me. Even so, there’s a deep aching in me for some much-needed time with her, like an addict itching for their next fix. But I’m trying to keep the pining in check.

Raney leans against the doorframe, arms folded. Pretending to be casual, she says, “I laid out a blue sundress for her today. I think it suits her very well.”

My face twitches.

Without another word, I slowly get to my feet.

Opening the door wider for me, Raney steps aside, falling into line at my heels as I leave my office. It’s a fool’s errand to try and get any work done while my focus is so brittle. Besides, the measured distance between Katherine and me isn’t sustainable.

She might hate me, but that feeling isn’t mutual.

“She seems like she’s in a pretty good mood, all things considered,” Raney points out, her voice bright and full of hope as she follows me down the staircase.

I stare straight ahead as we descend the steps. I appreciate her dancing around the subject of Katherine’s stay. “Yes, all things considered, I’m glad.”

“Try not to be so glum,” she replies as we reach the main hallway. I’m met with shockingly sympathetic eyes when I pivot to look back at her. “You and I both know that once my dad sets his mind to something, there’s no shaking him. Here is her safest bet.”

I fold my arms, scanning over my cousin. The hard switch from glowing optimism to grief can almost be tasted in the air between us.

Yes, unfortunately, she isn’t lying for my benefit. And yet, the angel on my shoulder knows the truth; no matter the real threat to Katherine’s life, it’s just an excuse to close her up in one of my childhood jars.

Before I can address the memories that are likely turning around in Raney’s mind of her own mother’s death, a knock at the door has us snapping our heads up.

A knock at our door would have been odd even under normal circumstances, given the estate’s remote mountain location. It’s unlikely a lost traveler or one with a flat tire would have ended up at our front porch.

Raney and I exchange loaded glances as if we summoned Paul Ward—or even the police—with our conversation.

“Head back to the sunroom,” I instruct quietly. “If you both need to be hidden, I’ll set off the alarm by the front door. You hear it, you hide quickly.”

“Already ahead of you,” she replies, glancing nervously toward the door before rounding the stairs and hurrying down the hallway.

I weigh my options as I approach the door. If I find the police on my doorstep, I’ll have little time to get the house in order and hide Katherine properly. Sticking her in a closet again won’t cut it; they’ll tear the place apart if they come with a warrant.

Paul, on the other hand, would be much easier to deal with. Maybe this time, I’ll kill him and handle the fallout later.

I peer through the eyehole. I’m relieved when I don’t see my uncle or any police uniforms, but only a single stranger.

When I open the front door, the man lifts his head. He looks familiar, but I know we’ve never met. He stands half a foot shorter than me, peering up from beneath unkempt, thick, auburn hair with a set of dark blue eyes. Given the lines across his face, he looks to be in his late forties.

Glancing over his shoulder, I notice a rusted, red Pontiac Sunfire in the roundabout.

“Can I help you?” I ask. I hold onto the door, prepared to slam it in his face if he reveals himself as a salesman.

“Uh, yes,” he grumbles. “You don’t know me…but you know my daughter.”

I stiffen. It can’t be…

“Dana mentioned you,” he continues. The man’s in a cheap suit, one a little too small for him. The seams look like they’ll burst as he tenses his shoulders and wrings his hands. “She said you lived here. You know, I’ve driven this road a bunch of times, never knew this mansion was back here.”

I white-knuckle the door. This is Katherine’s deadbeat father?

“Sorry,” I begin, trying not to sound as strangled as I feel, “you’re Kittie’s—”

The man ducks his head. “Yeah, got ahead of myself. I’m Tucker Starling. Kat is my daughter.”

God could not have put a worse man on my doorstep.

Slowly, I open the door wider and cross the threshold, closing it behind me. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Mr. Starling senses my hostility immediately and retreats a step. He might be a rotten bastard, but at least he isn’t dense. Maybe, unlike Dana, he can perceive the danger I pose.

“I know this isn’t a good time,” he begins, holding up his hands as if to ward me from advancing. “It’s just that Dana reached out to me about Kat going missing. I guess she hoped she was with me.”

As he speaks, I recall Dana talking about this man abandoning his daughter, damaging her self-esteem so deeply that she “clammed up,” even after he disappeared.

I remember the smell of summer in the air. As a child, I cried in the memory, watching my mother’s car roll down the road, kicking up dirt. I wondered if she’d come back for me like she said she would.

The idea of Katherine feeling a fraction of that pain gouges a hole in my heart and further stokes my fury.

“I know I haven’t always been around.” He smiles a little despite himself. “I don’t know if Kat ever told you about me; probably not.”

Ah, self-pity, too?

I contemplate killing him. I don’t go through life plotting the death of every man that annoys me, but Tucker Starling is a special case.

I envision the idea of giving the man’s head to Katherine in a box for Christmas. But, like many of my dark fantasies, the image of her smiling with her father’s head is one that doesn’t match with reality. In truth, if I do kill him and show her the evidence, she’ll likely cry. She’s a delicate woman, far too full of pity and kindness, to her detriment.

Plus, I assume she shed far too many tears for the man, and I’m not about to assist him in squeezing a few more out of her.

The only reasonable thing that I can give her is my last name. If she’d ever have me. It sickens me to think Dana kept Starling from her husband, and such a thing is chained to her daughter’s identity.

“The thing is, her disappearance has been a wakeup call for me,” Tucker continues. “I was a shitty father to her. I know you know that. And you don’t owe me anything.” Mr. Starling stares at the floor boards, shoulders hunched. Once he finally gets to his point, he lifts his head, his eyes pleading. “Do you have any idea what might have happened to her?”

For a split second, I wonder if this welp of a man in front of me is more observant than anyone who’s crossed my path thus far. The urge to kill him grows. The rationale becomes too good to resist, but I stave off my rage. I recognize that the pathetic look in his eye is not a keen perception but desperation.

“I’ve already spoken to the police,” I reply flatly. “Trust me, if anyone wants Kittie home safe and sound, it’s me.”

“I know that,” he has the nerve to agree. “Dana tells me that you two didn’t know each other long, but…you were close.”

“ Are ,” I correct. Perhaps the most troubling part about the situation is that everyone—except Dana—uses past tense. I know why. They assume Katherine’s dead.

“Right.” Mr. Starling bobs his head, catching his mistake. “I just thought maybe there was something you hadn’t told them? Some clue, a hint that they might have missed? Maybe somewhere she might have gone?”

I recall Katherine’s confession about the park bench. I’m curious if Dana ever directed the police there or if she simply doesn’t know much about her daughter at all.

I narrow my eyes. “I’m not withholding anything.”

“I didn’t say you were. I just…I feel so bad about not being around. I want to do something, anything. I’m desperate to make this right. I always told myself that maybe my Kat was better off without me, but now I’m worried she went missing because I wasn’t there.”

I fight with myself for too long, and finally, my hands form trembling fists at my sides. It’s the inclusion of the word “my” before Katherine’s name—as if she belongs to anyone other than me.

“I just want to turn every stone over, even if they’ve already been checked.” Finally, he ceases his blathering.

I can’t stop myself. I keep my voice low but don’t bother to wrangle in the venom. “Let me get this straight,” I say, and take a step toward Tucker, forcing him to back up, “you come to my home to accuse me of something—”

As I advance toward him, Mr. Starling’s hands fly up again. “I’m not accusing you of anything!”

“You’re not worried about your daughter. You want to absolve yourself of guilt. Guilt, by the way, that you didn’t seem to feel after she shut down. After you hurt her.”

Mr. Starling stumbles down the porch steps, nearly falling. As I descend them, he clamors to the railing to keep himself from collapsing onto the stone path below.

“Wait a minute,” he stammers, fear forming in his eyes.

“And how easy is this for you? You show up when your daughter disappears, acting as the concerned father who has seen the error of his ways. But no one would fault you; no, they’re too busy feeling sorry for you. You get to reap all the comforts of being a father with a lost daughter and none of the blame. She isn’t around to make you face what you did to her.”

We’re both on the pathway now. Tucker retreats. If I cared to gauge his thoughts, I’d wonder what he feels more intensely…fear or shame.

“And that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? So you can say that you did all you could to find your daughter without actually trying. And you come here, full of self-pity. Like I’m going to feel bad for you? Is that what happened with Dana? She felt bad for you after a little bit of groveling?”

Sweating, he nearly trips over an uneven patch of grass on the center lawn on the roundabout. Soon, his back slams up against his Pontiac. His hands are still up in surrender.

“Did you assume you’d have an easier time with me? Because who could be harder on you than the woman who saw it all? Surely not the man who sat by your daughter’s bedside day and night. Who worships the ground beneath her feet. No—you couldn’t comprehend that sort of love, could you?”

I lose myself to the anger, but I’m calmer once I finish. He’s a pathetic worm of a man. How could my sweet, naive girl feel anything other than contempt for him? The thought of her granting him forgiveness infuriates me.

I stand over him as he remains hunkered against the sedan. I can’t tell if I’m just that much taller than the middle-aged man or if he’s shriveled up and bent defensively in front of me.

“I know,” he says, voice trembling. “I know; I don’t deserve to know my daughter. But I want with my whole heart for her to be okay. I want her to see that I’ve changed. Can’t you help me…to give me that chance?”

That image—Katherine hugging her father—is much more likely than my dark visions of her gleefully accepting my macabre Christmas gift. And I hate it. I don’t detest her capacity for warmth or love; who would resent an angel for their wings? But an uncontrollable rage rushes out of me before I can reel it in.

I hadn’t planned on hitting Tucker Starling. I’m divorced from the act of punching him square in the jaw—a direct hit, for all the good his hands shielding himself from me did. He hits the back of his head against the frame of the Sunfire and crumples to the ground. I watch him falter but feel more like a spectator than a participant in the pummeling I give the older man.

He’s conscious and curled up defensively into a fetal position. If he’s making any noise or pleading for me to stop, I don’t hear them. The world’s sounds turn to ringing, and all the colors burn red.

Eventually, I stop hitting him. He does a decent job protecting his head, but he’s whimpering when I come to my senses. My throat feels raw, and my knuckles ache. A quick glance at my right fist shows contusions along the bones that I know will eventually turn to bruises.

Perfect. The first thing that comes to my mind is that I just compromised Katherine’s situation. The second is a damn lawsuit.

“Get up,” I order. My voice is still low, and I don’t trust myself not to shout. When he continues to shake on the ground and refuses to move, I choose to be a little more forceful. “I said get up. ”

Jealousy, I realize. I’m jealous. It seems unbelievable that I’m jealous of the potential love Katherine might shower her father with. I don’t feel that with her mother, just with the man crying and blubbering on my lawn. Perhaps I’m frustrated with the certainty that she’d forgive him and welcome him with open arms.

Meanwhile, she hates me to the very depths of her core.

I kick the man’s side, which seems to spur him to scramble to his feet, bracing himself against the Sunfire.

My voice shakes from my restraint. I try to keep as calm as I can, but it takes every ounce of control not to kill him in my driveway. “You’re going to get in your car. You’re going to drive away—I don’t care where the fuck you go. You can drive to the train tracks and park for all I care. You’re never going to set foot on my property again. Do you understand me?”

When Tucker stares up at me, mouth ajar and fear widening his eyes, I smack the back of his head as if to get his attention. He cries out louder than proportional to how hard I actually strike him—which isn’t hard, considering the beating I just gave him. Blood trickles down the side of his face into his stubble from the split in his brow.

“ Do you understand me ?” I thunder. “Say it.”

“I…I understand,” he stammers.

No doubt, Tucker will call a lawyer the second he gets out onto the road.

I step back enough for him to swing open the door. “ Go ,” I snap when he continues to watch me anxiously.

Tucker can’t open it fast enough. He half throws himself into the driver’s seat, fumbling with the keys as they jangle in his shaking hands.

I watch him peel out of my driveway. His tires kick up a few patches of grass and gravel as he veers partly off the path. Once he pulls onto the road in the distance, he vanishes in a gray cloud.

The slow walk back to the sunroom decompresses me; I don’t want to face Katherine for the first time in nearly a week in a fury. I don’t want her to think I’m capable of truly hurting her, and that idea is enough to cool any remnants of rage that her father ignited in me.

Raney meets me outside of the sunroom. She frowns, studying me and noticing my disheveled state. “Everything okay?”

“Yep,” I say in a clipped voice, walking past her toward the door. “Those Jehovah’s Witnesses are getting more and more aggressive.”

Part of the reason I like Raney so much is that she reads me well enough not to pester me with questions. She lets it go and heads down the hallway to return to her chores.

I step into the sunroom, finding Katherine in one of the lounge chairs, eyes closed. Her chest rises and falls rhythmically, her hair in her face. A charcoal pencil has fallen onto the concrete floor, and a sketch pad rests in her lap. Raney’s choice of clothing is superb; the midnight blue tea dress brings out the warm tones of her apricot skin.

Picking up the book from Katherine’s lap, I place it on the side table after stealing a look at her work. It looks like the beginning of a person, but I can’t be sure who. I wonder to myself if she’s always been an artist; there are so many things about her I don’t know.

I sit at the edge of the chair and carefully lift her shoulders, positioning her head in my lap. She stirs from the movement and sighs. Obviously, she hasn’t been getting enough sleep.

The nightlights Cory bought for her have been helping. Katherine was plagued with night terrors the first few nights after Paul’s impromptu visit to the estate. I could hear her scream, even from the second floor. But when I’d go to her room to wake her, she couldn’t recall her dreams fully, only that she was falling into nothingness, without a touch of light to hold onto.

If only I could kill Tucker Starling, the beast responsible for her fear of the darkness.

I caress the side of Katherine’s face, and the contusions on my knuckles contrast harshly against her smooth, pale face. I sit like that for a while until her breathing evens out again, and she’s returned to a deep sleep.

Fishing my phone from my pocket, I skim through my contacts until I find Dana’s number and hold the phone to my ear.

I’ve kept contact with Dana to a minimum. I like to keep tabs on her to understand the direction of the investigation, but I also don’t want her getting too close. Luckily, she seems to be grieving instead of scheming.

“Hello?” she answers breathlessly.

“Hey,” I begin, speaking softly. “Your ex-husband came to see me.”

“He what?” she gasps. “What did he do? What did he say?”

“Not much,” I sigh. “Just wanted to ask me about Kittie. He went on a long rant about wanting to turn over every stone, to feel like he’s doing something, I suppose.”

“What an ass,” Dana sighs. “I’m sorry, Dorian. I swear I didn’t mean to let slip where you are. It just came up in conversation. I didn’t want him to come by and bother you.”

“I know. I didn’t call you to settle blame. I actually wanted to get a jump start and tell you that I might have lost my temper.”

“You lost your temper? What did he do?”

As I speak, I trace the curves of Katherine’s smooth face. She’s healed completely, and there isn’t a second I’m not grateful that she’s out of the woods now.

My thumb follows the fullness of her lower lip. “Dana, I’m sorry,” I tell her, trying my best to sound guilty, “I beat the shit out of your ex-husband.”

“Oh my god.” Something clatters in the background. “You what?”

“Forgive me,” I continue. “I’m not taking this situation very well. He kept touching a nerve.”

“Trust me, I know how you feel. Tucker showed up here the other day, talking all sorts of nonsense about being a family again when they find—”

Silence. I can tell she’s getting choked up on the other line. I almost feel truly guilty. If only I could tell her she’d made Katherine believe herself a burden and that she’s partly to blame for my actions.

Smoothing Katherine’s hair back, I put considerable effort into my voice to sound as empathetic as possible. “We’ll find her. I promise.”

When I hang up, I shift and tuck my phone back into my pocket. My movements cause Katherine to stir. I enjoy the softness in her face when she sleeps; she’s so innocent. No hatred of me to be found.

Katherine’s eyes flutter open just as I settle.

“Sorry for waking you,” I murmur.

“It’s okay,” she grumbles.

For just a moment, she’s the old Katherine. The edge of a smile on her face stirs an ache in me. I find myself wanting to preserve this moment between us. Eventually, reality will close in on us again. She’ll remember the parameters of her life with me and will go back to her carefully arranged smiles and hateful eyes.

The moment doesn’t last as long as I want it to. Her eyes flash to my hand when I lift it to her face again. She catches sight of my knuckles and frowns, body tensing. I ignore this and run the back of my fingers down her cheek.

“Dorian?” she calls in a near whisper, confusion lacing her pretty face.

I can’t do it anymore, I realize; I simply refuse. Katherine can hate me for the rest of her life, but what good will it do me to deny myself her company? Perhaps my obsession began the second she saved my life or the moment she opened her eyes in the hospital. I can’t be sure, but I’ll drive myself crazy if I try to force any more distance between us.

Trying to stifle this love, this obsession, will be the death of me.