Chapter 22 #2
He was asking me. No more secrets.
“Ivan and I dated before,” I started.
A shadow passed over his face. “Courting?”
I offered a gentle smile. “Yes, courting. I was, I don’t know? Eighteen, nineteen? Maybe twenty the last time we spoke?” I shrugged. “I never … told him how I’d felt before.”
“Did he … hurt you?”
“Some ways, yes.”
His eyes narrowed. “I should have taken his fear to my advantage, then,” he said, gravelly.
“Hurting someone for me isn’t necessary, Hadrian.”
“There is more than one way to injure a man’s soul, dearest. And sometimes, it’s more than what they deserve. It’s what they need.”
Time to show my hand. “You say it like you know from experience.”
He nodded, contemplated for a second. His hand slipped a bit farther up my sleeve until he encircled my forearm. “I … felt it. When you went to the room. I heard it. Everything.”
I stared at a point on his throat. I couldn’t tell if the room had a looser hold on Hadrian, was giving him more liberties, or if whatever was inside it was seeping out. Becoming a bit more unruly.
Like he heard my thoughts, he said, “I think something is changing, Landry. Do you remember how I said the house felt different? When I first came out of the room?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t place it then. Everything was disorienting.
Like wading through silty water. But now I believe it was like this before, in my time.
Harthwait, I mean. It had a feel that made your skin prickle.
Your aunt mentioned it getting worse, and I remember something similar as a child, though it would come and go. ”
A thought came to mind—the feeling I’d had when I’d gone back to the room, the energy around me, like it had built itself up. As if it wasn’t contained and bled out now. The same kind of energy Irene had mentioned, that my aunt mentioned.
“You think the house was being contained? In that room?”
He shook his head before I could go on.
“Fall in Love with You” started to hum from the TV. Hadrian offered his hand, low at his side. “Care to dance with me?”
That hummingbird jerked in my chest at the sudden pivot. “Dance with you?”
“Do I have an echo in here? Maybe if I say yes, it will answer it back to me?” A brief but devastating smile appeared. “We can talk as I lead.”
I dipped my chin. “Yes, but I’ll warn you, I’m not any good.”
“I’m poor enough at it for the both of us,” he teased.
His hand slipped down my arm, then captured my right hand.
I stepped forward at the same time he tugged.
My hip hit the top of his thigh, my other hand landing on his shoulder.
He cinched me at the waist. Two stacks of blank pages, pressed together by a book binder.
Something told me the glue was already setting between us.
And it terrified me.
Because I couldn’t keep this man.
“Poor in love from a father, maybe,” I said. I meant it as a tease, but there was something sad in my words. I tilted my head back and watched his eyes drift over the living room. Soaked up the feel of him being this close. We could give each other that missing piece, though, is what I didn’t say.
“Poor in love does not mean rich in life.”
My throat burned. “You never loved your wife, then?”
“Arranged. Her father was one of the first migrants to strike oil. Maybe I would have grown to love her as a friend, if we’d had enough time.” His sincerity was refreshing.
“No one came into your life after she passed?”
“I traveled too much to settle. I took over everything after my father died. Made a few poor choices, to say the least. Decided to go west for a while. I made a few connections with Cora’s father, which kept the shipping port afloat, and …” He shook his head. “I became jaded. Arrogant.”
I chuckled. “You, arrogant? Never.”
“You tease,” he breathed. He squeezed the low of my back. Then, his expression hardened. “I would search these brothels for the men my father worked with and I would wait to see what they would do. I would see if they—took part in acts with children. And women without the woman’s consent.”
“What?” My feet tangled with his.
He met my gaze. “My father was a monster, Landry. The only way monsters stop eating is if they die.”
The dots connected, one by one; my hand gripped his shoulder so hard, there would likely be crescent marks beneath the fabric of his shirt. Children. A port. Multiple, not just him. Could it have been a trafficking situation?
“Did they—did you—” I couldn’t ask. The words died on my tongue, hugged by the taste of vomit.
“Kill them? Yes.”
My cheek fell against his chest. The wild beat of his heart in my ear matched my own. I thought I was going to be sick.
Hadrian’s father—I couldn’t ask, but I couldn’t not. I needed the full picture, and the thought of not knowing what happened to him as a child would eat me alive.
“Did he ever do things to you?” I whispered against his shirt. He was so warm, so alive.
We swayed in a slowly unraveling silence. I let him marinate in his thoughts, while I sorted through my own. While trying to navigate the dread in my gut.
And Hadrian had been in that room for over one hundred years? Knowing everything his father had done? Reliving past memories, and who knows what other kinds of figments, as they’d appeared?
“He attempted. Once,” he said after a while.
“I was perhaps seven, maybe eight. Bunny walked in on accident.” He paused.
“I remember little of what he said after. If he defended himself to her. He’d been in a foul mood the majority of the month, and this was the …
pinnacle.” He took a calming breath; it rushed through my ear, vibrated against my jaw.
“I just remember this baby rabbit I found outside while she was drying clothes that week. I’d begged her to let me stay outside and watch it.
Out of pity, I suppose, she allowed me to feed it, morning and night for the following month with excess goat’s milk.
Really, I wanted an excuse to keep out of the house. And he never attempted again.”
I couldn’t help but imagine it. That moment. That feeling, that visceral wrongness of knowing that something was happening that wasn’t supposed to and there was nothing he could have done about it. That innocence, teetering into oblivion with gnashing teeth snapping below.
I gripped Hadrian tighter. As if I could shield him from the world.
“I’m so sorry,” I choked. I could see it clearly—the hatred he’d had for Bertie, the butler. The insinuations that Bertie had known, had aided. And then Hadrian, an adult, ending the line.
Then Bunny, trapping him within the house.
A coil of hatred emerged. How could she have subjected him to the house if she’d known what it would show him?
“You relived it because of the curse keeping you in that room,” I murmured. “How could she do that to you? After helping you?” Tears threatened my vision.
“You do not understand, dearest. I think that is the issue we have at hand.”
I dug my fingers into his hand, his shoulder. “Don’t I?” I asked vehemently. “That’s—disgusting to subject you to those—memories a-and—”
“Landry,” he said, firm. “She likely did not know how the house, the curse, would treat me. I was in a different place when it happened.”
“But that’s torture.”
“You do not realize what I turned into as an adult.” He swallowed. “I remember when I came back from Fort McKavett. Hot, muggy month. Late August. God, I was …” He shook his head. I lost myself in the sway, the smell of him, how we bent together in all the right ways.
“I was inconsolable. I was—ruined. Imagine, I killed my father. Lost my wife. I traveled west for years, leaving my affairs in such disarray. I wanted it to fail. I wanted everyone to suffer like I had. And finally, a man I was chasing took me toward Stetson. I decided to stop for the night. And there I was, consumed with hatred for … everything. I was still wildly upset with my father, with myself for putting up with him for so many years, and I was angry that no one did anything to help me but Bunny. A part of me snapped. I ruined the front parlor. The office. Planned to burn the place to the ground and kill myself.”
I pictured it, his voice rumbling in my ear, and stepped on his foot on accident. Kill myself. Those two words.
His mouth settled against my hair, right at my temple.
“Oh, yes. Our stableman, Revley, heard Bunny screaming at me, and tried to stop me. I knocked his ears clean back. Bunny caught my attention long enough to keep me from—but I,”—he shrugged, lost—“I came to pieces. I was mad at what my father had built. I was mad at myself. I hated everyone and everything, and if I’m being honest with myself, I am not so sure I wouldn’t have taken Revley and Bunny’s life had she not done what she did. I wanted everything to end that badly.”
My lip quivered. “Hadrian, I—”
“Do not pity who I was. I was wrong. I know this. Pitying only romanticizes the things I did, and I deserved every last bit of what I got in that room. I was running, and running only ever makes for a coward.”
I slid both hands away until I encircled his waist and hugged him to me. And here I was, ungrateful for the circumstances I had been dealt, with the parents I had been given?
“All I remember is Bunny stopping me. I don’t remember how or with what, because the screaming—she loved me.
She was my mother from the time I was born, nursemaid or not, biological or not.
From my infant years until I was thirty-five.
No matter what version of myself I was, I was hers, and she was protecting me.
Do not hate her for what she did.” His thumb found my cheek.
Brushed away a lone tear that raced down to my chin.
Maybe he was right. If Bunny hadn’t stopped him, how would things have ended? What lengths would he have gone to end it all?
Suddenly I saw Aunt Cadence, turning me away as a child. Telling me that Mommy’s home was better. The thought made me shiver. She knew something was wrong here and chose to push me away. Was it the same? To choose the lesser of two evils?
“All of that to say, as a child, I remember Bunny being vehement about the house. Keeping things clean. She never liked the things my father brought into the house. Granted, I was too young to know what she might mean.” He stepped closer, his presence nearly enveloping me.
“She briefly had help from a friend of mine’s mother.
I remember something similar to what your aunt mentioned—a cleansing, that is, but Mrs. Haste passed not long after.
” The corners of his eyes crinkled as he gave me a pointed look.
“Bunny could have messed something up. The curse, when she went to stop me. The feeling that had been in the house, that she’d tried to get rid of, and then keep me from doing what I intended—it could have culminated. ”
“So it could be anything keeping you here. Something with an emotional tie … or remains.” The last two words felt like a pebble tossed in a rushing river. I didn’t like the idea of finding his grave.
“If they followed tradition, the grave is not on the property. I would have been buried near the river with the rest of the family plots. No bodily remains on house grounds.”
A tension knot uncurled in my gut. That was good. Good, because I wouldn’t be searching for a grave, but also good because that left us at another dead end.
A pause.
Then, “Do you hate me? For the decisions I made?” he asked.
I shook my head. His shirt was plush against my cheek. “No. I don’t hate you for what you did.”
“Nor I, you,” he whispered, and this time, those three words were intoxicatingly gentle, not laced with malice.
We swayed for a while. The playlist shifted to something a little more passionate. My feet and hips found rhythm with his; I matched his step, anticipated the weight shift of his body.
“I haven’t heard you talking in the middle of the night,” he said.
I managed a smile.
“I’ve missed your voice.”
“My endless ramblings?”
“Just you talking. I like it.”
“Really?”
“Your words give me traces of color, Landry. It makes me feel like I might live again, listening to your stories. So yes, I really do miss you talking.”
And for a split second, I thought maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t in a rush to figure this out because he wanted to stay a while longer, too.