Chapter One #2
Tears burn down cheeks already tender to soak into silk.
My arms tighten like that might stop the endless supply I seem to have, but they continue to spill.
Growing increasingly heavier. Mirroring the crushing weight in my chest. The bottle in my throat.
I wheeze with my first sob. My fingers fist. Nails cut.
But it does nothing as I collapse all over again under my grief.
My sorrow.
It blooms between my ears, a storm of blood roaring louder than my wails. It captures me around my throat and I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I wheeze as I sink stiff fingers through my hair, claw at my scalp. Fist my curls. Around me, walls hum and pulse with my every jagged pant.
They’re too close.
I can’t breathe!
I’m on the floor, but I have no memory of crawling from the bed. The wood is ice scraping my knees.
I need to get out.
I need to find the door.
I need Uncle Marcus. I need his arms and his strength. I need him to hold me and tell me I’ll be all right. I need him to fix all the broken pieces inside me that keep bleeding.
They don’t stop and I want to die.
But the room is spinning. Shadows are scuttling across the floor. Surrounding me. Tugging at my slip. Scratching my skin. Each wisp is serrated with thin blades that draw blood as I’m turned onto my back.
The ceiling writhes with living tendrils. A pit of snakes.
“No…”
I try to flip over. To get on my belly and crawl. If I get in the corridor…
“Don’t fight, little one.”
Dots explode in black patches across my wavering vision. I’m too weak to resist when my arms are pulled over my head by barbed shadows. The edges sink into flesh, burrowing deeper the more I resist.
“Stop…” I think I choke out.
“I can ease this suffering.”
The voice is in my head. Tangling with mine. Distorting my resistance. Stroking the raw nerve of every pleasure point so that even the pain has me arching.
“Don’t want this,” I tell myself even as the room starts flicking in and out of focus. “Please…”
The air is so thick. So hot. My skin feels flushed. Tender. I think I’m going to be sick, but if I throw up, I’ll choke.
It speaks again with a low rasp that prickles beneath my skin.
“What do you want, Lenora?”
The answer is simple. It’s on the tip of my tongue, teetering precariously. So delicate and dangerous.
There is only one thing I want.
“Tell me,” it purrs as if already in my head and only waiting for me to unleash it into the world.
But I’m not crazy.
I don’t speak to things that aren’t there. I don’t let myself indulge in insane behavior.
And deep down, I know what becomes of those who dabble in such things. I know the price. What I want, I can get myself without the aid of … whatever this thing is.
I shut my eyes instead. If this is a dream, it will be gone when I open them again. If it is a demon, I will not submit.
Something feather-light sweeps my face. Almost a breath, a faint chuckle. Like I have amused it by my defiance.
“Perhaps you wish to remain in your agony. I will wait.”
My eyelids sweep open, mind braced to confront some horrific sight, but finding only the ceiling overhead.
White with only the usual cluster of shadows in the corners.
The room itself sits in its usual chill.
The familiar whisper of naked branches outside my terrace window.
The familiar echo of my own labored breaths as I wait for the chaos raging inside me to calm.
This is new.
Before tonight, it had stayed behind the mirror. It had stayed at the edges of my periphery.
It’s grief. I know it is. That thing hadn’t existed before a week ago. It only crawled free of whatever unholy thing contained it after that evening.
“We won’t be long.”
Eliah captured my face between his long fingers. Yellow and red smudges stained his skin with the faint scent of turpentine. I found myself turning into his palm, inhaling him.
“The sooner you stop distracting us, the sooner we’ll return,” Ames teased, lips nuzzling the curve of my neck from behind.
His arms were too tight around my middle. His hold, too unyielding as I stood between them in the dimly lit foyer. Soft dusk shone across the gleaming marble, illuminating the liquid silver pools peering down at me.
“Be careful,” I whispered. “The roads...”
Eliah kissed me, so slow and sweet I forgot my words.
“You worry too much,” he teased once he’d properly disorientated my thoughts.
I did worry too much. I always sensed that gnawing anxiety deep in the pit of my stomach when they left home.
“Nerves,” Mrs. Pym always said. “It’s natural.”
But nothing about that unease felt natural.
Still, I stood on the front steps of Usher House and watched them slip into their car. Ames behind the wheel. Eliah smiling and waving from the seat next to him.
I took myself to the greenhouse while I waited.
The scent of soil and damp heat welcomed me into their folds like an old friend, and I stood on the cobblestone path winding through my little sanctuary, watching the glass film with condensation and darkness.
I stood there too long before pushing myself to gather up my gloves and trowel from the preparation table and setting to work.
Gardening had always been a consistent friend.
A mindless endeavor that required no real thought.
Flowers didn’t care that I was an orphan.
They didn’t demand I be a certain way in order to uphold the Usher legacy.
Here, in my little box of Eden, I was allowed to simply exist. Life had no further meaning beyond the feel and crumble of dirt beneath my fingers.
“You should wear shoes.”
The low murmur of a man’s gruff rumble had me dropping my spade and spinning to face the figure on the path behind me. My heart fluttered in my throat as I brought the shadow into focus.
“Uncle Marcus.”
As rugged and handsome as his sons, Uncle Marcus held all the beauty I hoped to expect in the future from my two.
Ames had his solemn intensity, that simmering scrutiny that could make a grown man shift with discomfort.
While Eliah had his calm. The gentle way he handled every situation.
He was easy to make smile and when he laughed, it was with the full weight of his chest.
But he was a man.
My boys were men. Each respectfully twenty-seven.
But Uncle Marcus has his silver strands at the temples, faint lines and that aura that a man who has done and seen all there is to see wields with such little effort.
And, if I were allowed to be honest with my feelings, at least to myself, I selfishly desired far more than I should.
“You could step on something.”
Stupidly, I dropped my gaze to my naked toes. Filthy beneath the hem of my dark skirt.
“I like the feel of earth beneath my feet,” I said, and earned the ghost of a smile quirking his lips.
He drew closer and the air in the cramped space thickened as it always seemed to do when he was near. My heart puttered a little too fast beneath my ribs, a frantic dance I tried to bottle down.
Inappropriate, was what Mrs. Pym would call it.
Step or not, Uncle Marcus was my Godfather and entrusted with my wellbeing after my parents’ death.
There was also the matter of his sons. I had already capped my quota for taboo the moment I let them both into my bed. It didn’t help that both Eliah and Ames had decided just two weeks before to let their father have me — if I wanted.
If I allowed it.
In their mind, the older man was exactly what we needed to solve the situation we’d been facing the last several years. That situation being my stubborn innocence. Uncle Marcus was a man who had been with women and would have a clear understanding of how to … deflower me.
I was giving it serious thought since Ames suggested it. I gave it too much thought, especially in the most inopportune moments. My head immediately filled with images of him above me, large, capable hands guiding his sons. His deep voice gentle the way it got when he was talking to me.
The very idea had me flustered and tongue tied around the older man. My face warmed and places I’d only ever let them touch grew damp.
Ames found it amusing. Teased me relentlessly … while holding me pinned to the mattress, fingers between my thighs. His breath, hot in my ear, asking if I would let his father do this. And not stopping until I’ve confessed.
Eliah would merely grin like it was endearing and tell me, “What’s the harm?”
A ridiculous thing to ask.
All of it felt right and it shouldn’t. Being with them felt right, but their father? Three men? How selfish and gluttonous could I allow myself to become?
“Can I help?”
I blinked out of my thoughts and focused on the man turning my thoughts to pudding.
“You’ll get filthy,” I blurted, eyeing his crisp, white button down and dark trousers.
Broad shoulders lifted beneath that soft fabric, and I found myself mesmerized by the power of them.
“It’s only clothes.”
As if to prove it, he unbuttoned the right cuff. Veins and tendons flexed and rippled with the slow flick and roll of the sleeve. The other side followed, unveiling the winding display of art that always had me curious.
Just how far did it go? Did it cover his entire torso? Lower?
I quickly looked away and felt the knot in my throat give audibly with my heavy swallow. I prayed he hadn’t heard, but I also wasn’t brave enough to look. Instead, I returned to my work, muscles braced for the exact moment he slipped up next to me.
“What are we doing?”
I stared at the spade in my hand, then the row of tomatoes I’d been doing something with.
But my brain was clouded with the heady scent of his soap and something dark and primal that clung to his skin.
It prickled mine with tiny goosebumps that tingled around my hardened nipples.
They grazed against the lace of my bra, sending electric sparks all the way down…
“Just…” I pause to clear my throat. “Checking for dead leaves.”