Chapter Two
Lenora
The burn blows across my right cheek. My fingers curl into rumpled sheets. Sheets tossed back like he’d been beneath them before my spiraling madness.
Another crack collides with my left cheek. My body instinctively tightens and shifts. A familiar ache blazes through my core that I know isn’t normal.
I sob with the third. By the fifth, I’m weeping into the sheets, body shifting with a restless need I recognize but know is wrong in this context.
Behind me, Uncle Marcus’s every heavy pant echoes over my sniffling.
It reflects in his eyes, in the hard slant of his jaw when he turns me over and I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror fixed to the ceiling.
Thick slabs that extend the length of the room, down the walls.
The entire room is a giant hall of mirrors all capturing my humiliation from every angle.
But I can only focus on the looming figure practically vibrating over me, silver eyes nearly opaque with barely restrained rage.
And something else.
“If you ever do something so fucking stupid again…” he snarls in rapid French, beautifully carved chest rising and falling. “You’ll get a lot more than a spanking.”
Defiant, upset that he would spank me like a child, stunned that I enjoyed it, I make to scramble back. To put space between me and the man staring down at me with a warning that only increases the hum between my ears. The suffocating knot choking my airway.
“You don’t understand,” I scream at him. “You don’t know what it’s like—”
“To lose the people I love?” he throws back in my face, equally loud, equally drenched in pain. “I have lost everybody, petite idiote. I lost them. You are all I have left, Lenora.”
He’s right, of course.
In the haze of my own suffering, I hadn’t considered anything else.
Him.
How this would affect him. How he would feel waking up in the morning with me a broken shell across the pavement.
The pain I would have caused him, the grief of having yet another funeral the day after he buried his sons…
I burst into tears. Jagged, heaving sobs that my body refuses to even contain as I struggle to breathe in between.
Gentle hands grab me, possibly to comfort me, but all I taste is self-loathing and the brewing hatred rising up into my throat.
“Don’t touch me!” I wail, swinging blindly. “I don’t deserve—”
He’s stronger, or maybe I’m a liar, but he drags me into his lap. My legs are twisted around his hips and we’re sitting with an intimacy we shouldn’t be in the center of his bed.
But I don’t care. Nothing matters but the fact that he makes the world stop spinning. The moment his arms crush me to him, I can breathe. I’m no longer drifting but crawling to solid ground.
And I hold him tighter. I strangle him with my arms and weep into the curve of his neck.
“I’m here, mon p’tit.” His fingers work through the knots in my hair with gentle, soothing strokes. “I won’t ever leave you.”
It’s a lie.
A well intentioned one, but a lie all the same.
Ushers don’t live. Not long. Our time is measured by seconds. Mere fragments. A blink and one of us is gone.
He lost his wife when the boys were ten. I lost my parents at fifteen. All the people in between — and there have been so many — dropped away one by one until the only Ushers remaining are me and Uncle Marcus.
And I will lose him.
I know it with the same certainty as I know the sun will rise in a few hours.
Over his shoulder, somewhere in the room of mirrors, I hear the faint click. The subtle tap of steel on glass. The scrape of razorblades. The raw, bloody skin around my wrists pangs.
I shut my eyes and I tighten my hold.
“Promise me you will never do anything that stupid again,” he’s saying when I focus.
“I have already buried my wife. My sons. My brother. Too many friends and loved ones. I have attended more funerals than any man should. But,” he turns his face into the side of mine, “if I lost you, Lenora, if I had to bury you…”
His fingers fist my hair. Tight. So tight, strands pull from their roots. Incite fresh tears.
His free arm snakes around my middle and I’m curved in, closing the remaining space between us. I catch myself on the warm skin along his shoulders and ignore the rise of warmth that always blooms when he’s close.
“They would have to bury me, too. There would no longer be a reason to go on.” His hold loosens and he lifts his face just enough to graze our noses together. “You are all I have in the world, mon petit. I refuse to live without you.”
I shouldn’t.
Reason and manners I usually hold so dear abandon me and I find my palm settling lovingly against the curve of his evening kissed cheek. The stubble prickles skin, but I am too captured by his misery to properly enjoy it.
“Please forgive me,” I whisper through an endless stream of tears I can’t stop. “I only wanted…”
“I know what you wanted, Linny. But they wouldn’t want you to join them like this. They would be devastated.” His hand, big and warm, so capable of pain and kindness frames my cheeks. His thumbs brush lovingly at my tears. “Swear to me you will never—”
“I don’t know how to live without them.” The words escape in a rush of anguish carved from the very pit of my grief. “All my life, I’ve had them. Every second of every day and now…”
The hold around my middle tightens. His exhale ghosts across my wet cheeks. My lips.
“Je sais, mon petit.” He sighs again and repeats quieter, “I know. If I could take their place—”
My palm slaps over his mouth. A clammy barricade refusing to acknowledge his dangerous confession.
“Don’t,” I plead, voice a broken rasp. “I don’t want that either. I can’t lose you, too.”
Because I love him.
I love him with the same reckless obsession I have for the boys. Not the love a niece should have for her godfather, but the kind that no one would understand. The kind shunned in the Bible.
Even if I knew my boys were waiting for my lead where their father was concerned, waiting for me to make the first move, it felt like too much for a single person.
Not that it matters anymore.
The gentle brush of his mouth against my palm sends a flurry of heat up my arm. It settles over the echoing chill numbing my insides, but it’s not enough.
“You need sleep.” My wrist is captured and drawn down. “Your room is a disaster, and I don’t trust you alone. You take the bed and I’ll take the floor.”
Already there are cracks in the warmth between us. Icy razorblades slice every inch of exposed skin as he begins to withdraw. His arms grow slack. And panic sets in.
“Wait.” Nails cut into taut muscle as I hold him to me. “Please. Don’t let me go.”
Pain coils through the pale surface of his eyes and hardens his jaw. Tightens his arms. I’m back against him with a renewed, crushing force.
“Mon c?ur—”
“I know.” My arms lace back around his shoulders. My face finds home in his neck. “I just … stay with me, please?”
He will not refuse me.
It’s a certainty I know to my core. Uncle Marcus would give me the sky if I asked for it.
It’s this knowledge that fists my insides and twists. It’s the understanding that he would move heaven and earth to make me happy, but I can’t return to that room. Not with their scent still fresh on my pillows and that thing lurking in the corners.
“What do you want, Lenora?”
Pain. The single word leaps to the forefront of my mind.
Sorrow.
I want those responsible to watch as everything they love shrivels up and dies before their eyes. I want them to feel what they’ve done with a brutal vengeance that would tear a hole through the very fabric of time.
I want blood and death. I want to hear them gasp for their last breath and watch the life leave their eyes.
A fair trade, I think. They destroyed my world. It’s only fitting that I burn theirs.
My gaze shifts to the mirrors, to the thing I feel watching me, waiting for that last slip of my sanity. Waiting to take what’s left of my soul.
“Uncle Marcus?”
“Oui, mon c?ur?”
The me in the mirror watches. Sits too still with her legs too tight around the man holding her. A man who could solve all her problems.
If I kill the shadowy remains of the Lenora begging to let it go. The weak, useless thing that let her boys die. She knew something was wrong. She felt that voice telling her to keep them home, but she let them get into that car.
She killed them.
She doesn’t deserve to run the shots anymore. She has proven to be a liability. Even the very idea that we should let those responsible live their lives while my boys are eaten by worms…
I will not fall prey to that stupidity again. Women who bow to discomfort lose everything, and since I have nothing left … I will stop at nothing to avenge my loss.
A dangerous and manipulative game. A con I ignored in my lessons.
Believed them distasteful and grim. My boys didn’t play in Marcus’s world.
I would never need to become this version.
I foolishly accepted I would forever be ignorant and happy.
Live my life with the men I loved. Start a family. Raise them in Usher House.
But I was na?ve.
Even when I was told our existence would never be so simple, I believed I would be the exception because we didn’t do anything. We didn’t hurt anyone. We kept to ourselves and lived in peace.
I shut my eyes and cage Lenora Usher behind impenetrable bars. Isolate her from ever being so stupid again. I have yet to fully forge the new version of me, but I have the groundwork.
I have the motivation.
The hatred.
The rage.
I have the money and resources.
I have the time, energy and…
I have the man holding me and the power of the Usher name.
My eyes open and lock with the new Lenora Usher in the mirror. I stare into the icy, bottomless soul reflected back from the dozens of gleaming mirrors lining the walls.
“Can I stay with you tonight?”