Chapter Fifteen
Marcus
Ishouldn’t have let her go alone.
This isn’t the Lenora I knew a month ago. Two weeks ago. This person she’s become is a version I don’t know how to reason with.
From the moment I decided to stay, she had been my greatest cheerleader. Supportive and encouraging. She urged Ames to give me a chance. She welcomed me back so Eliah welcomed me. Never, not once did she throw in my face that I wasn’t fit to be a father.
Now when she needs me, when she’s spiraling and needs an anchor, I’m failing her.
“You should have gone.”
The faint clink of metal clipping together fills the empty space of my room. They hook deep in the recess of my mind and drag the reality to the forefront.
My boys are dead because of me.
I sent them out.
I told them it would be an easy job.
It was supposed to be me.
“You know why you sent them.”
No. It’s wrong. That isn’t why.
I pace my room. Follow the square of carpet in an infinite loop around the bed much too empty without Lenora. I tried. I crawled in and lay watching my reflection judge me from above.
She shouldn’t be alone.
There are hundreds of things that could go wrong if I’m not there to protect her. I should be there. Even if I have to sit outside her door until morning. Be close enough.
The crimson haze drifts when I stalk back. It creeps along the edges of the mirrors, the sharp bends in the room corners. Always just out of sight when I turn. But never quite fast enough.
I don’t know where it came from. The voices. The noises. They hadn’t been there before but they’re here now. Cutting. Biting. Unspooling my thoughts. Putting words where there hadn’t been before. They keep whispering.
“You let them die.”
Metal bits rattle as softly as a breeze through wind chimes. Distant, but right in my ear.
“How do you live with yourself?”
Because I didn’t.
I wouldn’t.
I loved my boys.
“Liar.”
I need to check on Lenora. It’s been too long. What if she hurt herself? What if she needs me?
The red haze drifts away when I turn. The metal pieces clink.
I ignore both as I hurry to the door in only my slacks. The chill of the manor scuttling across my naked torso means nothing as I hurry to find the woman holding my sanity.
My feet clap on cold stone. Darkness crawls through the corridors, oppressive without a light, but this has been my home since birth. I know every inch of it.
Except that room.
The chamber with the cobwebs and musty hint of dried blood. Everything about it was wrong.
Too dark.
Too cold.
Its very existence held an energy that shouldn’t exist.
But it was Lenora at the top of that incline, balanced dangerously on a jagged structure of stones, inches from a black void. One slip and she could have died. Either fallen to her death or been attacked by whatever creature lives in that hole.
“Did you see the mirror?” Lenora’s question rings in my ear. “Did you see the shadows?”
I’m not a doctor. I don’t understand the stages of grief or the necessary process to overcome them. My solution had been to run. To throw myself into work and ignore everything else.
But Lenora deserves better. She deserves to be properly loved and cared for. She needs every bit of help I can get her and I will. Whatever she needs.
Only, I do see them. Now.
I see the shadows. The hazy mist from my periphery. Maybe it’s a side effect of her delusions. Maybe it’s my brain’s way of trying to repair…
Her scream rips through the house. A serrated blade cutting through silence and my sanity, high and broken. A howl of something that sends a shiver down my spine, hooks into my gut and yanks.
I’m already moving. Feet pounding across creaking boards before I can pause to think. My heart pounds with all the possibilities, all the chaos and horror I’m about to stumble onto but determined to reach her at all cost.
Her door seemingly materializes in the shadowy distance, a slab of wood breathing in the darkness. Years of training urge me to knock, but all that is overruled with the long, thin whine of pain.
I throw open the door.
The hallway light spills in behind me, a filmy, yellow stain cutting a narrow rectangle across the bed.
Everything else crawls with oppressive nothingness.
An opaque and endless black that feels unnatural in every sense.
It presses against the walls, swallows the corners.
It’s a virus that clings to everything, except the bed.
It’s like a stage, visible for my viewing.
She’s on her back. A beautiful, pale silhouette bathed in the light I give her.
Body arched, long, slender legs splayed wide, arms held above her head.
Heels dig into the mattress, lifting her up, bowing her to the invisible force moving against her with deep, greedy plunges.
Her skin glistens with perspiration and desperation as she chases her pleasure against the thing slamming the frame against the wall.
Her big, glossy eyes turn in my direction and bloom wider at the sight of me. Her features tighten with her approaching climax, a frantic hitch in her gasp I recognize.
“Don’t … don’t look … Marcus, please…”
The words fracture around a gasp, a choked wheeze that sends her head back.
Her spine arches off the mattress, nipples sharp points extending high as her thighs tremble. She seizes around the thing inside her … whatever it is and shudders with waves upon waves of ecstasy.
I can’t move. My feet are rooted to the floorboards. Heat floods my face, my chest … lower. Traitorously lower. The dick in my trousers tightens even while a part of me screams of the wrongness.
But she’s so beautiful. So perfect like this. The very lines of her are made for this pain, this brutality of pleasure so intense, her body gushes.
And her assailant never stops. Never slows. It takes her with the same hungry plunges that make her scream and pulse. Tears cut down her temples as the pressure overwhelms her and she can’t breathe.
A low, guttural roar fills the room. It vibrates in my bones, possessive and triumphant. The temperature plummets and I choke on the taste of iron and ozone. Wood splinters as the frame finally reaches its limit.
“Mine!” The voice is thunder wrapped in velvet and screamed directly inside my skull and around the room. “She. Is. Mine!”
It jolts me, bringing me crashing back to reality and the actions I should be taking.
“Lenora!”
My growl is swallowed by her howl, by the seizure of her limbs, stiffening, back hooking off the soaked sheets as the creature sends her over again and she begs it not to stop.
I take a step forward to stop this, to save her …
to see her up close. My head is a vortex of desire and protective instinct willing me to snatch her away, while desperate to see the wet state of her core.
The mess she’s creating between her thighs.
The entire scene is obscene and unholy, and I am powerless to stop the need to wait my turn and feel the heat of her sex clasp me.
But it’s all I am allowed when the serrated winds of the arctic backhand me from the room. The door is slammed shut and I plummet.
I pitch backwards.
Something cold and solid slams into my spine. The wall, I vaguely think, but it gives as if I’ve torn through it and I tumble.
No floors.
No walls.
Just a weightless fall into an abyss that smells of wet stone and old blood. Shadows wrap around my arms, my throat, my legs, pulling and dragging me deeper.
I try to scream, but the darkness swallows the sound before it leaves my mouth. Somewhere above, in the room I can no longer reach, I hear her cum again. A damning sound that echoes down with me until it’s all I can hear. A mocking song meant to torment me to my death.
Then … silence.
Only the dark and the knowledge that whatever has her … will not let me near her.