Chapter 46 #3
Her voice is different now. Lower. And she’s using my name. My real name.
That should alarm me. It does alarm me, somewhere very far away, in a part of my brain that’s still trying to function. But the alarm is behind glass and I can see it blinking red, but I can’t hear it.
But that’s all wrong.
“Duchy.” Her name takes more effort than it should. “What’s happening to me.”
It isn’t a question. It comes out flat, almost observational, the way people talk about whether it’s low tide or high.
I look at Duchy and her face is… wrong. It shifts, her chin sharper and her cheekbones higher, the pretty features rearranging themselves into something that’s an ugly caricature of her. Her head is bigger and rounder, her mouth moves, but they don’t match the shape of what I’m hearing.
But then I blink, and she’s Duchy again. Mostly. A Duchess, instead, maybe.
“I don’t think… I don’t think I’m right.” I poke my temple. “Up here. I’ve felt like this once before. I was a child and he was an adult.” I shake my head. “I did not like it.”
Duchess sucks in a breath that might be a sob. But why on earth would she be crying?
Her features thicken, broaden, and her brow grows heavy and her jaw swells to an alarming degree. Her expression is suddenly regal, in a pompous sort of way, growing larger than life until she pops back into Duchess again.
I shake my head violently. What is going on?
“Everything is too much of muchness, Duchess.” I turn to her and feel my eyes water.
“Have you ever felt like that? Like you were too much of muchness and too little of lessness?” I sigh and feel the tear fall down my numb cheek.
“I’ve always wished they could find me when I was invisible.
” I nod. “I did always want to be found. Ya know?”
“Oh, Lucy, I’m so sorry,” she sighs, and the weight of my name, my real name, feels like a hammer to my chest, a reverberating bell. “I am so fucking sorry.”
I taste her apology on my tongue. It tastes sweet and sour and like the—
The tart!
The thought slaps into my head like a day-late headline, a confirmation of something I already knew and dreaded all the same.
The sweetness. The extra sweetness that I noticed on the first bite and asked about and she deflected and I let it go because it was Duchess, because she was my friend, because there’s no way I can’t trust my friend and I was so tired and so hungry and so desperate to have one good thing.
One good goodbye before I’m gone forever.
“The tart.” Even as the truth forms I know it came too late. “What is in it?”
I’ve known for at least three bites, some quiet part of me that noticed and filed it under trauma and exhaustion. Haven’t I done that before? Hasn’t everyone though?
“I had to do it, Lucy. They have Xavier. If I didn’t lace the filling with Pining—”
“Pining?” I ask, and the blood in my face chills.
“I know. I know, I’m sorry. But he’s my everything. Please understand. He’s my person I—” She presses her fingers to her mouth. “I had to. When Castle asked who you were, I didn’t tell him at first. I swear I didn’t. But Hatter must’ve said something about a woman whose name is on your boat—”
“Fancy?” I offer, but she frowns.
“What?” She shakes her head and waves it. “Then Frog knew who you were and told Grady, so he came down from Transylvania—”
“Who’s Grady?” I suck in a breath. “Is he vampire?”
“Oh my God, this is hopeless,” she growls and takes my head in her hands. “I’m trying to apologize. Focus Lucy. You won’t survive this if you don’t fucking focus.”
My heart runs away, but I go still as a stone.
“Good. Now listen to me, Lucy.” She huffs and continues talking, “Castle has revenge plans against every single last person that could possibly have anything to do with his daughter. My family? They know people in charge. They know who’s rotten and can be cut out and who should be left alone to fester everything they touch.
Castle needs that information. He thought I could be his in but found out my family just likes to fuck with me. He didn’t have leverage until you.”
“Me?”
She nods. “Whatever Hatter saw—”
“Hatton?”
She seems to vibrate to a stop. “What did you say?”
“Hatton not Hatter. He’s Hatter. Not… Not Hatton.”
“Hatton… Fury?”
I nod, and the boat moves up and down, but it’s okay because I’m holding onto it.
“Hatter’s my husband.”
All the color leeches from her face. “Hatter is Hatton Fury? Are you sure?”
I snort. “You think I don’t know my own husband! Not that he’ll ever be my husband or anything. Silly drama king. Drama King to the Queen of Hearts”
“Lucy, does his family know he’s here? Does he have backup?”
“Duchy!” I shush her. “You’re being too loud. Castle will hear you.”
“Oh my God. I’m gonna die. Xavier’s gonna die. We’re all gonna die.”
I try to reach for her hand. I think my arm moves. I’m not sure it arrives.
“It’s okay Duchess. It’s not so bad to be muchness.”
“Even when I run.” She’s crying now, probably exhausted by how futile it is to try to flee. “They always find me. And now they have me and Xavier both, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I dragged you into this.”
Her tears tug my chest, but her face keeps flickering from Duchy to the Duchess to Duchy again, the two of them overlapping like cards flipped too fast between fingers.
My mouth tries to form her name. Duchy. It doesn’t quite make it.
Chessy yowls, the sound coming from very far away. It’s sharp and urgent, and jolts through me.
“Chessy?”
“Chessy?” Duchess insists, and her hands are on my shoulders now, holding me upright or holding me down, I can’t tell which. “Who’s Chessy?”
“The Cheshire Cat,” I shout, feeling a little hysterical. “He’s my cat!”
“I didn’t see a cat another cat besides the one Hatter took—”
“I don’t want my cat to get hurt again,” I interrupt, voice teary.
“Shh. You’ll be fine. He’s still on the dock, okay We’re just gonna take a little trip, alright?”
The walls are starting to curve inward like I’m sitting inside a teacup, and everything is too bright and too loud, and the colors leak like watercolor beyond their edges.
The red of the bakery box bleeds into the blue of the quilt, and the dim light in the galley pools over the bed like spilled honey.
I groan as we move, rocked by the waves.
“I’m sorry, Lucy. Truly so fucking sorry. I hope… I hope one day you understand.”
Suddenly something enormous blocks the light, and my front door fills with a man larger than the boat itself. I yelp.
“Stay back, Duchess!” I try to shield her, but I’m not… moving. Why am I not moving?
He steps inside and the light from the galley shines on his face, creating shadows under his eyes like a skull face. His hair is so blond it blends in with his pale skin, and his mouth widens like a toothy reptile.
“J-Jabber?”
Where’s Hatter?
All light behind him is gone as he takes up the entire doorway like an eclipse, and behind him the dock is dark and the night air pushes into the cabin, cold and wrong.
No, the dock isn’t dark. It’s gone.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask through numb lips. I try to stand and my legs aren’t there. Duchess’s hands press me back down.
I fall against the wall, but it sinks with my weight. I’m too exhausted and confused to move, even when Jabber grabs Duchess by the arm.
“No!” Her voice has gone sharp, high-pitched even through the cotton in my skull. “Stay back. I’m not supposed to—the Wildes said only her—”His mouth moves wide like jaws, and it takes me a second for the words to register.
It lights a fire in my mind.
The Wildes.
The Duchess’s voice, fractured, pitched toward panic. “What are you doing? This wasn’t the deal! I’m not supposed to—”
“Stop fighting cousin. It’s time you come home.”
The voice comes from outside, from the darkness that used to be the dock, and it burns through the cold air with its hot, quiet hatred. A mountain accent, but not deep and slow and gentle like Hatter’s. It’s edged with something that turns my blood to ice.
It’s a song played in the wrong key. But the mountains are there, the same mountains. That’s the last analytical thought I manage before the man steps out of the shadows.
He’s tall. Broad-shouldered. Hair the color of sweet tea.
Heavy black coat that eats the night around him.
The moon through the porthole catches his bright, unnerving eyes and the slash of his handsome mouth and the cruel way it twists along his strong jaw makes the tart in my stomach turn to sludge.
“It’s you.”
The orderly. The one who said he worked at an insane asylum. I remember the way his gaze crawled over me that night, the slow inventory of it, like he was pricing something. Or I was a specimen to be experimented on. I’d told myself I was being paranoid and that he was just another leering patron.
He steps into my cabin from the boat’s deck, and the entire contraption dips to the side—or maybe it’s just me. I blink and he’s suddenly leaning over me, his smile wide and eager and empty behind piercing, ice-blue eyes.
“Hello, Lucy McKennon.” His accent isn’t as thick as Hatton’s, but there’s more twang and something feral in the vowels. “I’m Grady Wilde. Your new owner.”
Behind him, in the dark, someone else laughs.
And then the darkness comes.
The last thing I see is the Sweet Tea Bakery box, open on the bed between where Duchy was sitting and where I’m falling, and Duchy’s face as she sobs in front of the gun at her face.
And then nothing at all.