Chapter Eleven
ELEVEN
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He goes hunting.
Opening his bedroom door and stepping out into the murky north wing hall still grips him with an intoxicating thrill.
No one snaps at him to stop. Shoves him back into his room.
Forces him to lie down on his bed and be quiet, just be quiet.
He is a thing unlocked, unfettered, and he can feel his tattered moth wings tearing free of their pins and leaving only the imprint of himself behind.
Evander wanders down hallways with his breath half-held, reveling in how the early morning sunlight leaves golden thumbprints on the carpet.
Summer is already warm and untasted against the windows, and dust motes swirl when he brushes past heavy drapes.
He has dressed carefully in a button-down and waistcoat, his belt done up tight and hair caught up in an elastic, everything neat to mask the way he is overtired and jumpy, strung out from lack of sleep and the constant churn of anxiety in his stomach.
In his back pocket, he stuffs his notepad for deductions. Time to work.
He peers into parlors and studies and libraries, the books so old that the spines flake off at a touch.
Potted plants are crammed in every corner, monstera and philodendrons and pothos, their tiny roots attached to the wallpaper as they grow toward the ceiling.
They don’t seem to mind the dark corners, the suffocating gloom, which doesn’t seem normal.
When he steps over tiny green shoots that have busted free of their old ceramic pots and rooted into the carpet, he wonders if they’re looking for something.
A way out, maybe. Or a way farther in.
It takes a while to find the correct wing of the house, his explorations taking him through rooms stuffed with extravagant art and grand pianos and luxurious but dusty armoires until he finds it.
Laurie’s room.
His presence is spelled out in the pure chaos littered across the floor: suitcases open and clothes strewn everywhere, shoes piled by the door, dirty plates stacked atop a glossy laptop, the massive four-poster bed a mussy nest of tangled sheets.
The room is triple the size of Evander’s, the wallpaper lined with dark rosebuds instead of fauns, but it still feels like a guest room.
There’s no hint as to who Laurie is, what he likes, what he thinks.
But he’s lived here for the last seven years, the same as Evander.
Sure, he spends most of the year at boarding school, but Evander spends half his time sick in bed and he still manages to make his room feel cozy and lived in and his.
Either Laurie’s hiding part of himself—or he was never allowed to feel at home here. Perhaps not anywhere.
He hesitates, his hand still on the doorknob, wondering if he dares go in and snoop while Laurie isn’t here.
Then he hears something. Soft at first. There’s running water, a sharp intake of breath. Pain bleeds through the sound and Evander is drawn to it in a primal way he doesn’t understand.
A slim door leads to an attached bathroom, left ajar for steam to escape in a mottled haze. Evander creeps toward it, his chest tight enough that his ribs feel ready to buckle. He stays close to the wall as he peers in.
Laurie’s back is to the bathroom door, his shirt discarded and bare spine a curved ridge. He’s bent over the bathroom sink where the faucet streams water so hot that steam has pulled a cotton cloud over him.
His left arm is plunged under the faucet.
And he’s crying.
It’s a rough, uneven sound, his tears cut from wild seas and broken skies, all the usual apathy and sardonic quips stripped. This is a moment so raw and skeletal it feels wrong to see.
Evander doesn’t leave.
He drinks it in. He eats it. He wants to watch.
“—fuck,” Laurie is whispering, agony slitting his voice in half. “I’m so, so sick of this. I’m so—” He cuts off, a spasm shivering all the way down his bare spine.
Then his body tilts and Evander can see more.
The brace has been removed. Laurie’s wrist looks like a bent claw, so twisted in on itself that his fingers touch his forearm.
It shouldn’t be possible for bone and ligament to bend like that, to curl so tight and stiff that agony has written itself into the strained muscles.
As Evander watches, Laurie tries to massage it straight only to choke on a sob.
Evander did this to him.
He’s trembling from holding still, guilt an overturned jar in his chest. He needs to remember more from that day when they were ten. Laurie clearly did something first and Evander fought back. He had to. He was going to die.
Laurie has folded in half, his forehead resting on the sink, and he whispers, “I can’t.” He sounds so much younger.
Evander backs away carefully, picking his way around wicker hampers of dirty laundry and unzipped suitcases.
He returns to the hallway, his hands shaking as he shuts the door without a sound and backs up until he can no longer feel the humid steam beading on his forehead.
He’s breathing too fast. He needs to slow down, slow down.
But he saw Laurie as he was not meant to.
Vulnerable.
If he could dig fingernails into the sides of Laurie’s face and peel back the mask, he would. He would core him like a pear and throw away the soft, rotted skin until he saw him as he really is: horrible and beautiful and real.
Tucked into an alcove beside a pedestal displaying a marble bust, Evander slowly counts to five hundred. Then he retraces his steps and knocks loudly on Laurie’s door.
It takes a moment before it cracks open to reveal a sliver of Laurie’s guarded face, though his expression instantly shifts to something complicated when he sees Evander.
“Didn’t realize you knew where my room was,” he mutters.
Evander yanks his notepad from his back pocket and clicks his pen. “I need to ask you some questions.”
Laurie frowns. “Right now? I said I wasn’t helping you.”
“Actually, you said I could dig up your secrets.” What he’d said was, Take me apart if you want, though it feels too intimate to repeat out loud.
“Did I say at the ass crack of dawn?” Laurie sounds more than a little frosty.
Evander remains expressionless. “You didn’t not say it.”
Laurie rolls his eyes and steps aside, the door opening wider so Evander can slip through and pretend he’s never been in here before.
He tries to keep his face neutral, his mouth a thin, businesslike line, anything to hide his fluttering heartbeat. Show nothing. Feel nothing. It’s better this way, better that Laurie never know Evander has seen him undone.
But Evander isn’t sure what to do about the small thread of sympathy stretching inside his chest. He understands what it is to be in pain and fall apart alone because no one cares.
He snatches glances at Laurie, noting the return of the slim black brace on his wrist. He’s still half-dressed, his pajama pants low on his hips, and he throws himself on his bed and starts scrolling his phone.
The only evidence of his pain is feverishly damp hair from the steam and a glassy brightness to his eyes.
Focus on figuring out the murderer. That’s all Evander should be doing.
He needs to tuck his mess of thoughts about Laurie into a box.
But instead he stares at the bed, knowing he shouldn’t want to lie in the Laurie-shaped space between sheets and quilts.
He shouldn’t want to feel the ridges of Laurie’s spine under his fingertips.
“So what kind of interrogation is this?” Laurie doesn’t look up from his phone. “Also, don’t try questioning Oleander again. She will go ballistic.”
“So she has a lot to hide.” Evander scrawls on his notepad. “Much like you.”
Laurie lowers his phone an inch and watches Evander with a guarded frown. “This feels like anything I say will be held against me.”
Evander shoots him a disapproving look. “I’m holding everything against everyone at this point.”
Laurie rolls his eyes again.
“I can’t figure out who killed your grandfather,” Evander says, trying not to sound stressed while definitely being stressed, “without information. Like, when did he lock everyone out of the estate? And why? Why did he keep you?”
“Because,” Laurie says, with a long-suffering sigh, “no one else wanted me.”
“Shocking,” Evander deadpans, “when you have such a charming personality.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.” Laurie looks back at his phone, sinking deeper into his mounds of pillows. “My entire family tree is full of selfish dickholes who have dollar signs where their hearts should be. Grandfather doesn’t like them leeching off him. I mean, he barely lets me live here.”
“So there’s zero percent chance anyone else was on the estate the night of the attack?” Evander says. “Just you and me and Carrington?”
“Yup.” Laurie pops the P, still absorbed in his phone.
Evander starts pacing, his frown deepening. “Except how would you know? This house is huge. It would be totally possible to live in one of the forgotten rooms and no one would know—”
“Yeah, that’s supremely creepy.”
“I have to think,” Evander says tersely, “about all options.” But what he’s truly thinking of is his door yawned open wide in the night when he swore it was closed.
“Grandfather wouldn’t have let someone sneak in,” Laurie says. “He’s extremely private and hates people.”
It’s now that Evander realizes Laurie is speaking in present tense, as if despite all his dismissive snark, he also hasn’t fully accepted his grandfather is dead.
“He wouldn’t know when he was always away.” Evander starts poking about the room, surreptitiously lifting suitcase lids and then closing them fast when he sees underwear.