Chapter 3
C H A P T E R
T H R E E
the devil incarnate
Having grown up in Ravensgate, Cal was used to the house’s dark idiosyncrasies, but as Nadine’s eyes flicked wildly from the scrolling on the refurbished gaslamps to the glittering wallpaper, he was once again reminded of what this place looked like to outsiders.
To the hunted.
She was wearing something black and lacy beneath her top, the strap revealed by the panel of bare skin at each shoulder. Cal imagined pulling it down with his teeth before biting the soft, downy skin beneath as if she were summer-ripe fruit—
“Careful.” He spoke as much to himself as to her when she struggled to right herself. She scrambled backwards on the sofa and his weight shifted automatically in response, ready to give chase. “You were out cold.”
“There’s no doctors here,” Odessa interjected helpfully. She had pulled out a metal emery board and was filing her nails into sharp ovals on its bladed edge. “No hospital, either.”
“Really?” Nadine swallowed hard. “What happens if you get h-hurt.”
“Don’t,” his sister casually advised.
Nadine’s nervous eyes traveled to his brother, who had settled himself into one of the velvet armchairs like a long-suffering king.
Prolonged contact with the Paris green cover had given him lesions on his hands, raw and scored where they lay splayed over the armrests, with beads of blood set in the recesses like cruel gemstones.
He should have bandaged them, but because Cal himself had suggested this, he had worn the wounds left by his wife like badges of honor.
Seeing Nadine looking at them, he closed his hands into fists. “Hello, Nadine.”
“H-hi Ben.” Her eyes darted back to her lap, a flush in her pallid cheeks.
Cal did not like the expression on his brother’s face at all.
“Baby Cal was worried you’d sue.” Odessa looked back and forth between them, eyes alight with mischief. “You should have seen him fussing.”
“Premise liability law doesn’t cover acts of god.
” Cal swung off the edge of the love seat where he’d been waiting, and offered Nadine his hand.
After a pause, she took it, nudging her exposed bra strap back into place as he brought her to her feet, close as a clean miss.
He gave Odessa a sharp look over his shoulder.
“You know I don’t like to be called that. ”
“You’re the one who scared her,” she shot back. “Or are you saying you’re a god?”
“I don’t know.” Cal gave Nadine’s fingers, which were still clasped with his, a playful squeeze. “What do you think, Nadine? Would you kneel before me?”
Her eyes leapt to his, that pink in her face shading to a deep scarlet.
Interesting, he thought, observing his effect on her with pleasure. I think you would.
“Stop toying with the girl.” Ice rifted through every word. Ben straightened, leaning forward from his throne of hypocrisy as he condemned Nadine to her fate while she sat there, oblivious to her own trial. “You know you shouldn’t have brought her here.”
“I didn’t.” Choosing deliberately to misunderstand and therefore undermine, he said silkily, “She brought herself here. To me.”
Because she’s mine.
Nadine set her jaw, that stubbornness he’d only glimpsed before now asserting itself in full-force as she tried to figure out who in this room was her enemy. “Was my sister here?”
“We’ve been over this,” Cal reminded her. “She’s not here. We don’t know where she is.”
Odessa made a moue of concern that looked like the pantomime it was in this locked-room spectacle, but Ben was visibly furious.
He wasn’t used to having his authority questioned by the gentler sex.
Their mother had always bent to his will rather than suffer the storm of his wrath.
Even Odessa, who prided herself upon being provocative, was wary of teasing him.
“Did you search the forest?” Nadine asked.
“Those trees go on for miles.” The ice in Ben’s words became bladed and lethally cold. “They stretch into canyons, lakes, and mountaintops. There are parts that are completely inaccessible and backed up by years of windfall and brush. Where the fuck do you propose we start?”
“I don’t know.” She looked smaller. Her voice sounded smaller, too.
Odessa tucked her nail file into her pocket like a duelist sheathing a blade. “Don’t talk to her like that, poor thing. She’s going to think that we’re heartless.”
“Depending on who she’s been talking to in town, she probably already does.
” Cal turned on her so suddenly that she jumped, taut as a wire and just as tempting to pluck.
“Did you speak to Helena Peters, Nadine? I bet I can imagine what she said about me. That I have my way with girls and kill them in the woods while they’re still smiling—is that right?
You know they say all Cullraven brides bleed on their wedding night, regardless of whether or not they’re virgins. ”
Ben went stiff. Noelle, he knew, hadn’t been.
A point of contention with his brother, even if he hadn’t voiced it to her; he’d taken it as a sign that she might be too worldly.
But the maids had still whispered of blood on the sheets during that first night spent in his bed, so it hadn’t stopped the claiming, and it wouldn’t stop him now if Nadine incited his wrath.
“Cal.” Odessa gave him a chastising look—as if he were the one grimacing like a guilty corpse. “She doesn’t want to hear about our silly old family history.”
“She should know what she’s dealing with, don’t you think?
” Meeting Nadine’s fearful eyes, he went on blithely, “You know they call us the Killravens in town. Every death that happens within a fifty-mile radius is laid at our family’s front door.
They’ll tell you that to walk into Ravensgate is to walk into the very mouth of hell. ”
Out here in the middle of the mountains, rumors ran wild as weeds. They sank roots into everything they touched, blossoming with pale, trembling petals of half-truths. But under the soil, buried with the bones, there were real truths.
That was where the bodies were buried.
Nadine paled, drawing her hand back from him. A shame, that, but his teasing had shifted Ben’s disdain from Nadine to the more familiar enemy of the townsfolk and the need to protect the legacy and preserve his own honor.
“They’re backwards hicks,” he seethed. “Helena Peters has had it in for us for years.”
“She didn’t tell me anything like that,” Nadine said quickly. Too quickly. Which meant she had talked to people in town. God only knew what poison they’d spilled into her willing ears. And yet she came here anyway, that dark voice whispered. Some poisons are sweetest on the tongue.
He exchanged another look with his sister.
“Aren’t you friends with the sheriff?” Nadine persisted. “His son was at the wedding—the redhead, right? Can I talk to him?”
She’d have better luck trying to press water from granite. “Rael,” he clarified. “And Gideon’s his father. They’re well aware of the situation.”
“Can I talk to them? Either of them?”
“No.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And why not?”
“Sheriff Crocker was called out to a pile-up on the interstate.” Ben shifted his weight, bristling with importance. “So he’s not around right now. And Rael’s not here.”
“I can’t say I blame him.” Cal looked not at Ben, but the boar’s head behind him with its cloudy glass eyes, killed almost a century ago by his great-grandfather and carried over from England. “Sometimes I don’t want to be here, either.”
His words sounded flat in the uncanny, muffled silences of the parlor. Ravensgate was ever-restless, just as he was: a slumbering beast caught in the stasis of hibernation. His place in the city, with all its clean lines and sterile fixtures was little more than a bell jar.
“When were you going to tell me?”
Nadine’s voice broke into his thoughts and he gave her the same look he gave his clients, who paid him generously by the hour to hold the rope they intended to hang themselves with.
You really don’t care for that neck of yours, do you, Nadine?
She stepped back from him, and her expression changed as her eyes shifted to the walls.
He had used to sit in this parlor as a child.
After long homeschooling sessions that were first presided over by his mother, and then, when he got older, a constant stream of tutors who never cared to stay for very long, he would grow so wearied of it all that he needed to get away.
Not just from the lessons, but from the burdensome history of his family legacy: his own rock of Sisyphus.
His mother had used to play piano in here but his father didn’t care for music and eventually the instrument had fallen silent, and dust had collected on its keys the way it did on the mounted heads the servants couldn’t reach.
They had been expertly stuffed and in the depths of their polished eyes, he could sometimes convince himself that they were just a breath away from life in this perfect dome of silence. He would sit and watch them. Avidly.
Given that his great-grandfather had been the one to kill them, wishing them into an altered state of existence was probably tantamount to blasphemy, but he had wished nonetheless.
He liked the chattering woods and the way the wind stirred through the branches, making the trees knock together like hollow bones.
This house was his father’s kingdom, and it would be his brother’s after; but in this parlor, he had once felt like he’d held the power to charm the dead back to life, if only he could find the way.
As Nadine regarded the various trophies with the ashen solemnity of a small child being dragged up to the altar to repent before the glaring death masks of saints, Cal wondered what dark miracles she had wished for. Because he had seen that same expression reflected in his own mirror.
It was the look of someone far too familiar with death.