Chapter 7 #4
They went by his father’s rooms and her head inclined towards it.
When his parents weren’t out making rounds with their various social sets, his father spent the evenings in his room or his mother’s.
He had told Nadine this, hoping to put her at ease, but as they went past the parlor, filled with its many trophies of the wood, his father was there, leisurely turning the pages of a newspaper that Cal recognized immediately as the Plata County Times.
“Taking her out into the woods, are you?” he remarked, shifting the paper with a crackle.
“No,” said Cal. “The garden, actually.”
“Just don’t let her get away from you.” His father noisily turned another page, making Nadine flinch. “She’s a quick little thing. You should have seen her run last night.”
It was the worst thing she could have done, so of course she’d done that.
Cal nudged her towards the picture hall, which opened out into the solarium. “Through here,” he said, coolly authoritative, doing his best to ignore his father, who was watching them closely.
“I expect I’ll see you at dinner,” he said. “You are family, after all.”
And there’s more than enough blood to bind us all, isn’t there, Father?
The solarium was a cruel joke, built in the darkest part of the house and shaded by the tall redwoods.
His mother had given up tending any plants here long ago and Odessa’s few attempts at nuturance were withered limply over the sides of their expensive pots as if they had died trying to crawl free from their respective prisons.
“What was that about?” Nadine asked.
“Nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
“My parents are very old-fashioned. When we bring women to this place—” he paused, considering his words carefully. “—it gives them certain expectations.” He looked at Odessa’s decaying pothos, starved of love and life. “My father is very eager for me to settle down,” he lied.
“And you don’t want to?” There was a little inflection in her voice, which she was usually careful to limit. She was trying to hide her interest and not doing a very good job.
“I never considered myself the marrying kind.”
The words held the bitter ring of truth, and succeeded in holding her questions at bay.
They didn’t speak again until they got to the garden door, with its little panel of inlaid engraved glass.
He opened it for her, playing the polite gentleman, and she gave him a tense smile, like she thought she could see right through his act.
Some of that icy restraint slipped away as they walked into the garden, which was maintained by a careful and discreet employee that had been hired at his mother’s discretion.
Most of the plants in it were native, though a few were things that were often found in an English country garden.
His parents wanted it preserved, as history intended, and Caledon Cullraven had, like many British lords, thought of himself as a competent conqueror capable of bending the land to his will with all of the dominionistic arrogance he held in his arsenal.
But nature was not stifled as easily as that.
Nadine bent her head to the bronze sculptures of wildlife that stood on their pedestals scattered throughout, rendered to such exquisitely fine detail that they looked capable of springing to life. Looking at the one of a fox sparrow, done to scale, she asked, “Who was the sculptor?”
“No idea. Lost to time, I suppose. Like everything else.”
She continued to wander up and down the rows, careful not to tread on the seedlings.
Moving, rather deliberately, to the banks of black hellebore growing along the side of the house from their moldering trellis.
Also part of the original garden layout, the hellebore had flourished gloriously, with chthonic black blooms that looked out of place with all of the blue and white flowers.
“This is the hellebore?”
The hellebore, she’d said. Which implied a distinction. Who had she talked to about it?
“Yes. They’re the original plants from my great-grandfather’s time. Fascinating, isn’t it? That they’ve survived all these years? Hellebore is often associated with death and the occult, but in spite of their moribund reputation they’re tenacious—and poisonous.”
“Poisonous!”
“Oh yes. They can burn your skin if you touch them with bare hands. And a large dose of them can be fatal.” She made a strange face at that, but rather than question it, he decided to move on.
“I’ve always thought it interesting that my great-grandfather would equate such potency to his own impassioned feelings, but then, he was Victorian. They tended to be morbid.”
“Who tends to them?”
“We have a gardener. One of the servants does it—I’m not sure which one. Do you like to garden? You seem less tense out here.”
She looked up at the cloudy sky and the silvery light gilded her in profile, sparking off her hair and making it glow like old wood.
“I’ve always liked being outside. It’s people who are the problem.
” Her fingers spread, rubbing at her arms absently.
“Sometimes I feel anxious in new places. I used to think I was afraid of being lost, but then I realized I was afraid of who might find me.”
And he had, of course. He’d been following her all this time, and now the trap was closing in. “Tell me Nadine,” he said. “Do you see yourself more as the hunter or the hunted?”
“Uh, I guess I’ve never really thought about it.”
That fucking stammer. “Never? You must have some idea.”
She gulped. “Are you asking if I want to be hunted?”
“Do you?”
She didn’t say no.
That would stay with him after this, and after everything else that came to follow. He would remember that she had looked at him with those big grey eyes that invited one to give chase, and she hadn’t said no.
The tension thickened, swelling. She averted her eyes from it and him, going to the ground. Then she bent in a savage flurry of movement, snatching up something from the soil. He recognized it immediately, because she wore its twin around her throat.
“This is Noelle’s,” she said. “She never takes it off.”
(Help me)
Cal closed his eyes briefly.
“It appears that she did.”
Nadine stared at him, hard and unforgiving. Then her eyes moved past him, to the treeline. “Someone’s out there,” she said abruptly. “In the woods. Someone’s watching us.”
“No one’s there,” Cal said, though he wasn’t certain. Someone could be there. But it was far better for her to think herself safe, than to see this as a prison and have it become a grave.
“I saw them.”
“Nadine.” He surged forward, gripping her arm as she nearly took a spill into the hellebore. “Jesus.”
“The chain is broken. God, it looks like it was torn off. Like someone—”
She didn’t finish what she was thinking. She didn’t need to.
Maybe someone was watching them in those woods. She had already seen too much, knew too much. She had come here with her throat bared, secure in the trust that it wouldn’t be slit, and he had been quick to make a play for her before she was even in her season.
He rarely found himself at a loss but this was a fucking quagmire of a situation.
The townsfolk had already poisoned her thoughts against them, kindling the faint embers of suspicion to a roaring flame.
And then there was Ben’s carelessness in managing his wife—if he had disposed of Noelle beneath the black hellebore in some fucking fit of ancestral-inspired pageantry, Cal was going to kill him.
Without being fully conscious of doing so, he steered Nadine to the library. Shock had made her passive and she was leaning heavily on his arm, feet dragging on the runners. It felt like she was a trophy that he was bringing home from the woods.
He pushed her into one of the armchairs less gently than what he suspected she was used to, and knelt down in front of her. His height served him well when it came to intimidation but it made leveling with people rather difficult.
“Nadine.” He spoke deliberately, taking the hand that wasn’t still clutching the necklace in his own. Her fingers were ice-cold, in spite of the summer heat. “Putting yourself through all of this isn’t going to save your sister.”
“Then help me.”
“You don’t want my help,” he said bitterly. “Not at my price.”
Her face shaded from desperation to disappointment, which shouldn’t have stung but it did. She had had expectations of him and he had failed to rise to meet them, and fallen thusly in her regard. “Take me back to my room, please.”
Cal swore inwardly. At this rate, she would never let him close enough to do what needed to be done. “I can give the necklace to Rael, if you’re worried,” he offered, as he turned her towards her door. “He’ll see that his father gets it.”
“No,” she said sharply.
“Are you sure? It could be evidence.”
Her body jerked visibly at those damning words. She had obviously been thinking the same thing and was shocked to hear it from his own treacherous lips.
“No,” she said again, a tremulous note entering her voice.
“It’s up to you.”
Her fingers tightened around the chain, fisting it against her breast. She did not look like a woman who was about to go marching to the police, but right now, she didn’t look like a woman who had stood partially denuded before him with his cock in her hand, either.
His lower belly throbbed and he clenched his fingers until the pain of his nails biting into flesh overrode the lingering echoes of discomfort in his loins. “I suppose I’ll see you at dinner.”
Nadine didn’t demur; she slipped into her room without another word.
But this time, he heard the clatter of the bolt as she drove the lock home.