Chapter 16 #2
“Possibly.” Cal straightened from his casual slouch. “Has he touched you?”
“N-no.”
“Good. Stay away from him. He’s lost his sparrow and now he wants mine—but you belong to me.” His voice dropped. “I’ve marked you, and I’ll be the one to finish you off.”
“Finish me—?”
His cock twitched. “You’ll like it the way I do it, don’t worry.” She looked frightened and unconvinced. Cal reclined back, watching her as she continued to hover just out of reach. “Was there something else?” he asked politely, clicking the cap of his pen.
“What are you doing?”
“Just some probate litigation.”
“Do you like it?”
The question surprised him, and his surprise surprised him further, confirming the unreality of their situation. She had not asked him about his work since he had taken her to the diner in Arboreus and everything between them had gotten so twisted.
“It’s work but there’s a certain satisfaction in it, yes,” he said, but it sounded forced.
The easy camaraderie between them was lost and he was faced with a rather disturbing vision of what Nadine would look like, forced to heel like his mother, all her vivacity of spirit drained away, with a dull glaze in her lovely eyes.
“But I don’t think that’s why you came to see me. ”
“I want my phone back.”
Her request disappointed him, though it shouldn’t have. Of course she was here for that. She still wanted to flee from this place—right into the waiting arms of death.
“No.” He picked up his pen again, waiting. “Is that all?”
“It’s mine.” She stared at him, as if this claim to ownership ought to impress. When he didn’t respond, she scowled. “I have friends. Friends who worry about me. If I don’t talk to them, they’re going to be worried.”
“They won’t be,” he said.
“They—what? Why?”
“Because I took care of it.”
It took her a moment. First, disbelief. Then anger, fear. “You impersonated me,” she said, slowly realizing. “You impersonated me to my friends and family? But my phone has a lock.”
Cal looked at her, daring her to acknowledge what went on between them. That letting him into her room the way she did, he would have no trouble at all taking her hand as she slept and pressing her trusting fingers into her phone’s lock.
“You . . .” Her eyes glinted with tears. “Psycho.”
“You’re going to that festival,” he told her. “That was your fate, I’m afraid, from the moment you walked into this courtyard, demanding to know what happened to your sister. My family will see to it, even if I don’t. I can’t have you running around panicking, alerting all your friends.”
“So you’re going to imprison me here? Is that the plan? For how long, Cal?”
“Until I own you.” It came out as a growl, low and menacing.
She leaped back again, in a way that had his fingers clenching around the marker in an effort to ground himself.
“When I’ve claimed you as my sparrow—that’s when you’ll be safe, Nadine.
And then you’ll fuck me, just like all the other Cullraven brides fucked their husbands.
I’ll hand you the knife, but we both know you’ll decline it, and darling, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it. ”
He thought she would run again—she looked like she wanted to, swaying on her feet like that, as if mesmerized. But then she said again, falteringly, “Give me my phone.”
Brave, sweet little fool. Holding the pen loosely in his fingers, he said, “Tell me, what do you think will happen if you leave here? Do you think you’ll be free—from me? From this? You’re not the first sparrow to want to fly from here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our grand-uncle’s wife—she tried to run.
She didn’t care much for his vicious appetites.
So he chased her across two continents and six countries to punish her for her hubris before he fed her ashes to the sea.
His name was Benjamin Alexander Cullraven.
Ben’s namesake.” His smile was sardonic.
“Seems rather fitting, wouldn’t you say? ”
The color fled from her face and she held onto the back of his desk chair with white fingers. “Oh my god,” she said weakly.
“We both come from a long line of vindictive, draconian men, Ben and I. Maybe we’re both doomed to hurt the ones we love: two scorpions, forged in blood. I might even be moved to pity him, if I weren’t cursed with the same affliction.”
Nadine looked up from the floor. “You say that like you think you don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice. But sometimes the consequences are the same.
” Look at me, he thought. I swore to myself I’d never fall for anyone again.
He flipped a page of his documents without reading them.
“I thought we could go to the woods today,” he forced himself to say.
“The weather is perfect for what I have planned. We can stop by the town on the way and show your friend no harm has come to you.”
Nadine gave him a harsh look. “Before the woods, you mean.”
“Before the woods,” he echoed.
She looked like she might protest. Then her mouth firmed. “Can I talk to my aunt at least? Just for a few minutes?” Her voice was like fraying thread.
When he didn’t respond right away, she said, “Please. She’ll get too suspicious.
She knows me too well. I don’t want her to come here.
” Her eyes circled his room, bouncing off the dark wallpaper and imposing furniture.
She sank down onto the bed beside him, and the soft feather mattress sank with her, causing her body to slide against his.
“Please let me talk to her. You can hold the phone. I’ll even let you—” her voice broke “—tie me up, if you don’t trust me. ”
“Nadine.”
She put her hand on his bare arm. It wasn’t often that she initiated contact between them, and he was surprised by the intent in that touch, the possession of it.
“Please, Daddy?”
It was like being struck by lightning—this was how he’d felt, seeing her that first time. Robbed of breath, unable to move, but, oh, still able to feel in a way that he never thought he’d feel again since that night he’d felt all hope die with that girl in the woods.
A dull ache built between his thighs when she leaned closer.
Her breasts grazed his chest, eliciting an answering ripple in his sternum.
If she had stuck a knife in him then, he would have allowed it, if only for the satisfaction of knowing she had pressed herself against him willingly like a bird seeking shelter from a storm in the cradling branches of a redwood.
He capped his marker and pulled away so suddenly that she spilled backwards onto his sheets. Not trusting himself to look at her, Cal reached into his bedside drawer, where he had been storing her phone, and held it up. “So you can beg,” he said.
She flushed, and it spread down her throat, and further—he knew how far now, just as he knew what color she was between her legs, and what she sounded like when she was past endurance and desperate for pleasure.
She sucked in when he grabbed her hand, using her finger to unlock her phone, before scrolling through her contacts to find her aunt.
“Five minutes,” he said, wondering if he sounded as breathless as he felt.
Nadine kept her hands in her lap while the phone rang.
She looked like the very portrait of feminine obedience, but it was a well-crafted lie.
For her, softness had always been a means of survival, a way of existing in a world that crushed bristly women whose spines wore runs into the warp and woof of tradition.
Beneath her tender exterior was a core of steel.
“Nadine?” her aunt’s voice floated from the speaker, deeper than her niece’s, and less wavering. “Is that you? Oh, thank god. I’ve been calling and calling, and you weren’t answering. It wasn’t like you. I was starting to get worried.”
Nadine gave him a look of such spiteful vindication that he nearly smiled.
“Are you all right, honey? Do you need me to come get you?”
“No!” Nadine yelped. “N-no. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Except reception. That’s been . . . well, shit.”
“You don’t sound too good. Are you sick? Have you heard anything else about Noelle? You sounded so worried the last time we talked. Did you go to the police about the necklace?”
Her eyes shifted away from his. “No. Nothing came of that. Nobody knows where she is. I think—” she drew in a harsh breath “—I think—she ran away.”
Tears spilled over her cheeks. She was seconds from breaking. Cal lifted a finger and mouthed, One minute, and she shut her eyes against him with a shake of her head.
“It’s really nice here. I think I’ll stay for a little while. Maybe . . . explore the woods.”
“Well, okay,” said the aunt. “If that’s what you want to do. But don’t push yourself if you’re not feeling well. Make sure you stay on the trails. Are you sure you’re all right?”
Nadine’s red eyes made the grey even brighter, like the pure blue of arctic ice. “Yes,” she whispered.
The love between them hung suspended in the air like raw, textured thread.
He had glimpsed traces of it before, here and there, and never paid it much thought, believing much of it to be the performative farce that it was for his own family.
But this—this was real, as real as the red-mottled granite the town was built on: a solid and sturdy foothold, eternal in its endurance.
“Okay. Well, call me soon, all right? Or I’ll worry.”
“I love you so much,” Nadine said, and his skin felt charged beneath his clothes, even though it wasn’t for him. “I love you, Aunt Nikki.”
“I love you, too, kiddo. Stay safe.”
The phone went dead.
Cal dropped it back into the drawer and locked it as Nadine got up, shaking herself off.
“Thank you,” she said, not looking at him.