Chapter 35 #2
“I was too observant,” he said. “Too difficult to frighten properly. Too unwilling to apologize for noticing things he preferred left ignored.”
“And your mother?”
“She let him.”
The words carried no bitterness. That made them worse. I understood mothers who survived by silence. I understood them too well to hate his easily.
Vincent’s mouth curved again, without humour.
“I came into my trust at twenty-one and stopped needing his permission to exist. We have been largely estranged since.”
“That is why you have your own money.”
“Yes.”
I looked at him standing among his quiet collection of fractures—beautiful, monstrous, and alone in a way I had not let myself recognize before.
“You are more like me than I thought,” I said.
His gaze lifted.
“No,” he said softly. “You are more like me than you wanted to be.”
I turned away first and walked back toward the living room, because I could not stand inside that secret room another second without feeling my own secrets rearrange themselves around his.
The dining area was still destroyed. Broken glass glittered beneath the table. The candle lay on its side, wax hardening against the wood. Pasta had begun to congeal on the floor. Miss Astoria perched on the far chair, watching the wreckage with feline judgment but no intention of helping.
I laughed once. It was not a happy sound, but it was real.
Vincent came up behind me, not close enough to touch.
“What?” he asked.
“I tried to kill you, and now I have to clean pasta off your floor.”
“I can call someone.”
I turned to look at him.
“Absolutely not.”
“It is only a floor.”
“It is my attempted murder scene. I’ll clean it myself.”
His expression shifted.
My attempted murder scene. Mine. Not his. Not Katherine’s. Mine.
A terrible, absurd intimacy.
I crouched and began gathering the larger shards. Vincent crouched beside me.
I glanced at him. “I can do it.”
“You’ll cut yourself.”
“I have done chores before.”
“Yes,” he said, picking up a piece of glass with insulting competence. “You mentioned. Now we can do them together.”
We cleaned together without speaking for several minutes.
There was something obscene about it—domesticity right after such an insane confession.
A sponge dragged through wine and cream while Katherine’s blood sat folded in my drawer.
Vincent rinsing a cloth at the sink while I swept glass into a dustpan.
When the table was clear and the floor no longer looked like evidence of a crime, I poured two glasses of water and handed Vincent one.
He looked at it.
“From the tap,” I said.
“Comforting, but I did watch you pour it.”
“You watched me try to drug you too, and that did not stop anything.”
His mouth curved faintly. .
Then his phone rang.
The sound sliced through the apartment. We both looked at it on the counter.
Unknown number.
A strange stillness settled over Vincent’s face. He answered without greeting. I watched him listen. He said nothing for several seconds.
Then he simply responded with, “Good.”
My stomach tightened.
He ended the call and set the phone face down.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Daniel is dead.”
I stared at him.
“How?”
“An accident.”
My fingers tightened around the glass.
“What kind of accident?”
His gaze held mine.
“The kind that ends a problem.”
I went cold. I understood perfectly. A road somewhere. Rain, perhaps. Headlights. A body that had terrified me since childhood was made small enough for a police report. I did not need details. My mind supplied them anyway.
“Did you arrange it?”
“Yes, my love.”
I set the glass down before I dropped it.
“When?”
“After he came to campus.”
My mouth opened, closed.
“You told him you would pay him.”
“I did.”
“You were never going to?”
“I paid him; he just never got to use that money.”
The answer sat there, calm and awful. I almost laughed. Of course, Vincent would consider that distinction important.
“He left Blackwater believing he had won something,” Vincent said.
The room swayed. I gripped the counter.
Daniel was dead.
The man who called me sweetheart like a threat. The man who made my mother flinch at footsteps. The man whose voice could turn me ten years old in the middle of a courtyard.
Gone. Removed. Ended.
I looked at Vincent.
My throat tightened. I waited for grief. It did not come properly. Only a thin, exhausted sadness for the father Daniel had never been—for the little girl who once wished he would sober up, apologize, and become someone else. That girl deserved to mourn. I did not know how to do it for her.
Vincent stepped closer.
I lifted a hand. “Don’t, I need a moment.”
He stopped.
Thank God. If he had touched me, then I might have leaned into him, and I could not survive knowing that about myself so soon after hearing Daniel was dead.
“You should have told me,” I said. “Before.”
“Maybe.”
“That was one of my terms. Why didn’t you tell me first?”
“Because if I told you, you would have tried to stop me. And then you would have spent the rest of your life hoping for him to return in the way you needed him to.”
I hated Vincent, but I also loved him. No—not love. Not yet. Not that word. But something dark and grateful and horrified had moved inside me, and it wore his shape.
“You don’t get to decide what threats disappear from my life,” I said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
His voice was quiet. “I know I shouldn’t.”
I looked away toward the window. Rain had begun again, soft and endless against the glass.
Daniel was dead. Katherine was dead. My father had become another secret folded inside this apartment, another body between us, another reason the rest of the world would never understand what Vincent and I were becoming.
Then I remembered my mother.
My hand flew to my phone. Vincent watched but did not stop me.
She answered on the third ring, her voice tired and warm.
“Selena?”
The name undid me, and I could not speak.
“Mom,” I said finally.
“What happened?”
Nothing. Everything. He’s gone. You’re safe. I’m sorry I couldn’t make him disappear sooner. I’m sorry someone else did.
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” I said.
After a brief silence, her voice softened. “Are you all right?”
I looked at Vincent. He stood across the room, still as a dark thought—the man who had destroyed everything that threatened me and called it love without ever saying the word.
“No,” I said truthfully. “But I think I will be.”
My mother exhaled quietly. “Come see me tomorrow.”
“I will.”
“You promise?”
I closed my eyes. For once, the promise did not feel like a lie.
“I promise.”
When I hung up, Vincent was watching me. I set the phone down slowly.
“You are going to tell me everything,” I said.
“I have.”
“No. Everything else. What else did you do that I did not know about?”
“You were very messy with your attempted murder, Selena.”
“I was traumatized. I killed… or thought I killed my best friend of eleven years.”