Chapter 28
I don’t remember much about my walk back to the manor after Nin and I parted ways. Did I float back, buoyed by tiny cherubs with wings? Maybe. Inside, I was dancing. Swirling my skirts and turning in joyful circles.
He kissed me! And I kissed him! My entire world had been turned upside down.
I began to have more hope that we could escape and wanted to carry on looking for the ballroom.
But the master’s increasing sleep problems were a thorn in our sides.
No longer did he sleep the entire night, or even more than an hour at a time.
Nin and I would make plans to meet in the greenhouse, but he’d only be able to stay for a few minutes before disappearing.
It was never enough.
Our situation was exasperating. We didn’t even have time enough together for me to sew his shirt sleeve back on.
We didn’t even kiss again, not really. Not deeply, as we had the first time.
I was frantic and anxious to spend any amount of time with him—a few seconds, a minute—spending half my time pacing and waiting.
A couple nights after the greenhouse, I paced and waited until I fell asleep face down on my bed while moping.
I dreamed of my mother, standing over my father’s grave, where a cardinal perched on the headstone.
Mammy wept so hard that her tears fell like rain onto the grass.
And where they fell, hundreds of lilies sprouted.
Lilies like the one in Nin’s boutonniere.
When my mother disappeared in the dream, I lay down in the blooming lilies and inhaled their fresh scent. Soft petals tickled my cheeks. My nose. My brow.
No, it wasn’t their petals I felt. The lilies were breathing.
In and out… it was their breath I was feeling on my face.
That makes no sense. Flowers don’t breathe…
I woke suddenly, the dream fading and breaking apart, and I blinked into the darkness of my room.
Silver eyes blinked back at me from my pillow.
“Nin!” I cried, overjoyed to see him.
“Shh,” he whispered, a soft smile on his lips. He lay on the bed next to me atop the covers, lifting a hand to gently push tendrils of my hair away from my face. “I tried not to wake you.”
“I was dreaming,” I said dazedly, slowly realizing that I was only wearing a thin chemise beneath the heavy bedclothes. “How long have you…?”
“Only a minute,” he said. “And I must warn you, I don’t know how long we have. Your master sleeps poorly tonight.”
“Again?”
He nodded.
“I’ll take anything I can get,” I whispered, touching his cheek. “Tell me what you’ve been thinking since we last saw each other.”
Nin chuckled softly. “That might take hours. I’ll tell you what I was thinking before you woke.”
“Yes, tell me,” I said, sliding my foot toward him beneath the covers. He was so close—in my bed—but at the same time frustratingly far away.
He ran a light finger down my face, tracing the line of my jaw. “I was thinking,” he said, voice low and deep, “about the first time I saw you.”
My heart raced beneath my chemise. “In the graveyard, after the funeral.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “Your world became so vast to me that day. I’d previously thought I knew everything there was to know but realized I knew nothing.”
“A demigod who personally knows the names of every human being? I find that hard to believe.”
He snorted softly. “My pride is monumental, Molly. I should’ve never told you that.”
“Don’t say that. I want you to tell me everything.”
“And you, me. I want to know everything about you. Everything inside your mind.”
“What do you want to know?”
His roaming finger hesitated on the lacy neckline of my chemise. “Have you been thinking of what we did in the greenhouse?”
Warmth flooded my cheeks. I nodded from my side of the pillow, and when I tried to speak, my voice felt so small. “I cannot stop thinking about it.”
His eyes fluttered shut briefly. “What have you done to me, Molly? I feel like I’ve stepped into a snare that’s harder to escape than the aegis around this house. I am utterly spellbound by you.”
My heart soared. “Kiss me,” I whispered.
Silver eyes smoldered beneath heavy eyelids.
His mouth came toward mine; then he hesitated, hovering for a moment before changing course to plunge down to my neck.
He placed slow kisses across my throat, warming me from the outside in.
Melting me like sunlight on snow. I wrapped my arms around him, trying to pull him closer…
closer. My fingers tangled in the silken waves of his dark hair as he kissed his way up my neck and licked the shell of my ear.
A riot of tingles rushed over me.
“You taste like fresh grass and spring,” he whispered.
My hips pushed against his, speaking a physical language to his body that I barely understood. But he rocked back against me, and I felt the rigid length of him through the bedcovers between us.
Not close enough.
I wanted him inside the covers with me.
I wanted nothing between us.
Needed it.
The strength of this craving overwhelmed and consumed me as his mouth sought mine, and we devoured each other, tongues twining and exploring. We were burning up, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bed itself had caught on fire.
“Closer,” I dared to whisper, and he didn’t argue. He struggled to pull down the bedcovers, groaning in frustration when he couldn’t tug the fabric without putting some room between us, breaking our kiss.
I helped him, and just when we’d awkwardly untangled ourselves from the linens, he suddenly froze in place and stared blankly at me, without sight—just for a moment. Then he blinked, and he was looking at me again. But now his face crumpled.
“He’s waking,” he whispered with a terrible ache in his voice.
“No!” I whispered as anger and frustration blotted out all rational thought. I tried to hold on to him, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew it wasn’t possible.
He kissed me—hard. Possessively. Desperately.
Then all his warmth left me at once, and he disappeared, falling through my fingers like sand. I curled up on the bedlinens where his body had just been, hugging my pillow and breathing in his lingering scent as if it were the very air I needed to breathe. And I broke down and wept.
I prayed he’d come back to me that night. Prayers of the desperate, I suppose. But nothing came of them, and I just ended up falling asleep with tears drying on my cheeks.
When I woke, I knew I had to get a handle on my feelings for Nin. They had ignited like a house fire, fierce and dangerous, and all at once. This was what my mother had warned me about, these kinds of feelings. They were too intense, and I was out of control.
I was afraid of where these feelings would lead, and at the same time, afraid of not knowing. Perhaps we both needed to cool off.
When Nin didn’t return that night, I tried to do just that.
But when a day passed and he didn’t return the following night, all those feelings came back.
They grew inside me like planted seeds, and by the next night, when he appeared for five seconds to tell me that it wasn’t safe—“How is your master always awake?”—and I felt his lips on mine for the briefest kiss of my lifetime, I was ready to burn the entire manor down just to get back to him.
The master just wasn’t sleeping, and I didn’t understand how that was possible.
But after another sleepless night, I found out.
It was a dreary afternoon, and I’d come downstairs after hearing that the weekly grocery delivery had just arrived. “A major winter storm is coming,” Filomena announced.
The delivery boy from town had told her. The first storm of the season. Everyone in Tarrytown was getting ready for it, apparently, and news of the approaching storm had come from the telegraph attendant at the train station.
It seemed impossible that we’d get much snow this early, at the end of October, so I dismissed it.
But Mr. Hoffmann didn’t. He busied himself with getting horses out of the paddock and into the barn, and barking orders to us about battening down the hatches, getting ready for the storm.
So we brought in extra wood for the fireplaces, and ticked off a list of tasks. One of those tasks was burning trash.
Hoffmann kept a big barrel for burning near the carriage house. All the trash that had been accumulated that week went into the barrel, and it was set on fire. The valet got it started, but he left me to mind the flames while he carted one more pile of wood back to the manor.
That’s when I saw it, amongst the noxious, burning refuse.
A broken bottle of wine with the label still intact.
VIN MARIANI à LA COCA DU PéROU.
Coca…? From the coca plant? This was French cocaine wine—no wonder the master’s heart rate was so high! Had he been drinking this to stay awake? Because it would most certainly keep him up—even I knew that, a mere junior nurse who wasn’t allowed to have keys to the hospital pharmacy.
If the master was going to these extremes to stay awake, did that mean he knew Nin could escape his bonds? Maybe we weren’t as safe here as we thought. Not that I ever really thought we were.
After burning the trash, I went up to my room to change out of my smoke-scented day dress and back into my uniform. Bethany greeted me when I opened the door.
“Finally!” she said as I walked through her to get to the wardrobe. “I’ve been waiting for hours. What’s on your dress? Is that soot? Is it time to clean the fireplaces again?”
I ignored her questions and stripped off my skirt and bodice. “Any particular reason why you’ve been waiting for me?”
“Oh! Yes. So, I was doing my usual rounds, walking through the manor today, staying out of sight of the master—you know, the usual.”
“Uh-huh…”
“And I was thinking about the last time I’d seen that No-Face Man? Remember?”
“Good ol’ No-Face.”
She gave me an impatient frown. “Don’t joke about this, Molly.”
“Fine. Go on, then,” I encouraged. “Tell me.”