CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ceci
“No more philosophy,” Sabrina said. “It’s Nos Galan Gaeaf, and I refuse to waste it on respectable conversation.”
Ceci looked up. “It’s what?”
Sabrina glanced at her over one shoulder. “Calan Gaeaf. The edge of winter. Ghosts, bad omens, dreadful stories, and all the things proper people pretend not to enjoy.”
Archie, with a lazy smile and mischievous eyes, said, “You forgot cheating.”
“That is not seasonal,” Sabrina said. “That is talent.”
Duncan, who had so far maintained the increasingly impossible position of being present without appearing involved, remained quiet. Ceci aimed her sharp eyes at him. “You were going to let me sit through this evening without mentioning it was Halloween.”
“Is that the American term?”
“Yes.”
He considered that for a moment. “Then I was going to let you discover it.”
“That sounds deliberate.”
“It was.”
Archie rest one hand lightly on the carved back of Ceci’s chair. “Time to be corrupted by local custom.”
“That depends on what the custom is.”
Sabrina began shuffling, the cards making a dry, elegant sound in her hands. “Tonight. Stories. Superstition. Possibly ruin. In certain parts of Wales, people would keep clear of crossroads and churchyards. One does not invite company one cannot dismiss.”
Ceci raised an eyebrow in Duncan’s direction. Momentarily forgetting they share a secret that should not be acknowledged. The hand Archie had rested on the chair moved just enough to avoid brushing her shoulder, though she felt the near-miss all the same. A shiver ran through her body.
“Halloween at home usually means cheap candy and children in polyester,” she said.
“That sounds grim,” Sabrina replied.
Sabrina began to deal.
“So,” Archie said, gathering his cards. “As our only foreign element, you’re obliged to contribute something in return. Americans must have Halloween lore.”
“We have a lot of fake cobwebs.”
“That cannot possibly be the best of you.”
“Usually not.”
He smiled at that, and that close to him, she could see the warmth in his skin more clearly, the gold in his hair catching the lamp light, the unembarrassed attention in his face whenever he looked at her. He was too easy to watch.
Duncan, by contrast, had the kind of stillness that made movement feel significant only when it happened.
He held his cards in long, careful fingers, dark eyes lowered for a moment to the hand before lifting again to hers.
Even seated, he gave the impression of height, of line, of something honed rather than merely handsome.
Sabrina said, “Dax knows all the proper grim country stories, but he hoards them.”
“I do not hoard them.”
“You ration them in a way that becomes indistinguishable.”
“That is because your standards are chaotic.”
“They are generous.”
“To yourself.”
Ceci laughed before she could help it. Duncan’s gaze shifted to her at once. The glance lasted only a second, but warmth slipped through before he could shutter it. She looked down at her cards, annoyed at how the air around the table had become charged.
“Do Welsh ghost stories differ much from English ones?” she asked, because the question is safer than the table felt. Archie leaned back, one ankle resting over the opposite knee. “You ask that as if the English are ever to be trusted with folklore.”
“Fair.”
Sabrina lays down her first card with a flourish. “In Wales, the dead often have better manners.”
“Unlike the living,” Duncan said.
“Especially unlike the living.”
Ceci glanced at her own hand and tried to remember the rules Sabrina rattled off too quickly, on purpose.
“I’ve already forgotten how to play.”
“No, you haven’t,” Sabrina said. “You’re trying to look harmless.”
“That is an extraordinary accusation.”
Sabrina’s only reply was a cat-like quirk to her mouth. Ceci caught herself before the protest became too real. “I resent how often that works as a description.”
Archie laughed softly. “I don’t think harmless was ever available to you.”
The line landed before she could defend herself against it. Across the table, Duncan placed his next card down with unnecessary precision. Sabrina saw everything. Ceci knew she did because the corner of her mouth moved once, and then settled.
“Dax, tell us about the ruins,” Sabrina said, as if it were the most natural conversational turn in the world. “People always say such nights make old places behave strangely.”
Ceci shifted into her chair. “That feels pointed.”
“Because it is.”
Duncan looked at Sabrina. “Leave it.”
His tone was quiet, but Ceci heard the difference in it immediately. This was the voice he used when he was asking for something under the cover of command. Sabrina heard it too. She studied him for half a beat, then turned her attention back to the cards.
“As you wish,” she said, which meant, Ceci suspected, as she wished. Archie glanced between them and said, in an almost lazy tone, “There’s that feeling again, as if I’ve entered the evening in the middle of a chapter someone tore out.”
That pulled Ceci’s eyes to him. His expression was light. His eyes were not. She thought, suddenly and with unnerving clarity, that he was a man who could pretend ease while taking in more than anyone around him realized. A person could get lost underestimating that.
“You have,” she said.
Archie lifted his brows, faintly pleased.
Good,” he said. “I was beginning to worry I’d missed the interesting part.”
For a moment, the room narrowed. Sabrina still shuffled and spoke.
Archie still sat loose-limbed in his chair.
Firelight still trembled against the glass.
Yet under all of it ran the knowledge of what Duncan knew and what he had chosen, for now, to keep.
He held her gaze just long enough to make the silence feel private.
Then Sabrina said, “Well. Since no one is being properly cooperative, I shall supply the macabre myself. Do you know of the Hwch Ddu Gwta?”
Ceci tore her eyes away from Duncan with more effort than the moment deserved. “I absolutely do not.”
“The tail-less black sow,” Archie said, delighted. “A seasonal menace of excellent character.”
“That sounds made up.”
“Most worthy things do,” Sabrina replied. “She roams the night with a headless woman and punishes the slow-footed.”
Ceci laughed. “That is so specific.”
“It’s local color,” Archie said.
“It’s blackmail by folklore,” Duncan said. Sabrina pointed one slender finger at him. “And yet you ran faster than any of us when we were children.”
“That was strategy.”
“That was terror.”
Ceci looked between them. “You two did this together?”
“Everything unwise,” Sabrina said, “he did with me.”
Duncan said dryly, “That is not a sentence one ought to say with pride.”
She smiled at him over the cards. “And yet.”
The ease between them caught at Ceci more than it should.
It was not romantic. That was clear even to her from the outside.
It was older than that, stranger in some ways, more intimate than others.
Sabrina belonged in Duncan’s life in a manner that did not ask permission from anybody watching.
For reasons she did not care to examine too closely, that comforted her.
It also irritated her.
Not because she envied Sabrina exactly. Because she envied the ease of being known over time. She had spent years being competent in rooms full of people and still gone home feeling curiously untouched by any of them.
Archie, as if sensing the line of her thought without knowing its content, said beside her, “Don’t let it alarm you. They’ve always been like this.”
She turned toward him. “You say that as if it should be reassuring.”
“It is,” he said. “If Duncan disliked you, he’d be far easier to read.”
She should not laugh at that.
She did.
And because she did, she failed to notice that Archie had rested his hand on the table until his fingers, spread carelessly near the edge of her cards, brushed the side of her wrist.
The contact was brief.
Accidental, perhaps.
She still felt it all the way to her core. Archie did not apologize. He only glanced at her, quick and almost questioning, as if to see whether she’d pull away.
She didn’t.
Duncan saw it.
That much was obvious from the fact that he stopped in the middle of reaching for his next card and finished the movement a shade too carefully. Sabrina, meanwhile, laid down a winning hand she had no right to possess and looked angelic about it.
“You’re cheating,” Archie said.
She widened her eyes. “On a night devoted to the uncertain boundary between worlds. I would never.”
“You absolutely would,” Duncan said. Ceci studied the cards on the table. “I don’t even know enough to accuse her properly.”
“Then the lesson is simple,” Archie said. “Never trust a beautiful woman who shuffles too well.”
Sabrina inclined her head. “At last. Something useful from you.”
Archie turned his palm upward on the table in surrender, and for one absurd second Ceci thought he may reach for her hand outright.
He didn’t.
But the possibility of it remained there, bright and unhelpful.
“Tell me something properly eerie, then,” she said, because if the evening continued its present course, she was going to forget how to hold a cup without making a spectacle of herself. “If this is your Welsh Halloween, there must be more than one black sow and a headless woman.”
Sabrina began at once. She spoke of old customs, white stones thrown into dying embers, names marked and searched for in the ash the next morning.
Archie added to it, half folklore, half embellishment, with enough confidence that Ceci could not tell where one ended and the other began.
At some point, Duncan, despite himself, was drawn in as well, correcting a detail here, offering another there; his low voice gave weight even to the stories he claimed not to believe.
The room deepened around it all. Outside, the dark pressed closer to the glass.
Inside, the candles burned lower. It became oddly easy to imagine the house ringed by older fears, by harvest nights and superstition, by all the unnamed things that had once made people quicken their step between door and gate.
Ceci thought of waking on the hill. Of the ticket taker who should not have been there.
Of the year on her phone. Of the man next to her who knew the truth and had not betrayed it. Another shiver ran through her before she could stop it.
Duncan noticed immediately. He rose without comment, crossed to the sideboard, and came back with a folded shawl from the back of another chair. He paused behind her just long enough to give her the chance to refuse.
She didn’t.
He settled it over her shoulders carefully, and the backs of his fingers grazed the side of her neck in the process. The touch was light. It was also the most aware she had become of her own skin all evening.
“Thank you,” she said, and hated how soft the words came out.
“You’re cold.”
His hand lingered at the edge of the shawl for a second longer than necessary before he stepped away. Archie had gone quiet beside her. He wasn’t sulking, nothing so childish, only watchful now, the line of his mouth altered by thought.
Sabrina, who had seen the entire thing and would almost certainly spend the next week enjoying it, said into her cards, “Well. This is already better than Christmas.”
Ceci closed her eyes for one dangerous second. When she opened them, Archie was looking at her again. Duncan had resumed his seat. Sabrina was cheating with the serenity of a saint.
And somewhere in the middle of a Welsh Halloween she should not be living through, in a house that should not yet know her, with a man on either side of the truth for reasons neither of them fully understood, Ceci felt the evening slip fully beyond the point where it could be called ordinary at all.
Which, she thought as she lifted her cards and discovered she had somehow acquired the winning hand without knowing when, was perhaps the first honest thing about it.