six
Mabel Darling
“Do I need to cuff you to the bed again?” Baron asks. “I’m going out.”
I scowl at him, cuddling Seeley to my chest like a shield. “How are we ‘equal partners’ if I have to be tied up every time you leave the house?”
“How are we partners if you try to escape when we leave the house?”
“I’m not going to escape,” I grumble.
“Good,” he says, coming over to the table where I sit. “Because you’ll never be able to. Run to the end of the earth, and I’ll be waiting when you get there.”
He grips my hair and tugs my head back, planting a kiss on my forehead that’s more possessive than any forehead kiss has the right to be.
“I’ll be back soon.”
And then he’s gone, phone still in hand, door banging shut behind him.
Seeley slinks from my arms and strolls over to lie directly in front of the refrigerator, like he’s trying to place himself in the most inconvenient spot in the house.
I shake my head and watch the door for a minute, considering whether to follow Baron.
He’s acting strange. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going last night, and he didn’t explain at all just now. He never goes out for a run more than once a day.
I woke up when he got home from his run earlier, only to find that Duke had tied me to the bed.
That was upsetting, though not wholly unexpected.
After my one half-hearted attempt to leave from school in October, they rarely let me out of their sight, and they’ve tied me up every time they’ve had to leave me alone at home.
That was my punishment, right up until now.
Of course Baron wanted sex when he saw me like that, and it was worse than usual, since I’m already so torn up, and Duke wasn’t there to soothe me in the aftermath of his brother’s torment.
In light of his strange behavior since we got here, though, the fact that he still wanted sex is a normalcy that offers a small comfort as I sit here alone, untethered for the first time in months.
It sets me on edge, that he just took my word so easily, believed I wouldn’t leave. What is he planning?
He might want me to leave, having come up with a particularly gruesome torture as punishment if I do. If I leave, he’ll have an excuse to employ it. If I don’t, he’ll have proof for Duke that I stay because I want to, that I could have left, but I chose not to.
Or maybe he was simply distracted, as he seemed. That’s so unlike Baron, though, it makes me even more ill at ease.
He could be toying with me, trying to make me question everything like he did before. If that’s the case, he’s succeeding.
But where is Duke?
Is that part of the plan, or did he run away this time?
He’s been subdued lately, so unhappy that even Baron noticed.
And he wanted to go back to Faulkner so badly.
Maybe he used the opportunity, cuffed me to the bed and left while Baron was away.
I debate whether Baron would tie his brother up if he tried to run, or if he’d try to fix things. Is he a captive too?
I pace the hallway, and after a minute, Seeley joins me, looking as distraught as I feel. When he reaches the wooden staircase at the end of the hall on our fourth pass, he perches on the bottom step, watching me. I join him, and he bounds up the stairs, so I follow.
We all slept in the master bedroom downstairs, but there are two more bedrooms up here, a bath, an office.
The house is nice, and set up well, with almost everything to make it a home.
I use the restroom and wash my hands, then open the medicine cabinet.
A generic assortment stares back at me—rubbing alcohol, bandages, antacids, painkillers, antibiotic ointment.
A small perfume bottle is wedged into the corner, dark smoky glass in the shape of an angel with a polished, round golden head as the lid.
With shaking fingers, I move aside the box of aspirin and take it out.
When I turn it over, the back of the lid features a tiny black spider, its legs thin as threads of silk, the hourglass like a dot of blood in its center.
Men don’t kill with poison.
I tear open the other drawers, the cabinets, rifling through them recklessly, searching for something, anything, though I can’t say what I’m looking for.
A sign she was here, that it wasn’t Baron or Duke who placed the perfume there, that I’m not crazy.
I stop when I find a black tube of lipstick with gold trim in one of the drawers.
I take it out and pull off the cap, rolling up the stick of hot pink wax, the end blunted and smeared from where it was used.
I stare at it a long moment, then pocket it and go back downstairs. I sit at the kitchen table with my phone and dial.
For a minute, it only rings, and I don’t think she’ll answer. At last, the call connects.
“Cecily,” I say, sinking back in my chair in relief. “You picked up.”
There’s a long silence, long enough that I have to tap my screen and check that the call is still going.
“Are you still with those two monsters?” she asks at last.
“Yes, but—”
“Do you need help?” she asks. “Are you trying to get away from them?”
“No, but—”
“Then I have nothing to say to you.”
“Please,” I blurt. “I just need to know.”
“I told you, I don’t know anything about it,” she says. “It was there the last time I checked. I don’t know how long it was before you came over. I didn’t want to see it, so I didn’t look at it again. If it was gone, one of those… Boys took it.”
“But you just left.”
She sighs. “I’m sorry, Mabel. Maggie was coming for the summer, and I couldn’t have her in a house where those monsters had access. God knows what they’d do to her. I couldn’t live with myself if they got to her the way they did you.”
She doesn’t say the other part: the way they did her.
“I’m sorry,” I say, dropping my forehead into my palm. “I know you don’t understand, but—”
“No, I don’t understand,” Cecily says. “After everything they’ve done to our family… To be honest, I understand your mother more than I understand you.”
“Aurora is not my mother,” I say stiffly.
No, my mother wouldn’t swallow a bottle of pills rather than face another day of seeing her daughter destroyed by the Dolces.
My mother fled with her husband in the dead of night, leaving me to fend for myself.
Don’t worry, Mom. I always did.
“Yes, well, I am Magnolia’s,” my aunt says. “It was my responsibility to protect her, so I did that. It wasn’t my responsibility to take care of that mess you brought to my house.”
“You’re right,” I say, straightening and picking up the lipstick. I wrap my fingers in a fist around it. “I’m sorry they hurt you. I never imagined they’d do that. I shouldn’t have led them here.”
She’s quiet a long moment. Finally, she says, “Thank you for your apology.”
She doesn’t offer forgiveness, and I neither expect it nor ask for it. I have a different request.
“Can you tell her something for me?” I ask. “I know this was your house before it burned, which means it’s really her and Sullivan’s house more than mine. But tell her not to come here. Not ever. Even when I’m not here, it’s not safe.”
“I will,” she says. “I’ll tell them both.”
“Can I ask you one more question?” I say, then go ahead before she can refuse. “Do you remember Dahlia?”
“The Delacroix girl?”
“Yes, her,” I say, relieved. “Were we friends? When I was a kid, was I friends with her?”
She’s quiet a moment. “I remember your mother saying that.”
“What happened to her?” I ask. “They sent her to boarding school, and she never came back. Why?”
“That’s something I don’t know,” she says.
“Okay. Thanks anyway. I’m sorry, Aunt C.”
“I know. Goodbye, Mabel.”
She hangs up, and I sit there staring off for a while. I could find her if I wanted, find where she went. Baron could, anyway.
But if I told him to find her, he’d want to know why, and I can’t put her in more danger.
There’s no reason I need to know, anyway.
She was a lifeline for me for a long time, but that line has been severed.
When I left Cedar Crest, the hospital where I had to go when I had my mental breakdown, I couldn’t go back home, and I couldn’t go to college yet because it was summer.
I didn’t have the strength to find somewhere else to go, but I knew I had an aunt in Maine, so I drove all the way there without stopping.
I showed up on her doorstep with nothing but Seeley Boots and my Prius, and she welcomed me in without question.
She must have known from my mom what was happening to me back here, but she never pushed me for answers, for rent money, for anything.
She just opened the door. She said that’s what family does.
So, when campus closed again the next summer, I packed up everything and came back.
I couldn’t go home. They were there. So I came here, and I kept coming, and she kept a room for me.
And I led them straight to her.
That’s the worst part. I should have run again after they came to the ice cream shop.
I should have never toyed with them. I just never thought they’d hurt her.
I thought they’d come for me, that they wanted me and only me.
So I don’t blame Aunt Cecily for her coldness.
She’s not my mom. She’s not responsible for me, and she wasn’t even before I turned eighteen. I’m on my own, just like I always was.
I slip my hand into my pocket, wrapping my fingers around the dark angel.
I imagine spraying it in a man’s face, watching him choke and gasp for air, fall to the floor.
His face turns red and then blue as he convulses, spittle flying from his lips, his eyes begging for mercy as his hands claw at his throat.
At last he goes still, his tongue protruding, the tip just starting to turn black. I smile.
Then I get up and go outside and bury the lipstick in the trash.
A while later, I hear tires on gravel, and I know Duke is home.
Seeley comes trotting in, tail up, and stares at the door expectantly.