Chapter 16 Amelia
SIXTEEN
AMELIA
Mirabelle broke the news.
“I’m so sorry, love. Your momma didn’t make it,” she said through glistening tears.
Amelia denied it at first.
It was a trick. A ruse. A sick joke.
Haunting silence came next, that moment before the surge, and then grief took her under with a wail she didn’t recognize as her own. Her knees crashed to the floor, and the rest vacated her memory with shades of black. Black behind her eyes at night. Black from the curtains drawn shut by day.
That first night, Amelia sobbed into a pillow so hard she nearly smothered herself. Mirabelle had been there to remind her to breathe and, in the days to come, cradled her, cried with her, drew hot baths, hummed sweet songs.
Liam Moriarty offered his condolences with white peonies and a kind note. Even Jack apologized for her loss. His bright blue eyes had gleamed with sincerity, and Amelia accepted it politely but asked to be left alone.
They all came, all except Emory.
Like a pebble in her shoe, his absence grew more obvious with each passing day. That she craved his comfort added complexity to the pain. Amelia wanted to curl up beside him and sleep for days, but it was foolish to seek shelter in such a hard man.
She saw Emory only once in passing. So engrossed in his inner world, he hadn’t seen her sipping tea at the kitchen island.
She tried to make herself small, but even her diminished presence disturbed him.
Emory turned to her as if expecting someone else.
Whatever he meant to say perished on parted lips, so he tipped his head and let her be, and Amelia thought that was just as well.
After a week, her heartache hardened to a dead calm. Amelia laid awake most nights and stared at the ceiling until pastel dawn spilled through the window.
Horrible questions kept her awake. Had it been quick? Quick enough her mom wasn’t afraid or in pain? Had she been alone? Was her father alone now too? Some nights she tried to sleep but saw Brian in her dreams choking on clots of blood and with the light leaving his eyes.
Tonight, sleep was hard won for different reasons.
Emory had business in Las Vegas tomorrow and planned to take her with him.
Mirabelle had told her that afternoon and even echoed Emory’s logic: “It’s safer this way.
” But that wasn’t Mirabelle’s truth, only Emory’s, so she faltered when she said it, and Amelia dwelled on that fracture of doubt.
She tossed to her side and stared at the clock.
2:32 AM.
The numbers glowed like red embers. Another day and night in the underworld. Time marched on, but that hardly seemed to matter. Amelia pulled the stiff covers over her head.
Everyone there meant well in the worst ways. The bed’s starchy sheets were pulled taut against a hard mattress and chaffed her bare legs.
Brian’s sweater had mysteriously vanished too, whisked away to the dry cleaners, or so Mirabelle speculated because she didn’t honestly know. What a useless gesture. It’d come back smelling like any other striped sweater, but not like Brian.
In its place, Mirabelle had taken Amelia’s measurements and ordered clothes. Boxes came for days on end, big and small and filled with beautiful things. It was a grand luxury in the confines of a nightmare.
“You’ll want for nothing. Even Emory agrees,” Mirabelle had told her.
Oh, how she’d beamed at that last bit, a bold effort to engender trust. She hung her fragile hopes on it, and Amelia whacked them down with a biting retort.
“You mean nothing except my home and family, right?”
Mirabelle had excused herself then and came back later with puffy eyes and a sniffly nose, but a fresh round of bright smiles and another big box. Amelia had burned with shame and apologized, but Mirabelle feigned ignorance at the slight.
Amelia shot up from the sheets. The clock with its colon-for-eyes blinked flatly at her. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, got on the floor, and, beneath the nightstand, yanked the clock’s cord from the wall.
A muffled conversation filtered from down below.
Emory’s deep and commanding voice was unmistakable to her after her time there.
Amelia often heard it rumbling through the mansion and sometimes his resonant laughter too.
She pressed her ear to the floor and steadied her breaths to listen but couldn’t make out the other voice.
With a pang of curiosity, Amelia pushed from the floor, and the voices melted into the darkness as she tiptoed across the room. She cracked open the door and hovered beneath the frame.
Angry footfalls paced the foyer below. She knew the cadence of Emory’s stride and the way his boots hit the floor. He’d once pounded after her like that.
The night he held her in his arms and slid his fingers inside. The night he almost kissed her. The night she almost ran away.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Liam said. “Damon murdered that boy, and if you didn’t have a vested interest, he would’ve done the same to Amelia. The very thing you were trying to protect her from would’ve happened anyhow.”
Brian. Like his sweater, Amelia assumed they forgot. Her heartbeat hastened as she crept into the hall.
“I already admitted Damon was a mistake,” Emory argued, “that I should’ve done it myself. What would you’ve done?”
“Oh, good! No harm, no foul then. It all goes away.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“A prayer that the motel clerk doesn’t get chatty when he wakes up.”
“If he wakes up.”
Eric. Amelia didn’t know that Damon had hurt him too. The poor boy was so young.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Liam warned. “You better pray he kicks it. Her being here set something in motion we’re not prepared to deal with.”
“It was already in motion.”
“Don’t be so fucking na?ve. There’s something else going on. You and I both know it. The things the Velascos are doing, have already done, are beyond the pale. Philippe was a lot of things, but never a butcher. If he weren’t dead, I’d say it reminds me of—”
“Enough!” Emory barked. “Leave it alone.”
The hallway darkened, Amelia could’ve sworn. Emory stopped pacing, and silence stretched on. She coiled her arms around her middle to ward off the chill, and the starchy bed seemed a splendid comfort, but her legs carried her farther down the hall instead.
“Answer my question,” Emory said. “What would you’ve done?”
“You know my thoughts. You brought Amelia here, went through all the trouble. Make her sing, Emory.”
Amelia’s stomach twisted. Dressed as a threat, it hid the depraved. A bad man might’ve seized on it as permission to do awful things, whatever those might be.
“Answer the fucking question. If you’d been at that party, seen her huddled in a pile of bodies and crying for help, what would you’ve done? Left her for them, left her to die? Is that the kind of man you are?”
Judgment dripped from Emory’s questions that came wrapped in so much affront. Something gave way in Amelia. A softening of the resistance, a fissure in the barricade.
She slumped against the wall with a winded breath, as if all the air had been knocked from her lungs. What kind of man was Emory Holt? She couldn’t say anymore.
Emory exhaled a quiet, scathing laugh. “Nothing? Alright. I’m going to bed.”
“My point still stands,” Liam said. “I told you to cool off a bit, not ice her out. You’ve made no effort to speak to her since she decked you.”
“She doesn’t trust me.”
“Why the hell should she? Try harder. You’re down here raising hell on her behalf. Look at you, tough guy. You’re up my ass about it. I would have helped her, by the way. Fuck you for thinking otherwise.”
“Fuck you too, old man.”
Their voices rose with dueling heat, so close to fisticuffs, but they called a truce with laughter, and the tempo of their banter turned on a dime. A patting sound followed, the telltale way men embraced—hard hugs with open palms whacking each other’s backs.
Emory muttered something Amelia couldn’t hear before his boots sounded up the stairs. She froze, suddenly aware how far she’d drifted down the hall, too far to make it back to bed.
Emory rounded the corner in quick strides but stopped with a shuffled step when he saw her there. His hair was combed back and gathered neatly at the nape of his neck. In a white t-shirt and jeans, he smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and whiskey.
Amelia didn’t know what his business outings entailed, only that they mostly occurred after dark and kept him out late.
She remained rooted halfway down the hall in an oversized t-shirt that barely covered her ass. At least she was wearing underwear unlike their first encounter in that same hall.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she explained, though Emory hadn’t said anything and refused to come closer.
He stared at her impassively, but in the pale moonlight, Amelia swore he looked mildly relieved.
How convenient for him to have revealed his motivations indirectly. He could divulge how he felt in a confessional of his own making as she listened through the veil. Emory wasn’t a coward, though. He withheld deliberately.
That pebble smarted again, sharp and paining her more than she cared to admit.
“I imagine not,” Emory said flatly. He crossed his arms and chewed the inside of his cheek.
“It wasn’t the noise. I was already awake.”
“I know.” He glanced at her bedroom door cracked open and probably glimpsed the sheets in a tangle. “I hope you can get some rest.”
Emory resumed hurried strides and breezed past her on the way to his bedroom.
“Why didn’t you come?” Amelia demanded more than asked as he reached his door. She tried to banish the hurt from her voice but couldn’t match his stoic detachment.
Emory turned to her with a look of confusion, but his shoulders tensed as if steeling himself against accusations. For such a strong man, he couldn’t carry the weight of his guilt. He needed her to relieve him of it. Amelia refused.