1. In the Dark #3
Every tired morning. Every Sunday I had lost staring at a wall I kept promising myself I would paint.
Every time I had looked in the mirror and not found myself in it and blamed the flat, scraped woman looking back, blamed her for being weak, blamed her for not being grateful, when the whole time it had been his hand in the dark, helping himself to more of me.
The grief came half a heartbeat behind the cold, and the grief was worse.
The cold was only theft. The grief was every year I had spent apologizing to him for the things he was stealing.
I tried to pull away, but his hand clamped down, holding me in place. His eyes drifted half-closed, and a sound escaped him. Low, satisfied. Hungry.
“God, I’ve missed this.” His voice had gone thick, drugged-sounding. “Those damn wolves kept me away too long. Do you have any idea how hard it was watching you from a distance? Knowing you were there, all that untapped potential, and not being able to touch you? To taste you?”
I couldn’t speak. The pulling was getting worse, that cold emptiness spreading through my limbs, my chest, my mind. I felt myself fading. Becoming less.
His hand moved.
Off my face. Onto my throat. His palm warm against my pulse.
Then lower. Across my collarbone, down the front of my blouse.
He stopped over my heart and held his palm flat against me, the way a man rests his hand on something he means to keep.
Then lower again. Across my ribs. Across my stomach.
The pull deepened in time with his hand.
His fingers found the dip of my hip and the cold spiked.
His palm slid down the front of my thigh and back up on the inside.
His mouth came to the line of my throat.
“This,” he said, against my pulse.
His hand drifted higher.
My body should have moved. I had taught it not to, over three years of him, and it stayed where he had put it.
I had practiced this stillness in a hundred rooms that had locks I owned, lamps I could reach and my own name on the lease.
I had practiced it until it stopped being a decision and became a reflex.
Now the reflex had me. I lay under his hand the way a field lies under weather, and I hated the field, and I hated the weather more.
Down in a place his touch had never once found, a small clean voice that did not sound a thing like fear said, Not. This. Time.
His fingers brushed the inside of my thigh.
Something woke up from that place deep inside me.
Three threads. A part of me. For how long, I don’t know, but I had recognized their existence before. They had mostly been quiet before. They were not quiet now.
His hand drifted higher.
The threads hummed. A chord, struck low and clean under my ribs, three notes at once, golden and silver and onyx, a glossy shade of charcoal black.
I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye.
The chord was not asking me anything. The chord was answering.
To his hand. To what his hand was about to do.
And then something happened.
In the corners of the room, the shadows moved.
Not the way shadows move when a candle flickers. This was purposeful. Deliberate. They seemed to lean toward me, reaching like hands in the darkness, and something else in me stirred in response.
That ancient, primal thing I’d always pushed down. That creature made of shadow and icy fire.
It came up out of me on its own. I did not call it. I did not know how to call it. It heard the chord humming in my chest and it answered, and it did not wait for me.
The effect was immediate. The shadows in the corners surged forward, just for an instant, and Marcus jerked his hand back like he’d been burned. The pulling stopped. The cold retreated.
Marcus stared at me, his gray-green eyes wide with something I’d never seen in them before.
Fear.
Just a flicker. There and gone. But I saw it.
“Well,” he whispered. “That’s new.”
He stood, straightening his jacket, and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Then he smiled, and it was worse than the fear. It was hunger, sharpened now. Eager.
“Rest, sweetheart. You’re going to need your strength.”
He left without another word, taking two of the candles with him. The door locked behind him, and I was alone in the darkness once more.
But the darkness felt different now.
The shadows in the corners were still reaching for me. And for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel afraid of them.
I felt like they were mine.
It should have scared me worse than it did.
A sane woman, bound in the dark, does not look into the corner where the worst of the shadows pool and think there you are, the way you think it when you find a familiar face in a crowd.
But the chord had gone quiet at the sight of them, three low notes settling into place like a hand finding the small of your back in a crowd.
I reached for them instinctively, wanting to pull them closer.
And my hand passed right through the bedpost.
I looked down at my fingers, translucent in the darkness, and understood: whatever Marcus had taken from me, it was more than I could afford to lose. I was fading, becoming a ghost or some weird shit like that. If I didn’t find a way to stop him, there wouldn’t be anything left of me to save.