Chapter 3
I stay pressed against the wall until the ringing stops.
Even then, I don't move. I count the silence in my head, certain it will start again any second, certain this is only the space between one ring and the next rather than the end of it.
An hour, maybe more, passes like that — me, still, back to the plaster, curtains drawn, listening to a house that refuses to give me anything but quiet.
Eventually I make myself peer through the gap in the curtain. The street below is empty. No coat. No camera. No stillness where a man ought to be moving.
It's probably nothing, I tell myself, though I don't believe it even as I think it. A prank. Kids from the town, bored, cruel the way this town is always cruel to me.
I need something to quiet my own mind before it spirals somewhere I can't follow it back from, so I reach for the book on my nightstand — Rebecca, its spine soft and cracked from handling, my grandmother's initials pressed faintly into the cover — and I read until the words blur and my eyes go heavy despite everything, because apparently even terror has a bedtime.
As always, before sleep takes me, I leave the window cracked, just an inch, just enough to let the smell of rain in — that's a ritual older than the fear itself, something my mother apparently used to do, or so I've been told — though I still draw the curtains fully shut, even as they flare gently inward on each gust, ghostlike, pale fabric breathing in the dark.
I fall asleep somewhere in the middle of a sentence.
At first light, I go straight to the window, easing the curtain back a careful inch, bracing myself before I let myself look.
No one. Just wet cobbles, grey sky, a gull complaining somewhere over the rooftops.
I let out a breath I feel like I've been holding all night.
The morning unfolds the way mornings always do here — mechanical, dutiful.
I make breakfast I barely taste. I bathe in the dark, the way I always do.
I dress — plain, practical, my hands too unsteady this morning for all the little buttons the good dresses require — and go down to find my father exactly where I expect him: stretched along the sofa, one arm flung over his eyes, a half-empty bottle balanced on his thigh like it belongs there.
I don't wake him. There's no version of this morning improved by trying.
I'm halfway through wiping down the kitchen counter when the landline starts ringing, down through the floor, from the shop below.
I freeze mid-motion, cloth still in hand.
It's a customer, I tell myself. It's Amara. It's Mrs. Aldridge asking about an order. I make myself walk down the narrow stair anyway, one hand trailing the wall, my heart already picking up its pace before I've even reached the bottom step.
The shop is dim, morning light barely making it past the treated glass. The telephone sits on its little shelf behind the counter, ringing and ringing, and I simply stand there and stare at it the way you'd stare at something that might be venomous.
It stops.
I don't know whether to be relieved or more afraid. I stand there another few seconds, willing myself to breathe normally, and then —
It starts again.
I jump so hard I nearly knock a display box off the counter. My hand hovers over the receiver for a long moment before I finally, foolishly, lift it and press it to my ear.
Silence, first. A held breath on the other end, patient, unhurried.
"Hello?" My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
And then his voice, low and unbothered, as though we're mid-conversation rather than starting one:
"You left your bedroom window cracked open last night. Let the rain smell in." A pause, and I can hear the smile in it even without seeing his face. "Gave me a rather lovely view of you, curled up reading on the rug."
The receiver nearly slips from my hand. I gasp before I can stop myself — that voice, unmistakable, the same one from the shop yesterday — and I slam the phone back onto its cradle so hard the bell inside gives one last startled ring.
My heart is a fist against my ribs. I turn, meaning to check the street, meaning to see if he's still out there somewhere —
And he's already at the door. Standing just outside the glass, one hand resting against the frame, watching me through the pane like he's been there the whole time.
I scream — I can't help it, it tears out of me before I've decided anything at all — and I run, stumbling back through the stairwell door, up into the house, into the living room where my father lies exactly where I left him.
"Papa." I grab his shoulder, shaking him hard enough to rattle the bottle off his leg. "Papa, wake up — please, there's a man outside, he's — Papa, please—"
He doesn't stir. Not a flicker. “Papa— a man is watching me— wake up, please —”
When he finally does move, it's only to slide bonelessly off the sofa entirely, landing in a heap on the floor with a low, contented grunt, as though the rug were exactly where he meant to end up all along.
I'm reaching for him again, some useless instinct still hoping to shake sense into a man who has none left to give, when I hear it.
The bell.
Down in the shop. Ringing once, clear and small, the sound of someone stepping through the front door.
I go completely still.
He's inside.
I shake my father one more time — hard, desperate, his head lolling uselessly against the cushion — and then I hear it. Footsteps. Unhurried. Climbing the stairs from the shop, precise and even, the exact rhythm I heard outside my door last night.
I don't wait to find out if they're coming for the living room.
I'm up and moving before I've fully decided to, out into the hall, down toward my own room, the door slamming and locking behind me with hands that barely cooperate. My window. I need my window.
My dress — the ivory bodice gone soft and creased from sleep, sleeves the color of clotted cream, a deep emerald velvet overlay laced from waist to collar in black cord, the fabric dark as a held breath. My boots are already on, black leather, laced to the ankle. It'll have to do.
There's an old drainpipe running down the back of the building, iron gone rust-dark with age, half-strangled in ivy that's climbed it for longer than I've been alive.
I've used it before, on nights when the stairs felt too loud, too close to my father's door.
I grab my veil from the sill on instinct — sheer black, weighted at the hem — and settle it over my face before I even open the window, because whatever waits for me down there, I refuse to meet it eye to eye.
I climb down carefully, one foot finding the old iron bracket, then the next, the ivy slick with dew under my palms, my skirts bunched awkwardly in one fist the whole way.
Through the mesh of the veil the world is soft and grey, blurred at the edges, and I'm nearly to the ground, nearly free, my boot reaching for the last stretch of wall —
Hands close around my waist.
I shriek, my grip tearing loose from the ivy, and then I'm being lifted, turned, my back slammed against the cold brick hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.
"Careful," he murmurs, close enough that I feel the word more than hear it. "Wouldn't want you cracking that pretty skull open before I've had the chance to."
I keep my eyes down, fixed on the black knot of his tie, refusing — refusing — to look higher.
"Let go of me," I gasp, and shove uselessly against his chest, his shoulders, anything I can reach. When that fails, I grab the hand pinning me and sink my teeth into it, hard, tasting copper.
He doesn't flinch. Doesn't pull away. A low chuckle rumbles out of him instead, delighted, entirely too pleased with himself.
"There she is." His breath stirs the veil at my ear as he leans in, voice dropping to something private, almost tender. "I do like a bit of fight in my things, Ophelia."
The sound of my own name in his mouth sends ice down my spine.
It's barely gone six. The street is empty in the way only a British seaside town at dawn can be — a single gull overhead, the tide still working the harbor somewhere below, no one close enough to hear me if I scream. I try anyway.
"Help—" My voice cracks. "Someone, please, help me—"
He presses closer instead, caging me fully against the wall, and dips his head until I feel him studying the shape of my veiled face like it personally offends him.
"Why do you wear this," he says, quieter now, almost thoughtful, one finger catching the edge of the black lace. "Why won't you look at me?"
I go still, tears spilling hot and fast beneath the veil. "Please," I whisper. "Let me go. Whatever my father owes you — I'll pay it. However much. Please, just—"
He laughs, low and genuinely amused, and the sound of it is somehow worse than anger would have been.
"I'm not a bloody debt collector, love." His thumb drags slow along my jaw, over the veil, deliberate.
"I saw you once. Just once. So beautiful.
So fucking sexy. So hot. And now I want you.
That's the whole of it. There's no ledger to settle, no favor owed — just me, and the fact that I haven't thought about anything else since.
" His voice drops lower still, rough at the edges.
"You can scream all you like. No one's coming to save you from wanting something you don't understand yet. "
"Ophelia Sorrell, is that you?"
The voice cracks through the quiet like a slap — an old woman, shawl pulled tight over her nightclothes, standing a few doors down with a look of pure scandal on her face.
"What on earth do you think you're doing, carrying on like that in the open street?
Children walk this way to school, you know! "
The man goes still for exactly one heartbeat. Then, unhurried, he steps back, releasing me so smoothly it's as though he'd never touched me at all.
"My apologies," he says to the old woman, perfectly pleasant, and turns and walks away down the cobbles without so much as a glance back at me.
The woman turns her disapproval on me instead, tutting under her breath about decency, about how a girl my age ought to know better than to behave like that in public — and I don't answer, can't answer, my whole body still shaking as I stumble back toward the shop door.
It opens at my touch. Not broken. Not forced. Simply — unlocked, though I know, I know I locked it yesterday and didn't unlock it behind me when I first ran up those stairs.
He let himself out this way. Which means he let himself in this way, too.
I stagger inside and press my back to the door, gasping, trying to force air into lungs that don't want to cooperate. I lock the door. It takes a long moment before I notice it — something small and white, sitting face-down on the counter where nothing was sitting before.
I cross to it slowly, my whole body still trembling. A photograph. Turned over, the blank back facing up, and across it, in a narrow, elegant, unmistakably confident hand, someone has written:
I made you mine the moment you weren't looking.
My fingers won't stop shaking as I turn it over.
It's me. Walking down the high street, autumn leaves caught mid-fall around me, one small red leaf resting in my open palm like I'd summoned it there myself. My birthday. My dress, my hair, my face turned just slightly toward the camera —
My eyes.
My own eyes, ice blue, caught in perfect, undeniable focus, staring back at me from the glossy paper.
The scream tears out of me before I even register I'm making a sound.
The photograph drops from my fingers like it's scalded me, fluttering face-up to the floorboards, and I stand there in the middle of the shop, shaking, staring down at my own reflected gaze staring back up at me, and I cannot, for the life of me, look away.