Chapter 13
Ruby
I last forty-seven hours before I go back to the basement.
Forty-seven hours of telling myself it was pipes. Old buildings make sounds. Maybe furniture shifting on an uneven floor. Maybe a stray cat that got in through a vent. Forty-seven hours of rational explanations stacked in a neat row, each one capped and labeled, each one completely full of shit.
Because pipes don't breathe. Cats don't drag furniture across concrete with weight.
It's Friday. Two days since the hallway.
Two days since Nash kissed me against a wall, lifted me off the ground, pressed the full length of his cock against me through his jeans, and told me he'd decide when I was ready.
Since I almost came without him touching me below the waist. Two days since "yes sir" left my mouth stripped of every joke I've ever hidden behind, and he watched me walk to my room with eyes that made my skin burn.
Two days, and he hasn't touched me since.
He makes my coffee in the morning. Gives me rides to Amaranth.
He takes the wall. Watches. But the knee taps are gone.
The lingering glances in the mirror are gone.
The heat that built between us all week has been replaced by something careful, measured, controlled.
Nash is behind the wall again, and this time the wall is thicker.
I keep catching him looking at me. Not the steady hold from before. Quick glances that cut off the second I turn my head. His jaw tight. His posture locked. The distance is deliberate, and that's what makes it worse because it means he's choosing it.
He regrets the kiss. The thought lands in my chest and stays there, heavy. Cold.
Nash drops me at Amaranth at nine and rides to the clubhouse for a war room session. He'll be back by noon. The shop doesn't normally open until noon, but Frankie booked an early client today. Some custom piece she's been designing for weeks. She'll be at her station by ten, focused and occupied.
Which means I have a window. And I need one, because if I sit at my station thinking about Nash's mouth on my throat for one more hour I'm going to lose my mind.
At ten-fifteen, Frankie's machine is buzzing. I wait four minutes.
"Running to grab more transfer paper," I call over my shoulder. "Back in ten."
She nods without looking up. I push through the front door, walk around the side of the building to the stairwell entrance, and stand at the top of the stairs.
The basement door is one flight down. Closed. With the same padlock Frankie keeps on it. I walk down. Pull a bobby pin out of my hair. Bend it. Work the shackle.
Twenty-two seconds later, the padlock clicks open.
The basement is dim. There's a single lamp on a table against the far wall.
The space is larger than I expected with brick walls and a concrete floor.
There's also a bed against the left wall with actual sheets and a hand-stitched quilt.
A small bookshelf that's full and a mini fridge humming in the corner.
In the center of the room, sitting in an old leather armchair with his legs crossed and a ham sandwich in one hand, is a man.
He's pale. Genuinely, structurally pale, the kind that suggests sunlight is a concept he's familiar with in theory. Dark hair, an angular face, and sharp features currently arranged into an expression of total, frozen alarm. He's holding the ham sandwich the way you'd hold a grenade.
We stare at each other.
I know his face. Every member of the club has a photo somewhere, a story attached, a name spoken with weight. Leo. The one who didn't make it out of the Holloway building. The one Frankie doesn't talk about. Whose absence sits in every room she enters like a chair no one moves.
He's alive. In Frankie's basement. Eating a ham sandwich.
"So," I say. "You're the breathing."
He blinks. Sets the sandwich down with the precise care of a man calculating exits and finding none.
"Ruby." He says my name like a man seeing a ghost, except he's the ghost. His eyes are wide. Panicked. "You're not supposed to be down here."
"And you're supposed to be dead." My voice comes out steadier than my hands. "You died at the Holloway building. There was a funeral. People grieved."
The stray. Frankie meeting Arden this morning to pick up supplies. The padlock she checks every night before she goes upstairs. Eleven months of Frankie carrying something heavy behind those dark eyes, and I thought it was grief.
It wasn't grief. It was him.
"Frankie knows," I say. It lands flat. Obvious. "She's been hiding you."
"She saved me."
"And Arden."
Leo's jaw tightens. "Arden turned me. Frankie took me in. Nobody else knows."
"Turned you into what?"
Leo doesn't answer. His mouth presses into a line.
"Can you explain the rest? Because I still need to know why you look like you haven't seen the sun since the Clinton administration."
Something shifts in his expression. "The second Clinton administration or the first?"
"Does it matter?"
"It does if we're establishing a timeline." He glances at the stairs. "Frankie's going to kill me for real when she finds out you're down here."
"Frankie didn't tell me anything. I broke in."
"That doesn't make it better."
"It makes it more impressive. That padlock took me twenty-two seconds."
I step fully into the room and close the door. The air is cool, cooler than it should be, with a faint smell underneath the mustiness that I can't identify. Something metallic. Something that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
"Are you a vampire?" I ask.
The question exits my mouth before I can stop it.
The pale skin. A basement dwelling. That faint metallic smell.
The fact that I watched Arden sniff a photograph weeks ago and heard him say old blood, and I've been building a case file about this town that I've been too sane to open until right now.
Leo's expression goes very still. A living person would have laughed.
"Frankie is a witch," I say. "The candles. Sage. The way she touches things and they respond. She's a witch. You're down here because you can't go outside, and you can't go outside because you're a fucking vampire."
"I want to point out that you're handling this extremely calmly."
"I'm not calm. I'm in shock. The calm is a performance. Underneath this, approximately forty percent of my brain is screaming." I pull the wooden chair out and sit because my legs are done. "A witch and a vampire. In a basement. In Willowridge, Mississippi."
"A witch and a vampire isn't the combination I would have picked either." He picks up the sandwich again. Takes a bite. Winces. Presses a fist to his sternum. "I'm UNDEAD and I still get heartburn. How is that fair?"
"You're a vampire with heartburn."
"The ham doesn't help. But the ham is the only thing keeping me civilized, Ruby.
The blood situation is... managed. But there's something about processed deli meat that holds the whole operation together.
" He rubs his chest. "Frankie says the heartburn is psychosomatic.
I say the heartburn is the last human thing I have and I'm keeping it. "
I laugh. Too loud, bouncing off the brick walls. The absurdity of it cracks something in my chest, and the laugh keeps going until my eyes sting.
"Don't tell Frankie about the extra ham," he says. "She's trying to regulate my diet."
"Frankie is monitoring your deli intake. That's either a nurse or a girlfriend."
Something raw crosses his face. "It's complicated."
"Everything in this town is complicated. I'm starting to think Willowridge runs on complications the way other towns run on tax revenue."
The stairs creak above us. Footsteps descend. The door opens, and Frankie is there. She looks at me. Looks at Leo.
She looks at the picked padlock.
"I heard something two days ago," I say. "I came back to check."
"I know." She steps in. Crosses to Leo. Puts her hand on his shoulder with a tenderness that carries eleven months of impossible caregiving. I look away.
"How much did he tell you?" she asks.
"Enough. Vampire. Eleven months. The ham sandwich is emotional support, and the heartburn is the last human thing he has."
"It's acid reflux," Leo mutters.
"Also, for the record, I know you're a witch.
" I cross my arms. "The candles that light themselves.
Sage that never burns down. The way plants grow toward you when you walk past them.
I've known for months. Honestly, I should get a medal.
Or a plaque. 'Ruby Leighton: successfully identified a vampire AND a witch in the same building using nothing but observation and an unhealthy attention to detail. ' The FBI should be recruiting me."
Frankie's mouth twitches. Then breaks. She laughs, short, surprised, the kind that escapes before she can catch it.
"There it is," I say. "Frankie Devereaux laughing. Leo, did you see that? Mark the date."
"I saw it," Leo says from his chair. "Historic."
Frankie shakes her head, but the tension in her shoulders loosens. She looks at me with those dark eyes that see six things at once. Underneath the calm, I can see what this is costing her. She's afraid I'll tell someone.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay what?"
"Okay, I won't tell anyone. Your secret is my secret. Okay, whatever you need." The words come out easily. Automatically. "Someone has to know. Might as well be me."
"No conditions?"
"None. You saved someone you love. That's the whole story. The rest is details, and we'll get to them when you're ready."
Frankie's hand reaches for mine. Squeezes once, hard. Lets go.
"Come upstairs," she says. "My client is waiting."
She goes. Leo and I look at each other.
"She's going to make you soup," he says. "When Frankie trusts someone, she feeds them. The soup is aggressive."
"I can handle aggressive soup."
"You say that now."