CHAPTER 45 #5
“Yes.” He pushed up from his chair and helped me remove the stiff leather cushions, arranging them in a row to form a bed. “You’re not sleeping here. You can sleep on the mattress,” he said, folding out the bed.
“Be serious. Look.” I pointed to the row of cushions, which must’ve only measured about four feet in length. “You’ve got to be over six feet tall. It’ll be like sleeping on a dollhouse bed for you.”
“Six-foot-two. And I’ll be fine.” From the closet, he pulled down a stack of sheets and unfolded them onto the mattress. He returned to the closet for four pillows, handing off two to me.
Before he could stop me, I plopped down onto the cushions. “Look, you see? It suits me better.”
“Up on the bed.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll be fine.”
“On the bed. Now.”
The deadly authority in his voice prodded something deep inside of me. Something that begged to be cracked open and cut loose. A flash of fantasy slipped through my mind, of him holding my throat, spouting off commands in that voice.
“You’ll have to haul my dead rotting corpse there.”
“I’m quite familiar with the task.” Lips tight, he bent forward and to my utter shock, slid his hands beneath me, lifting me up into his arms.
I let out an unattractive squawk as he threw me into the air, my skirt flying up around the spandex shorts I’d worn underneath, and the soft, cushy mattress caught my fall. “Talk about stubborn.”
He strode over to the fireplace and lit a small flame, stoking it enough that it caught quickly and let off a blaze of radiant heat.
As if mesmerized, he stared back at it and raised his hands, twisting them in front of him.
“I never thought I’d feel warmth again. Not like this.
” In his profile, I caught the slightest curve of his lips.
“My brother used to tease that I was half-dead, for how cold my hands were all the time.”
“You said your brother was taken away and killed?”
The look he cast over his shoulder held an expression of Oh, yeah.
About that. He turned back to face the fire, and I pulled the blanket he’d set out up over myself.
“He was kidnapped when we were about seventeen years old. Boarding school. They sent what we believed were his ashes. For years I questioned whether, or not, they were his. But even if they weren’t, the message was clear. He was gone.”
A cold dread stirred in my stomach, as an image of Bee’s terrified face flashed through my mind. I quickly blinked it away. “I’m so sorry.”
“I blamed myself for what happened to him.”
“Why?” I stared off, wondering if his guilt weighed as heavily as mine. If it ever pressed down on him, drowning him, as it often did for me.
His brows knitted together, and he lowered his hands. “The day he was taken, I fell into one of my episodes. I couldn’t fight back.”
“You were a kid. It wasn’t your fault.”
He shook his head, as if refusing to believe me, then pushed to his feet and strode over to his desk. From one of the drawers there, he withdrew a picture that he handed to me.
I stared down at two adorable boys with dark hair and copper eyes, one with a more prominent dimple on the left, the other more prominent on the right. “You’re identical,” I said, running my finger over the one I knew was Professor Bramwell, based only on his dimple.
“He was three minutes older.”
After examining the two of them side by side, I handed it back. “I couldn’t imagine losing my sister. She’s going to be seventeen this year. I worry what that’ll mean for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s in a sort of boarding school herself now.
A special school designed to help her. She kind of had it rough when my mom died, and …
well, she’s just been lost. Has some mental turmoil to work through.
She, um … found my mother in the bathtub.
” My nerves hummed, as they usually did, with the creeping visual of what I’d actually seen that night.
Except, that time, I felt sliced open, like he could see the ugliness of it all.
The dysfunction that’d felt like a shadow for so many years.
“Anyway, the school has been great for her, but it’s so expensive to keep her there. ”
He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Your mother’s trust pays for her tuition?”
“Trust?” I wanted to laugh at that, but it occurred to me right then how disconnected the two of us were.
How inconceivable it must’ve been for a man like him to imagine a woman living so irresponsibly as to not leave a trust behind for her child.
My world must’ve been as foreign to him as his was to me.
“My mom didn’t have anything when she died.
Her boyfriend, Conner, is Bee’s father. The two of us split tuition. ”
“You pay for your sister’s tuition while going to school?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to admit that I was a couple of months behind.
“It’s why I was so hardball about getting paid in cash.
I don’t want to be that way, but sometimes, you do things out of desperation, you know?
” I tried not to wince at the thought of the video I’d filmed in his class weeks ago. “Or maybe you don’t.”
“Don’t ever feel ashamed of being ruthless in the pursuit of what you want, Lilia. The path to success is rarely a virtuous one.” After returning the picture to its drawer, he fell back into his chair. “And how is this Conner?”
I shrugged. “He’s okay. He sticks around, so I guess I can’t complain. Has some pretty shitty friends, though.”
“They give you a hard time?”
I bit my cheek to keep the repulsion from showing on my face, as Angelo came to mind. “One. He’s the only one who really scares me.”
“What’s his name?” An edge of hostility hardened his voice, and I looked up to see rigid lines of malice darkening his expression. As though it angered him to know the man scared me?
“It doesn’t matter.” Shameful as it might’ve been to say, I liked his defensive reaction.
I’d never relied on a man to protect me.
Ever. But something primal played on the back of my thoughts that went hand in hand with the visual of him choking me, and I found myself oddly turned on by it.
“Anyway, I know what you mean about feeling the guilt, though. I was sixteen when my mom died. I knew things were going downhill with her, and I tried to get her to go to the hospital, but she refused. She was so paranoid of everything and everyone, and …”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Those words hooked themselves in my belly and pulled a blackness from my guts that twisted and writhed. My head begged to ignore it. To cast him off as a liar. I turned away, forcing a smile. “You’re throwing my words back at me.”
“They’re fairly wise words.” He reached down into his desk and brought up a decanter of amber-colored liquid.
I watched him pour a dose into a glass and take a sip, mesmerized by the sheen that I wanted to lick off his lips. Every small gesture, from the lazy swirl of his drink, the way he inhaled the scent, to the gentle press of the glass against his lips, held a provocative undertone. “Can I have some?”
“How far away is twenty-one for you?”
“Only a few weeks.”
He cocked a brow and reached down into the desk for another glass, pouring half as much. “Seeing as I don’t know how you hold your liquor, we’ll start with this.” He handed it off to me, his finger brushing mine when I accepted the drink.
I swirled it just as he had, taking in the woodsy, fruity scent with a subtle hint of what reminded me of caramel.
One small sip, and I closed my eyes, letting the liquor sit on my tongue a moment, where it burned, before I swallowed it back.
“Mmm. That’s good.” I liked the feel of it sliding down my throat into my belly, warm and tingly.
When I opened my eyes, he was staring at me over the rim of his glass. “I’ve never had this before.”
He tipped back his drink, polishing off about half the amount I had left in one sip. “It’s good shit.”
“Can I ask you a question?” The moment he winced, I chuckled and cleared my throat. “Who’s the guy in the autopsy room? He looks familiar.”
“You recognized him without eyeballs?” Not looking my way, he snorted. “Just someone I was asked to examine.”
“I thought I was going to be stuck in there all night with him. I was terrified. And then you came in, and …” I buried the visual of his kiss in another sip of my drink, remembering the taste of his lips on mine. “I was so relieved to see you.”
His lips twitched as if to smile, and his gaze fell as he seemed to slip into thought.
“The dead themselves are harmless. It’s what they leave behind that inspires fear.
” He blinked out of his staring and poured himself another glass of liquor.
“I need to finish my notes. You might consider going to bed, Miss Vespertine. It’s going on midnight. ”
“I wish I would’ve packed a toothbrush. Whiskey will kill any bacteria in my mouth, though, won’t it?”
“I wouldn’t rely on that as a regimen, but I suspect you’ll survive tonight.”
I placed my glass down on a coaster atop the side table next to the couch, where I’d set my phone earlier.
Beneath the blankets, I unlatched my skirt and shimmied out of it, leaving me in the shirt I’d paired with it and my spandex shorts.
As I discarded it on the floor beside me, I noticed him staring at the garment, perhaps thinking that I wore nothing beneath.
I wondered if I should’ve said something about the shorts, that I shifted around a lot when I slept which made my clothes shift so they tended to drive me nuts.
I figured I’d better just leave it alone, particularly when his attention veered back to his notes.
Except, there was the one issue. “I don’t suppose you have anything to secure one of my arms? I don’t want to wander off into the corpse room half-asleep. I’d probably have a heart attack.”
From another drawer of his desk, he pulled out a set of cuffs, presumably the ones he’d used to secure me in that cell. He strode over to the bed and snapped one to the metal frame, the other to my wrist. When he failed to release my arm, I looked up to see him staring down at it.
“ Memento mori ,” he read aloud, running his thumb over my tattoo, his soft caress stirring an irrepressible fire beneath my skin. “Remember you must die.”
“It’s just something I did after my mother passed.”
“A reminder to appreciate life as a gift.”
Smiling, I lowered my gaze. “Some days are easier than others.”
“Having purpose helps. Keeps you from doing foolish things, like dropping out of school.”
I winced at that. “Earlier, when I said that stuff … I was just angry. I didn’t mean to badmouth Professor Gilchrist. You won’t tell her I said those things, will you?”
“No. I won’t say a word about it. So long as you promise not to leave Dracadia.”
I gave a playful smile. “And abandon the opportunity to annoy the hell out of you? Never.”
“Good.” He held up the key to the cuffs and placed it on the side table next to my glass.
If I thought about it, perhaps it was strange asking my professor to cuff me, but it spoke to the level of trust I felt around him. I probably could’ve slept naked and he wouldn’t have laid so much as a finger on me. The man was rigid to a fault, in that respect.
No other male in my life had ever instilled such confidence in them—not even Conner, though I’d have never tested the theory.
I settled into the bed, covers up to my neck, and watched him ease back into his chair. After giving one more glance toward my skirt on the floor, he returned to scribbling his notes, stopping every now and then to glance over at me, and the moment our eyes met, he went back to his writing.
Much as I wanted to keep talking to him, to learn more about this enigmatic man, I didn’t want to bother him while he worked.
In the quiet, sleep weighed heavy on me.
Heavier.
Until at last, I could no longer keep my eyes open.