Petrify

39. The Pianist

The Pianist

The silence grows to a deafening roar as the Ghost and I stare at each other in the dark.

The moonlight doesn’t reach this far into the room. It might be the only thing that saves me, that it’s too dark to see clearly the face of my tormentor. Only his sharp cheekbone, the dark hair dusting an angular jaw, a lowered brow over a pitch-black, shadowed eye.

And I can see the flash of rage in that eye.

I’ve stormed past a threshold I shouldn’t have crossed, and now I’ll pay for it.

I run.

I run with my heart in my throat, throwing the mask, hoping he will lunge after that and not me. He curses under his breath at the sound of the plaster hitting the ground.

I don’t waste a second bolting from the room.

The east wing is empty. On purpose, I realize—so that should this happen, there are no witnesses. No one to save me.

Terror pushes me forward, adrenaline already flushing through every little blood vessel, burning through my flesh. I run until I am across the house. I run until I’m at the front door.

If I can get outside, then he can’t corner me. The grounds are too large for him to easily find me. There are tombs in the cemetery; there’s the dead gray wood that encases the estate. I could hide anywhere.

My fingers brush the door handle—

Only for his hand to roughly cover my mouth, dragging me back against him. The scream dies in my throat, and I freeze, losing my balance and falling into his chest. I’m stumbling, but his hold on me is too strong, holding me up.

“That wasn’t very nice, Mallary.”

I don’t fight him, even when my mind screams at me to move.

He’s dragging me backward, away from the door, from freedom.

Into a shadowed alcove off the foyer, the light diminishing so suddenly I begin to wonder if I’ve fainted.

But his breathing is ragged next to my ear, his fingers digging into my skin, and I realize we are just in a dark room.

A dark room I’ve never seen before. No, not a room.

I’m almost blind in the pitch-black of the narrow passageway. He has no issue, leading me through the dark like he knows exactly where he’s going.

Like he walks through these walls all the time.

He lets go of my mouth. He knows I won’t scream.

There’s a creaking staircase he pushes me up, and somehow I don’t fall, and in seconds, he’s shoving me into a small attic-like room. There’s one window—the window looking over the front lawn. Bars encase the outside.

To keep something—someone—in.

My steps falter. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m seeing something forbidden. Something I’m not supposed to. Just like the maintenance worker he killed.

A small disheveled bed in one corner, and paper scattered everywhere.

Lined paper, all handwritten—it’s music.

His music. Books stacked in piles along the wall, the rug threadbare and old, a single exposed lightbulb hanging from the ceiling to illuminate the tiny room, a small table lamp in the corner.

He’s still behind me. His cock is pressed against me, one arm still around my waist, the other gripping my throat. Threatening to steal my air, but I can’t breathe anyway. My mind is spinning with—all of this. The fear for my life, the thrill humming in my limbs, the truth in front of me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but I’m not entirely sure what for. For taking his mask, for running, for his doomed fate, being relegated to this little dark room. For everything.

“Are you?”

He lets go, and weak with panic, I fall to my hands and knees. He follows, shoving my leggings down to my thighs, pressing himself into me. He doesn’t prepare me, doesn’t stretch me on his fingers, but it doesn’t matter. My body eagerly gives in.

“Didn’t get very far, did you?” he says, sheathing himself all the way.

My back arches, my thighs shake. Pathetic whines fall from my lips at every thrust, and I’m pushing my hips back against him, needing his wrath, needing him deeper, harder.

“Too fucking easy,” he says. “You wanted to be caught.”

I nod, tears blurring my vision, because it may as well be true. I don’t know what that makes me. Anyone else would be terrified of him. Anyone else would have screamed the moment he removed his hand from my lips. Instead, I cry out his name, burying my face in the carpet.

I want him to need me. I want to take up all of his thoughts, the way he does mine.

“I hadn’t planned on bringing you here. But now that you are, I want to lock you in and never let you out.”

“Please.”

“Please, what?” He looms over me, nudging his cock deeper. “Please lock you away? Please forgive you? Please go easy on you? You know I can’t do that.”

I don’t expect my orgasm. It crashes through me in seconds, building to an intensity too overwhelming. My hips buck against him, and I fall forward, biting my arm to keep from screaming.

“They’ll never think to look here. They’ll think you’ve gone missing, just like the little worker you’re so fond of. Replace you. And you’ll be all mine.”

He doesn’t slow down. His heavy breathing is muffled by his mask, and I have the urge to do it again, to reach up and tear it away from his face, this wall between us, even when his cock is deep in my pussy.

This spark of disobedience, this frustration, burns hot in my chest, but I can do nothing about it when he’s pinning me to the ground and fucking into my spasming cunt.

What would he do if I took his mask again?

How badly would he hurt me?

“Fuck.” He hisses through his teeth as his hips snap to mine.

Inside me, his cock jerks. I moan along with him as he comes, his fingers digging into my hipbones hard enough to bruise.

He thrusts a few more times, his chest heaving, and when I look back at him looming over me, the rage has faded from his hooded eyes.

He doesn’t move for a moment, peering down at me through the slits in his mask. His face is slowly coming together like puzzle pieces in my mind, but some of it’s still missing.

“Don’t ever run from me like that again,” he whispers, somewhere in between a plea and a command.

I’m still limp with pleasure beneath him, tears tracking down my cheeks. “Okay.”

Eventually he pulls out, the cool air a shock on my slick center. He cradles my body against his, his gentleness jarring, settling behind me with his arm under my skull. As my breathing calms, so does his.

My head is blessedly silent for some time, my thoughts wandering from the pleasure of feeling so spent, to the pleasure of his warm body against mine.

He’s never held me like this before. Never kept me so close I could feel each breath expanding his ribs.

“You live here,” I whisper, scared to speak too loudly.

His fingers twitch. “This is the room I’ve been banished to.”

“You’ve been here the whole time.”

In the walls.

I roll over. It’s an effort to even move, a deep, sore ache between my legs.

“Yes.”

My mind spins with this new information. “Is this how you…”

“I’m able to get almost anywhere in the house.”

“How?”

“These are the old servants’ passages, reopened when… when I was locked inside. When they did not want me out in the east wing anymore.” His throat bobs with a swallow. “This mask—I found it here in the attic. Years ago. I thought…” He trails off.

I lift my hand again to lay it on his cheek.

He flinches, barely noticeable, except for the way his lashes twitch.

Regret blooms in my chest. But he doesn’t stop me.

The plaster is smooth to the touch, almost as warm as his skin, glowing silver in the moonlight.

The soft ridge of a brow, the bow of the lips, the contour of the mask’s cheekbones.

A full-faced venetian mask without any filigree or decoration.

Too serene and pleasant for the man beneath.

“I thought maybe if I pretended I wasn’t Arnie, they wouldn’t hate me so much.”

I remember the image of him at eleven in that article, taken just weeks before he “died.”

“Can I…” I smooth a finger over his plaster cheek. “Can I see you?”

The muscles in his jaw jump.

“Promise me you’ll never leave.” His warm hand cradles half of my face, the thumb skating over my cheek bone. A possessive touch. “Promise me you’ll never run.”

“Okay.”

He told me that if I knew his face, I’d hate him. And lying on this rug with his arms around me, with the evidence of his desire seeping down my thigh, I can’t imagine that that would ever be true.

But he hesitates. “No. Not yet.”

He brings my spent body to the bed after undressing me for the night, wrapping me in sheets that smell so completely like him.

I think he’ll touch me again, take me, but he only curls up next to me like some kind of big, lethal cat guarding the bed, and I’m nodding off to the sound of his breathing, intoxicated by his scent.

His arm is wound around my waist, his body pressed against mine.

Like even his subconscious can’t help but keep me close.

At some early hour I’m awake. Next to me, an arm propped under his head as he lay on his back, he stares at the ceiling.

I can’t tell if his eyes are open, or if he’s found a moment to sleep, too.

The midnight sky outside is too dark. At some point he turned on the lamp on the opposite side of the room, the low yellow light still too dim to make many of his features distinguishable this far away.

I sit up, goosebumps immediately erupting across my exposed skin. He’s still clothed. Maybe he knew I’d stay close if I was bare and freezing.

He doesn’t move, save for the soft breaths expanding his ribs. In, then out.

I could easily lift his mask now. See at the man underneath.

Be the first to see Bastien’s face in years.

And he wouldn’t know, would he? I can be gentle enough and he’ll never know I dared to peek again.

I almost do it—I almost reach for the white plaster again.

My heart aches to know his face. The temptation is too great.

But it is not the same as a secret readily offered.

Putting space between us is the only way to keep from giving in. I slide out of his bed, slowly, quietly. He doesn’t stir.

There’s a single bookcase near the window, overflowing with books that are worn from the passage of time, some nearly falling apart.

More stacks of books on the floor. Most of them are recognizable classics, their titles barely legible in the dim lamplight, with tattered spines and bent covers.

Another stack of notebooks, a few pens here and there, a pair of boots tucked halfway under the bed.

Cobwebs in the corners, the husk of a moth on the windowsill.

In the shadowed dark, I make out an old upright against the far wall. There are papers scattered on top, a few candles melted down, an old kerosene lamp, a picture frame. The fallboard is lifted, exposing the cracked keys, and I know without a doubt the instrument isn’t tuned.

I remember my first night here, music echoing through the house. It sounded so close to my room as Ms. Byrne showed me around. That haunted melody, I realize—the same as the music Baz has been leaving for me. The piece he’s been writing for me.

I near the upright, careful to walk on the tips of my toes. Even up close, I can’t make out much of the written lines, the notations in the margins. I can’t see whose picture is framed. But a glint of metal catches my eye, gold catching the dim light from the floor lamp.

The moment my fingers touch the chain I recognize the necklace.

It’s unmistakable; I’ve been wearing it since Jason gave it to me—until it had disappeared and wound up here.

And when I look back at Baz on the bed, his eyes are open, watching my every move from across the dark room. His arm is still tucked behind his head, the other resting on his stomach. I swear his eyes glint with hunger.

He stole my necklace. And he doesn’t look the slightest bit sorry.

“Trying to sneak away?” His voice is raspy with sleep.

“I wouldn’t know how to get back.”

“Come here.”

I tell myself that I only obey because the chill is beginning to seep through my skin again. I climb back onto the bed, his eyes watching me appreciatively, landing on my hips, my waist, up to my breasts. He reaches for me, guiding me until I’m seated on his lap.

“Show me something,” he says. I can feel him hardening beneath me. “I want to watch you.” He swallows, his throat bobbing, his long fingers softly trailing up and down my sides, making goosebumps erupt on my skin.

“Watch me?”

“I want you to touch yourself. I want to watch you.”

“It’s four in the morning,” I say, even though desire is sparking low in my belly. “We should get a few more hours of sleep.”

“You can’t possibly think I’d rather sleep when you are on top of me like this.”

The hard length of him is nestled against my center. I lean forward, the movement grinding my clit against him. My breath hitches. “You aren’t still angry with me?”

“I stopped being angry the moment I caught you.”

My cheeks burn. “I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”

His fingers tighten at my waist. “Stop trying to convince me to let you go. It’s not going to work.”

He says this now, but maybe one day…

“Mallary.”

Maybe one day he’ll be sick of me. But right now, I can feel how much he wants me.

My hips begin to move almost on their own, chasing the pleasure of his body beneath mine, my hands splayed out against his chest, feeling every one of his ragged breaths. “I’d rather…”

Behind the mask, his eyes are only half open, watching me rock against him.

The friction from his clothing, the rigid form straining against the fabric, fitting so perfectly against my clit as I slide back and forth, grinding slowly.

The bliss in his eyes is erotic. It shouldn’t be this easy, this good. Not with him.

He’s not even touching me, and I’m electric. I’ve never seen his face, only his eyes, his lips, and it’s enough, especially when he looks at me like that, pupils blown and so full of want. Like if I stop, he’ll die. Like there’s nothing I could do wrong, and he’d still l—

I’m making a mess of his clothes, the muscles in my thighs tightening. “Do you like this?” I ask.

His lashes flutter. “So fucking much.”

Only a few seconds later, I come. In another life I’d feel embarrassed by how quickly I finish. But not with Baz. I shudder against him, falling against his chest, my hips still bucking against his cock, clenching around nothing and wishing he was deep inside of me.

He’s panting when I cry out, my helpless, pathetic sounds filling the small attic room.

I’ve barely caught my breath when he rolls us over so that he is lying behind me, an arm banded tightly around my waist. My eyelids are heavy with pleasure, the aftershocks still zinging through my limbs. “Let me—”

He shushes me. “Watching you is enough. Don’t worry about me.”

“But I want to,” I say weakly. The rush of desire gives way to exhaustion.

He holds me tighter, thumb circling my wrist. “Sleep.”