40. The Pianist #2
I glance down the hall. I am still alone. Mariane won’t be coming near me anytime soon. No footsteps echo through the foyer, this area completely vacant.
After only a soft push, the walnut panel swings inward, revealing the same dusty passageway as before, the only light streaming through the slats of lath where the plaster has chipped away.
I step into the darkness, and the wall swings shut like a pair of invisible hands are slamming the hidden door.
And then I realize I don’t know how to get out.
I take a steadying breath.
There is only one way forward. I can find his attic room again.
I trail my fingers along the exposed wood, which is soft with age and speckled with plaster dust, tracing my steps, until my fingers swipe through a spider web. I’m panicking at the idea of a spider crawling up my arm, trying to shake the web off.
And then familiar hands slide around my waist.
A cool voice in my ear, warm breath on my neck. “You’re trespassing.”
I don’t stop to think about how my body wants to relax into him. “That would imply I’m not wanted here.”
His smirk is audible. “You know better than to seek me out.”
“Do I?” Turning in his arms, I find his ghost white face only inches away.
His mask is all I can really see clearly in the dark, his black clothing obscuring his form. But I can feel him all the same, the possessive grip at my hips, his stare lingering on my lips.
“No, evidently you don’t. What do you want?”
“You killed Henri’s last tutor.”
I expect him to go silent. To deny it.
“Yes.” So easily admitted.
“Are you going to kill me?”
His fingers come to my chin, tilting my face upward in the dark, so his mask takes up my entire field of vision. “Wouldn’t I have done it already?”
I say nothing.
The amber in his dark eyes seems to glow. Searching me, delving into me, again and again. His thumb brushes my chin gently for a few seconds. I’m sure he can see how even this simple touch lights a fire deep inside of me.
It’s not lost on me that he hasn’t truly answered my question.
I’ll never be free of him. Even if I leave this house, he will always be there in my mind. The memory of him, the memory of this—
“Let’s go,” he says, his voice softer this time. He turns me so I walk in front of him, even as he leads the way forward. I don’t know where we’re going, guided only by his hand on my back; all the passages look the same to me, and I give up trying to memorize the route back.
I’m as good as lost. At his whim, like this, in these dark hallways. He really could drag me off somewhere they’d never be able to find me.
Through the maze, we come to that slim staircase again.
Up two dozen steps, and his room appears.
Dust motes sparkle in the hazy afternoon light shining through the window.
His bed is unkempt, the top blanket strewn haphazardly.
All of the sheets of music on the floor are gone, tucked away elsewhere, and the rest of his belongings are tidy.
He cleaned up.
But he didn’t hide the necklace still glinting atop the piano.
“You could have called for me if you wanted my company. I would have come.”
I face him once more. Look at him through my lashes. “I’m impatient.” It’s only been a few hours since he led me back to my room, using a completely different winding path through the darkness.
“Obviously.” He doesn’t touch me. He’s changed into a plain, black crewneck and new jeans. The string fastening the mask around his head is a stark white amongst the waves of his messy dark hair.
After this morning,I can’t deny that there’s something tethering us together.
He’s been nothing but… honest. He’s never lied to me.
I realize he’s waiting for me. He won’t touch me. He’s staring down at me, waiting for me to speak, to do something.
He must not have heard my conversation with Mariane.
“I have a request,” I say. I know I have his attention when he nods, slowly. “Leave Henri alone. Don’t… hurt him.”
He goes still. A barely-there twitch to his index finger. “Anything else?”
“I want to ask you to leave the staff alone, too.”
“You want me all to yourself?”
I can’t stop myself from touching him, making sure he’s real, tangible beneath my hands, stepping closer just to rest my palms on his chest. Maybe one of these days I’ll wake up and realize that he isn’t real, just a figment of my imagination.
Maybe I have lost it. Maybe none of this is real.
“Just—you don’t have to hurt anyone anymore. ”
“Is that what you think?”
“The staff are not your enemy. Neither is Henri.”
The conversation steers away. “You’re too nice, Mallary. And isn’t that worse? They know to be scared of the Ghost. You’re the one hiding in plain sight.”
I steel myself. “I’m serious, Bastien.”
“What do I get in return?”
“You already have me. Isn’t that what you wanted?” I lean closer, unable to stop myself from glancing at the lips of his mask. “You torment me already. Do you have to split your attention between so many victims?”
“Victims.” There’s a cynical lilt to it. His voice is delicious. I wish I could record him speaking, just so I could fall asleep to it. “So you’re my victim now?”
“You know I am.”
He grips my arms, holding me still. “As though you haven’t begged for me to be inside of you.”
This ghost and I have found ourselves orbiting ever closer, and the pull of gravity is far too strong to resist. He wants me. He’s been clear about how much he craves me.
Each new sheet of music is another love letter.
He wants to consume me. I can see it in his eyes. Anything I say, he will gladly accept. There’s power in that, in having someone so dangerous waiting for whatever I say next.
I could tell him to—
I blink. My heart is racing, and not because of our proximity. There are only inches separating us now.
“Your—Mariane offered me money,” I say, “to leave.”
“To leave.”
“Ten thousand dollars,” I whisper.
“And is that enough for you?”
If ten thousand dollars had been offered at the beginning—I would have taken it and run. I would’ve figured out another way to keep my spot in the symphony, another way to get my name out there. To do what I love. To get out of that apartment.
But now…
“No.”
It’s like he doesn’t hear me. “They want to take you away from me. Of course they do. For the past decade, while Leo and Mariane moved on, had another son like nothing happened, I’ve been–-”
He reaches for my hips again, but he stops himself.
“At first they visited me—she visited me. But by the time I was eighteen I lived in isolation. I wasn’t allowed out. For my own good, they said.”
And then he really does reach for my waist.
“My own mother avoided me. The staff—they wouldn’t look at me.
At some point I began to wonder if I had died and truly only existed as a ghost amongst the living.
” His fingers tighten and he won’t look at me, staring at some point above my head.
“And so I lived separate from them. Like in a mirror. All the same walls, all the same comforts, but alone.”
I don’t know what to say.
“Henri is doomed to follow in my steps,” he says. “I think that is the curse of this house. For all progeny of this line to suffer. None of the Beauchene men have happy endings. Do you believe in curses, Mallary Doyle?”
“I don’t know.”
His head tilts. “Maybe you should. You’re still here.”
I pull away, suddenly uncomfortable, suddenly realizing the precariousness of my situation—how I've effectively trapped myself in the web of a lethal spider.
No one knows where I am. No one will think to find me here.
He killed her.
“You don’t have to admit it now. But I've seen you, the real you, since the moment you walked through that front door.”
I’m putting distance between us in the next second, backing away, while he remains still, unblinking. Insisting, “You’re not making any sense.”
“You barge in here, asking if I killed Henri’s last tutor. The answer is yes. But you never asked me why.”
I stop only when I know I’m nearing the window. The east lawn spreads out behind me through the barred glass. “Why?”