29. A Man of Faith #2
“I’m the furthest thing from unwilling,” I murmur, my thumb ghosting across her cheekbone.
“I’m here, but I need you to give me a foothold.
You’ve told me this test happens every generation, you’re targeted by a chosen traitor, and you can’t seek help from family.
That’s the claim, right? I’m not rejecting it, but…
” I cut myself off and curse. “The space inside of me where faith should live is empty, and I can’t help it.
So give me something I can test. A pattern.
A trigger. I don’t need certainty, just a place to start. ”
So much for dignity…
I’m kneeling here practically begging for data points while she’s trembling with a bone-deep fear of something I cannot believe in.
I want to believe her, yet faith has always been a sort of resultant of all the evidence I work through.
It comes as a reward, and I can’t function in the chasm between certainty and uncertainty.
Does she see how badly I wish to help her? Or does she only see a man clawing at logic as though he’s drowning?
I expect her to turn away. To rip my hand from her face and ask for privacy.
I’m already counting down the seconds until the chasm has grown, until I’m back to square one trying to understand what Kai meant with ‘Feeling will get you closer to her than logic ever will’ .
Her silent appraisal makes my skin crawl and I’m back in my family’s dining hall, documenting each time my father whispered, ‘Can you just not do that?’ I’m seven again, sitting at the back of the classroom, clutching my brother’s sweater as I struggle not to blurt out the answer for the tenth time in a row.
Water runs down her right hand as she lifts it, palm landing over mine.
Electricity zips from her cheek to my hand, then hers and then finally through all the years I learned to soften myself, to slow down.
My throat goes so tight that I’m sure the candle is burning again.
I’m aching with the effort of not looking away because I am supposed to be offering an anchor, and yet it’s her touch keeping me afloat.
Being the one rescued, even if only for a few seconds, is almost unbearable.
“Okay,” she whispers. “It’s not fair to just ask you to believe. I’m not offended, and I want you to have whatever it is that you need. If you want certainty, I’ll give you as much as I have. Is that fine with you?”
I feel her words before I hear them, and the subtle heat of her tongue against my thumb is what yanks me from the trance. Only then do I realise that her hand has dropped back to the water, and I’ve been touching her lower lip, tracing the curve of it.
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Please.”
The sound of my plea disgusts me a little, so many thoughts stuffed into that one syllable. Six simple letters, heavy with… With what? The need for answers? Proof? Or maybe it’s for permission to stay this close a little longer, just allowing me to exist without needing to earn it.
Francesca’s lip trembles beneath my touch. “ Tenebris nostris, adesto. ”? 1 The overhead chandelier hisses once, and then darkness swallows the room. I don’t move, just count her breaths against mine. “ Veni, flamma. ”? 2
Nothing happens on the ceiling, but every candle answers. About twenty wicks lining the windows click into orange flames, without a spark I can logically source. The water becomes bronze, and she’s something that crawled out of hell to torment me.
She speaks where I can’t. “Redford’s alive . Adelina’s spirit never left; she listens—but only we , the direct daughters of Sheffolk can speak to her. We’re her… chosen vessels, I suppose.”
Alive . The word sits on my tongue until it burns right through.
“So, you’re telling me this entire estate is an organism.
With lungs, eyes that watch, and… and you’re its pulse?
The nervous system runs through the women here?
” I can hear how feral I sound; something old and pagan within me straightens when her lashes flutter.
The moist heat of her tongue brushes my skin again when she says, “Different pulses, with different purposes. Gran can stitch curses into anything; Percy feeds on emotion.” She hesitates.
“I can drink memory through touch. Take it into myself, my bones. But I’ve never tried it with you, not since the first time we shook hands. You were a locked door, essentially.”
My mind feeds me the memory, forcing me to relive that odd moment when her dainty hand slipped into mine.
The dull banging at the back of my skull as though something had knocked.
Gloves… She’s always wearing gloves when out in public.
I keep my stare on her mouth, hating the faint twitch it gives as though she awaits ridicule.
Before I can sheath it, the sharp question escapes. “Why didn’t you try again?”
“I wanted to,” she admits. “But then I realised I didn’t want to know you like that.
And then there were the signs, the way the house and its ghosts went quiet around you.
Intrigued instead of hateful. Your very presence seems to scare him .
I thought if I pressed my palm to your skin again and drank, I’d break whatever hesitant pact Adelina appears to have made with you.
The nail in the coffin was Tommy, if I’m being honest. I want you to meet her. ”
“The girl from the portrait?” My frown is instant as I watch her arm lift again, and I catch sight of the linen and silver bracelet wrapped there. She tugs at it without looking, gaze still locked with mine.
“You asked me how I knew where Thomasin’s body was…
At first it was just this invisible presence in my nursery.
She’d play dolls with me, and for a while I thought I made her up.
But then she started leaving me clues, telling me that she wanted to play outside but she’s trapped.
So she led me, hint by hint, until I found what was left of her.
” She exhales shakily, watching for my reaction.
“I buried her. In the cottage garden. I was nine at the time, and Tommy’s been with me ever since. ”
With another tug at the bracelet, the smell begins to creep in. My skin crawls as the recognition of Eau De Spectral Fungus hits. The sensory hell of it calls me out, arguing that I should’ve trusted my nose over my scepticism.
“Mildew…” I breathe, my heart kicking into overdrive.
She nods, and my hand falls from her face to rest on the rim of the tub.
“The smell clings because she died in it, wrapped in old linen to protect her from the cold as she starved to death.” Water ripples when she drops her hand and leans forward to rest her chin on her knees.
“I used to cry for her, thinking about how she waited, counting footsteps, thinking help was so close. But nobody opened the door. Not until me. Not until almost six hundred years later.”
“Francesca—”
“I know it sounds insane.” She shakes her head, grip constricting around her knees. “But if he wins… I’ll end up just like her. Just waiting for a future heir to stumble across my body and praying she’ll be luckier.”
Every part of my brain scrambles to keep up with what she’s saying, and they all come to a simultaneous halt upon detecting the very real fear that coats each word. I catalogue that terror, the way she holds herself, how her breath hitches when saying Tommy’s name, but cataloguing is all I can do.
Translation comes only moments later, when a tiny, cold hand presses against my nape. I shove to my feet so hard that my ankle whacks into a gilded clawfoot. Logic bulldozes its way through any adrenaline, and my ears are now pounding with a deafening ba-dum ba-dum .
I shove the panic away and scan the room in a slow circle, searching for something that would permit me to laugh this all off.
There’s the faucet, the hamper with Francesca’s ruined nightdress, and my phone on the counter.
A heap of towels is on the extravagant armchair, and some robes line the far left wall.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Still silent, I shift into a hopefully not-panicked pace, keeping an eye on Francesca as she watches.
Waits for me to point it out.
Just as I open my mouth to admit that I’m freaked the fuck out and my thoughts are hitting dead ends, I feel the next touch, and it stops me in my tracks.
There’s the ghost of a hand, tiny and childlike, slipping its phantom fingers between mine.
I haven’t held a child’s hand since my mother used to take my brothers and me to carnivals, and the pressure is so familiar that I can almost imagine a younger Henrik at my side.
Mildew and damp cloth grow in strength, and my chest contracts.
I glance down and see nothing, but I feel it.
I feel Tommy.
I’m about to have a fucking stroke. Any minute now, my face will go numb, and I’m going to hit the tile.
I’m going to die with a fourteenth-century ghost and a cursed witch watching over me.
I risk a glance at Francesca, and she’s wearing the most sickeningly pretty smile, and I want to ask her what the fuck is going on .
She needs to tell me I’m not insane. Needs to check for my fucking pulse.
No, she’s worse than Catherine Earnshaw ever was, because she’s smiling at me— a grown man clutching air —and I can’t breathe because she looks like she’s been waiting so long for this.
For someone to see what she sees.
“Belief doesn’t need to be magic,” she tells me.
“It’s just another kind of pattern, you know.
Let me teach it to you.” The bruises only make her grin sharper, and she does that little nose scrunch again.
It’s the sort of sight that makes my chest burn, and I’m rendered to nothing but ashes when she confesses a quiet, “Please, I want to.”