Eyes Like the Night

by Emma Accola

  Harry Spice grinned. “Who needs protection from whom? They didn’t like how you pushed their visions aside and imposed your will upon them. But you did it anyhow and the ensuing profitability rubs their noses in how wrong they were. Be glad you’re not like them.”

  I sat down in the chair the students used and narrowed my eyes. “You hold me in high esteem, yet you’ve done everything you can to destroy me. What’s it all for?”

  Harry Spice looked pleased. “You don’t remember, but we met at the winery when you were sixteen. I was there to upgrade your security system. You wore a cute little miniskirt and tank top as you went through the tasting room making calls and giving orders with the confidence of a four-star general. Every one of your cells carries that privileged air of being in charge. Neither of your siblings has it. Your sister is a passive loner and your addict brother is a worthless piece of crap who spent his time out in the vineyard smoking weed. Everyone on the staff knew that you were the one who would be taking over. Everyone. Right at that moment, I knew that you were me.”

  I jumped up and grabbed the back of Harry Spice’s chair, jerking it so that he jumped. “No matter what you do to me, I won’t enter your crazy little world. You can be in it all by yourself.”

  Harry Spice got up and loomed over me. “I’ve taken your world apart bit by bit so there won’t be any other place for you to go but mine.”

  I sneered. “I’m engaged to Micah Ekstrand.”

  Harry Spice chuckled. “No, you’re not.”

  “We are. It’s kind of funny how you didn’t see that coming.”

  “You’re engaged to a fraud.”

  Glen had said the same thing. “Another lie?”

  “The truth. Micah knows it too.”

  I snorted my contempt. “You wouldn’t know the truth if it jumped up and bit you.”

  My scoffing only delighted Harry Spice. “Ask Micah and see if you can believe what he tells you.”

  My answer was a glare.

  “What’s wrong, sweet Gracie? Are you worried he’s everything you were afraid he was?”

  “As long as he’s not you.”

  Harry Spice lowered his voice. “Every love story is beautiful, but ours is the best. We’re the same. You and I are the best of our families. We’re both beautiful and successful. You’re worthy of me.”

  “If I’m so worthy, why are you trying to destroy everything in my life that I love?”

  “You think you loved that life because your family made you believe that it was all you ever deserved. You never knew how to ask for more. You accepted that tepid, pale love from Leonardo because you had never met a man like me. You left your beloved winery for these cold beige walls of academia because your family wanted you to believe that all your changes made them miserable and displaced, like refugees on their own land. And you stood in the shadows while they reaped the praise.”

  My hands burned with the impulse to hit him.

  Harry Spice’s voice became soft and seductive. He touched a tendril of my hair. He lifted it slowly and let it caress his lips.

  “Other women clamor for my attention. They say I’m charming and handsome. They see the money and the status. Many of them are beautiful and educated, but none of them compares to you, Gracie dear. You have what I want in your blood.”

  “If you win this by breaking me, what will you have?”

  Harry Spice shook his head. “I won’t break you, Gracie dear. No man could.”

  “Micah could,” I said, wanting to be cruel.

  Harry Spice’s smiled shrank slightly. “Micah will be in your rearview mirror.”

  Though I sensed the coiled tension within him, I couldn’t resist the temptation to stab at his arrogance. “He’s my now and my future. I fall asleep and wake in his bed, in his arms, in his heart.”

  Harry Spice stiffened and became still. “He’s only there because I’m letting him be. For now.”

  “I love listening to your lies because I know the truth.”

  His expression turned chilly, derisive. “You fell in love with Micah the first time you met.” He leaned over me, and one hand picked up a tendril of my hair; the other went to my wrist, his thumb running over my fitness tracker. He put his finger through it, using it to pull my arm like a handcuff. “The spike in your heart rate was obvious. At night the lights go off in Micah’s bedroom, but this thing tells me you’re not sleeping. Your pulse soars at his touch. Is it racing now at mine? I can check.”

  I looked at Harry Spice’s hand on my wrist with as much revulsion as my face could manage.

  His free hand dropped away from my hair, brushing my breast on the way down. I shuddered. Harry Spice noticed and didn’t seem displeased. He put his hands on my arms as they hung at my sides. My heart hammered in fear, but I kept all of it off my face. I had learned to keep my composure in business negotiations and the classroom. But so had Harry Spice. He was at least eight inches taller and loomed over me. My fingertips stretched out to reach the desk behind me. The touch of its smooth top centered me. I returned Harry Spice’s stare.

  “You have no right to stare into our bedroom,” I said hoarsely, my rage at him growing almost lethal.

  “You gave that right to me when you accepted the end user license agreements on all your internet devices. From my phone I have looked inside your living room, seen how fast you were driving, and known when you had your legs wrapped around Micah. Your identity is made by what I’ve compiled. It’s like that with everyone.”

  “Get over yourself. Someday consumers will put you and your ilk out of business.”

  “No, they won’t. They don’t think they have a choice.” Harry Spice let his eyes linger on my lips. “I’ve killed the person everyone thought you were. The end is close, sweet Gracie.”

  “Now you’ve finally said something I can agree with,” I replied, relieved that my voice held steady and the hard lump of fear in my throat had allowed the words to flow freely.

  Harry Spice gave my lips a lingering regard before he opened the door and left my office. I shut the door behind him before sinking into my office chair. The old plastic seat still held his warmth, but my strength had fled my body. There was no way I could get up and away from it. Never before had I felt so much at someone’s mercy. After all these months of Harry Spice’s treatment, I should have been used to it. A stinging sharp hostility in equal parts with mortal terror squeezed my heart. My little voice told me that Micah was in terrible danger. This had to end fast before Harry Spice killed the man I loved.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was Thursday evening, and I didn’t teach on Fridays. The house was fragrant with a duck and a couple baked potatoes that I had put in the oven. My encounter with Harry Spice earlier in the day had left me quivering in terror, especially his words about having killed the person everyone thought I was. That part was easy because it was a lie, but the thought that Harry Spice would harm Micah terrified me right to the marrow of my bones. This had to end. How that would happen and what form it would take, I had no idea, not right now, at least. All I knew for sure was that Harry Spice’s reign of lies and intimidation would be stopped this weekend, before he had the chance to take Micah’s life. Murdering Micah would bring me so low that Harry Spice might actually win. I couldn’t allow that.

  My little voice sent me back to the pictures of the students Harry Spice had added to my roster. I had printed out all the photos they had posted and added them to a rough timeline that lay spread across the table. There had to be something in this that would defeat Harry Spice. Micah entered the kitchen behind me, dropping his trench coat over a chair. His hair, wet from the rain, lay tightly in dark ringlets. I wondered for the hundredth time whether there was a circumstance where he could look anything other than utterly handsome. Then my fear for his safety made my heart pound so hard I leaned on the table, dizzy. He joined me, giving me a peck on the cheek.

  “I took a personal day tomorrow,” he said, his gaze taking my emotional in
ventory. He’d been doing that since finding me in the bathtub. “The Math Department chair is mad at me for postponing a meeting and Elina is clamoring about showing up with a lawyer. She says that if I won’t see her, she’s filing suit.”

  “All the more reason not to go in,” I said, studying the students’ selfies from their social media sites.

  “Did you plan on telling me about this?” Micah held his cell phone in front of me. The screen showed Harry Spice sitting at my desk with a clear image of today’s date on the computer screen.

  “He was in my office when I came in this morning, sitting there like he was king of the world.” My hands became fists as I turned to face Micah. “He said some creepy things,” I said, thinking of how my fitness tracker now lay in a desk drawer at work.

  “What creepy statements did our favorite psychopath make?”

  “Apparently I’ve been on his radar screen since I was sixteen. He’d hacked into the winery’s computers earlier than I thought. He knew years ago that Glen had embezzled money from the winery and that I never let on to Mom and Dad about his thievery in the stupid belief that knowing about it would hurt them worse.” I didn’t bother to hide the wrath in my eyes. “You knew about the embezzlement too.”

  Micah became wary. “Harry Spice told Caleb and me.”

  “And you chose not to disclose it to me.”

  “That seemed like kicking you when you were down.” Micah paused, letting a long silence hang in the air. “You realize that your mother turned over the bookkeeping to you because she suspected something, don’t you? She didn’t want to be the one to call him out.”

  A hot lump burned in my throat as I clutched his lapels. “Back then I was flattered and honored to be given such a huge responsibility. Mom and Dad called me their company financial officer. But I couldn’t figure out why the books didn’t balance, and Mom never could seem to find the time to help me out. Then a few of our suppliers refused to work with us. I blamed myself for not being smart enough. When jewelry and antiques disappeared from the house, I could no longer deny what every other person in the winery already knew.”

  Micah’s voice came gently. “What was Glen using?”

  “Heroin. Weed. Meth. Oxy. Alcohol. And that’s just what we know about.” The subject left me numb. “I confronted him, and he got in my face and shoved me so hard I fell backwards over a chair. I had to protect the winery, so I immediately took his name off all the bank accounts and told the suppliers they now talked only to me. Glen went insane when his money was cut off. He came to the house and screamed at Mom and Dad. He threatened to commit suicide and to take them with him. I called the police and they took him away on a Section 5150. When he was released, I told him that he would go straight into rehab or I would swear out a restraining order on him. He chose rehab.”

  “He’s still lying to you.” Micah gave a slow shrug and made his face carefully blank. “Glen doesn’t manage the grocery store. He stocks shelves part-time, nothing more. Yet somehow he can afford a San Francisco apartment.”

  I rubbed my temples, annoyed at the holier-than-thou he had affected when he saw me at lunch. No doubt he would use all the changes in my life to further alienate me from my family. “When you asked to marry me, I doubt that you bargained on any of this.”

  “I never thought that we were only going to stay in each other’s lives if it was easy.”

  The jagged edges of my heart burned as they scraped on each other. “My life is in shambles.”

  “No worse than mine.”

  Suddenly the oven timer shrieked through the house, beginning an insistent beeping. Micah left me to tend to the roast duck and potatoes. He took the duck out of the oven and set it on a trivet. I came to the doorway to watch him leaning over the pan and taking in the aroma.

  “I know who I must become in order to defeat Harry Spice,” I said softly.

  Micah straightened up and turned to watch me carefully. “Who must you become?”

  “All of myself.” I went up to Micah and he took me into his arms. “Last night I had a dream where I was standing in a big, empty room on a gigantic map of the city. Harry Spice was walking toward me but I wasn’t scared.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I will learn to play his game better than he does.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because he told me that the end was near. And he wouldn’t have said that if he thought that he was far enough ahead of me to keep winning.”

  *

  In the morning Micah looked unbearably handsome in a maroon sweater and jeans. Having seen him at all times of the day and night, I wondered if he was incapable of being anything other than wildly attractive. The smell of the cinnamon rolls he had baked distracted me as I looked over the dining room table where I had spread out the pictures that Sludge had sent me. I started to gather them up, but Micah stopped me with a touch to my arm.

  “These pictures again. You’re becoming obsessed. It doesn’t hurt to look, but you’re probably chasing coincidence,” Micah said, from behind me, his breath tickling the little hairs at the back of my neck.

  I turned to face him. “This is not chasing coincidence. It’s chasing a feeling. It’s logical.”

  Micah smiled and shook his head. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “You’re such a man.”

  But Micah wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were on the stack of selfies that Sludge had taken from these students’ social media pages. Micah rubbed his chin, frowning slightly the way he did when he was thinking deeply. I was alarmed at his focus and moved to shuffle the selfies together, but he stopped me.

  “Hold on a minute. What if your feelings are right and this was always about using these students to send us a message? Harry Spice likes puzzles. Maybe there’s something here that we’re supposed to find.”

  My heart hammered. I knew there was because I’d already found it. Somehow in the night, in a little workshop in the corner of my fevered brain, I had worked out what those pictures meant. Each of the three students had been wearing a Bailey College hoodie, and each had a finger pointed to certain letters: c, a, l, and b. It wasn’t obvious, and it wasn’t coincidence, that they had almost all the letters of the name Caleb. Instinctively I knew I had that right, the same way I knew that Harry Spice had a plan for the e. Now in the bright light of morning, I didn’t want Micah to know. I needed to draw his attention away, or he would figure it, because he was that smart. The end with Harry Spice was close, but it belonged to me, not because I wanted to be a hero, but because it was mine—not Micah’s—mine. And I would have my ending and use every ounce of pitiless resolve my spirit held.

  Micah hadn’t yet seen my ruthless, not all of it anyhow. He would soon. That terrified me. What if the unfettered Gracie Meadows scared him off? All I had left was Micah. My ruthless would protect him, if it didn’t drive him away. I pulled him from the table so he wouldn’t keep looking at the pictures. Micah needed to be distracted from Harry Spice for his own good. I slid my fingers under his sweater. His delicious skin was hot and silky smooth.

  Micah smiled and caught my hands. “Are you trying to tempt me? Is that why you wanted me to take the day off?”

  “You know it.”

  “It’s so easy for you, you know, tempting me. The first time I saw you, I thought that you were more beautiful than a sky full of stars. I would go to sleep imagining that you were there with me whispering in the dark. In the mornings, I resented the sun because you would recede into dreamland. That day we spent together at your family’s vineyard left me almost gasping with longing. Caleb noticed and said that you could never, ever love a man like me.”

  “Why would he say that?” I asked, puzzled.

  “He said you would never, ever change the plan you had made for your life.” Micah kissed my palms. His voice became low and raspy. “You wrap yourself in what you like, and you liked the plan you had made for yourself, the winery, and your fianc
é. Those were your goals and you were hard-headed and ambitious enough to move heaven and Earth to get them.”

  I looked away. “Then make me the poster child for the unanticipated future. What would he say now that all those things I cared about are gone?”

  “He’d say that you would find your way back.”

  “Back to what? There’s nothing left that I want.” I harrumphed. “Harry Spice hollowed out my life and I won’t find my way back from empty by marrying a man, even one as sexy as you.”

  “I never presumed that marrying me would be all you ever needed in your life.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said quickly.

  Micah’s eyes were tender and haunted. “Caleb said you were dauntless—that exact word. He thought you would do whatever it took to protect your family and your winery. He said a woman like you would be like having a tiger by the tail and that underneath your sweet, angelic face you have the heart of a man.”

  I lost my breath in a rush and swallowed hard. “I am protective of what I love, if that’s what he meant.”

  Micah’s fingertips caressed my cheeks and neck. “You’re afraid of showing me who you really are, aren’t you? You’ve used your beauty as a mask your entire life. Who groomed you to hide your true face? Your family?”

  I pulled my hands from Micah and answered without looking at him because this conversation had suddenly become very painful and real. Did Micah already know about my ruthless? “Who says I’m hiding anything? My family knows who I am.”

  “They know the person they made you to be, the smart, high-achieving child who they could lay their burden on because they couldn’t figure out how to keep the winery profitable.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Caleb discerned that as clear as day. They wanted you to stay the way they made you, their perfect daughter, pretty, smart, and completely loyal. And then you inherited all that money and became their equal. They lost control, so they used guilt to level you. And so did Leonardo. Isn’t that why you hid your perfect SAT score from him? Because your grades were higher, did he say that you took an easier major? Did he say that those who can’t do, teach? Can you name all the times he sabotaged you emotionally?”