by Jenna Mills
"Want me to go get your camera?"
His voice stopped me. "My camera?" I asked, but before I could turn back to him, he was there, beside me.
"So you can take pictures. Show the world what you found behind all my closed doors."
Secrets. That's what I'd come seeking. Intimate details. Masks stripped away. But people wore masks for a reason, I realized in that moment. People built walls and closed doors. Locked them. Not because they wanted to or it was fun. But because they needed to. To protect.
Survive.
"No," I said, but the word came out more breath than voice.
"It's why you're here—"
"Not for this." Not every intimate detail needed to be shared—desecrated. I'd never really let myself think much about those days of Aidan's life. I knew Laurel died. I knew he was widowed. I knew he'd been the prime suspect.
But I'd never thought about grief, mourning.
I'd never stopped to think too much about his shadows. "I...I didn't know she was pregnant," I said quietly.
A muscle in the hollow of his cheek started to thump. "She wasn't."
"I don't understand—"
"Planning ahead," he said as I turned toward a massive armoire. "She saw the furniture on our honeymoon, in Paris, and..."
He kept talking. I knew he did. But I didn't hear, couldn't hear—
Dolls. That's all I saw. Shelf after shelf of them. Antique and Victorian, all standing in perfect little rows, hair perfectly curled, clothes perfectly pressed, eyes wide and staring—
"Kendall?"
I heard him, knew that he was there, right there behind me, but his voice came to me through a faraway tunnel.
Necklaces.
Tiny and black, rosary-like.
Around each porcelain neck.
His hands then, on my arms, turning me. And his eyes. I saw them flare, darken. "Jesus God—"
I pulled back—but he wouldn't let me go. Because he saw, too. He saw what I saw in the mirror across the room, the absolute lack of color to my face.
He saw everything.
"The dolls—" I said, twisting back toward all those unseeing eyes.
"Laurel collected them. Bought them wherever she went—"
"The necklaces—"
His hands were still on me. I felt them tighten. "She made them."
Laurel. Made necklaces of protection.
For her dolls.
Laurel who slipped into a bathtub, and ended her own life.
Everything was spinning, spinning so fast. "They're...like the ones we saw last week..." At the ninth ward, by Dauphine's house. And the next day, at the cemetery.
Naked.
Burned.
"Doesn't mean anything," he said, finally releasing me. "This is New Orleans. Burnt offerings are a dime a dozen."
I stepped closer, lifting a single finger to one of the dusty shelves. "You've seen burned dolls before," I murmured, part realization, part question.
"I have."
I reached for one, pulling her into my hands. "Did Laurel?"
"She did."
When I lay the fragile brunette against my palm, her eyes closed. "What about Danielle?"
"Yes."
I turned toward him. "You called them random burnt offerings, but if you were writing this, what would Jonas Marchant think?"
Aidan didn't even hesitate. "He'd think they were a warning."
His eyes. I could still see them, hard and dark and...shaken, when he'd found me kneeling on the porch of the rundown house.
Aidan thought the dolls were warnings, too.
"Have you told Detective Edwards?" I asked.
He laughed. "You're assuming he wants to know...that he would believe anything I have to say."
Thousands of jagged pieces, they just kept shifting, sliding closer, slicing...tumbling out of reach. "Why would someone be warning you?" I asked. "About what?"
He stepped closer— "Not me, Kendall." —and took the porcelain from my hands. "You."
I stilled.
Me.
And Laurel.
Danielle.
Mechanically, I looked from him, back toward the display of dolls.
"What?" he asked. "Is this too much? Should I have kept the key to myself?"
The answer should have been easy. No. There was no such thing as too much. This was exactly what I wanted, this glimpse behind locked doors into a world frozen in time, preserved, trapped like the feather in amber, alone there, forever in the past. Before his world fell apart.
But there was no way to want this.
"No," I said, turning back to Aidan.
Only then did I realize he no longer stood behind me. That he was gone.
And I was alone there, alone inside his locked doors.
The Truth About A
Thin. That was the first thing I noticed about her. The young woman was thin, fair-skinned and blond, with light blue eyes and minimal make-up. And the second after she let me into the bathroom at the back of the restaurant, with its one toilet and one sink and one empty paper towel holder, she closed and locked the door.
"I shouldn't be here," she said.
Nervous. That was the second thing I noticed. She was nervous, her wide eyes darting around the small space. "Then why are you?"
"Because no one else can tell you what I can," she said, finally looking at me. "No one else knows what I do."
"Don't worry," I tried to assure her. "No one knows I'm here."
She seemed to fade right before my eyes. "Someone always knows," she said. "That's the thing about Aidan Cross. The only secrets are his."
There was something about her voice, not anger, not accusation, but a sadness, a quiet resolution that had my own throat tightening.
Because in that moment, I knew.
I knew who she was.
I knew she was the first.
My first opportunity to speak with someone who had been involved with Aidan.
There was Adelaide. And I knew she loved him. And I knew her love for him might not be quite as brotherly as she claimed.
But this was different. Anna, as she told me her name was as we did our introductions, was different. Her relationship with Aidan did not go back to when they were kids. It was not platonic. She'd been with him. She knew him, knew him in ways very few did.
The ways of a lover.
The only one still around to talk to me.
I knew all this, knew all this before she told me her story. I knew all this because of her eyes, the shadows there. The remnants. The blue was soft, but it didn't sparkle. There was no light. It was flat...faded.
"Tell me how you met," I said against a growing sense of unease. I had to ignore it. I knew that. This was why I came. This was story. There was no room for the churn of sickness inside me.
No room for the slow, insidious slide of dread.
"It was late summer," she began, turning away from me to stare at the graffiti-adorned wall. But I could see her eyes still, see them through the dull mirror.
See how far away they were.
That she was there again, wherever there was.
With him.
"My sister has a restaurant on Grand Isle, and I was between jobs, so I was down there helping her out after she had another baby. And I would see him," she said, her voice hitching softer. "I'd see him sometimes, in the evenings, walking the beach."
And with no more than that, I was there, too, seeing him, seeing Aidan, walking along the water's edge as the sun went down.
"I had no idea who he was," Anna said. "Just a guy. He never came into the restaurant, never talked to anyone. He was just there as night fell, walking."
I closed my eyes.
And saw him even more vividly.
"This went on for a couple of weeks," Anna was saying, "and he just seemed so...lonely. I would stand there and watch him, and I'd feel it, whatever sadness he was feeling, until finally one night I went to him..."
I made myself open my eye
s. Made myself look at her. I made myself see...see the memory on her face. The longing.
"And that's how it started," I said—knew.
She looked at me through the mirror. "Yes. That's how it started."
I was recording the conversation, but looked down to jot something in my journal.
"We made love for the first time that very first night," she told me as my hand stilled against the paper. "I'd never been with someone that fast, but it was like I knew he needed someone—and I needed to be who or whatever it was he needed."
To fix him.
Aidan Cross has a thing for beautiful women, Sloan had said that very first night. And they for him. It's the mystery about him, the wounded hero.
The dread turned to more of a slice. Questions. I had so many of them. So many I had to ask.
Even if the answers messed me up in places and ways I didn't want to think about.
"It was incredible," she went on. "It was everything. I've...I've never experienced anything else like that. It was like...coming to life. Like breathing, really breathing, for the first time."
I pasted on a look of casual interest. "When did you find out who he was?"
She laughed. It was a soft sound, sad. "Not for a few months, believe it or not. He'd come down on the weekends and we'd be together, then he would leave to...go to work," she said with a self-deprecating smile.
"Did you ever ask him what he did?"
She slid an imaginary strand of hair from her face. "He told me he studied people—I thought he was a shrink, or something."
Studying people.
Not the full truth, but not a lie, either.
Aidan Cross definitely studied people.
He studied them, and he learned them, and he knew them. He knew them inside and out.
"When did you find out the truth?" I asked.
Her eyes flashed, exposing me to a quick sliver of light, and the first hint at who she might have once been. "When he brought me to New Orleans."
"For a visit?"
"That's what I told my sister," she said, "but once I was there, in his house, leaving wasn't easy."
More slivers of dread. Slicing deeper.
"Why not?" I asked.
She was quiet several breaths before answering. "Because at first I didn't want to. Because I still believed he needed me. That I could fix him. I'd hear him cry out in his sleep, and it would hurt me so bad."
Everything inside me was squeezing, squeezing hard. "What do you mean, cry out?"
Her eyes met mine. "For his wife."
And then I could feel it, too, the hurt Anna described.
"But then he would reach for me, and make love to me, and I'd know that I was the only woman in his world. That she was gone and I was who he wanted. He's good like that. He knows how to use words, how to weave them into a spell, like magic."
A spell.
Magic.
"He knows how to make you forget everything," Anna was saying, "until that moment when it all comes back to hit you in the face." She wrapped her arms around her slender frame, adding, "It's why you have to keep your eyes open."
You.
Have to.
It sounded like she was talking directly to me.
"We were happy," she said. "So, so happy. That's why...I didn't listen to all the rumors."
And then I knew. I knew why it sounded like she was talking to me.
Because she was.
But her words, I'd heard them before. Almost verbatim.
"Rumors?"
"About Aidan," she said. "About him being dangerous—about other women."
Sloan. They were his words.
"I didn't pay any attention, not at first," she was saying, and I let her talk, for the first time wondering how much was even real.
If she was even real.
Or if she was yet another pawn in the game Sloan had been playing ever since Laurel chose Aidan over him.
"Not until things started changing."
"What kind of things?" I asked.
She closed her eyes a long moment before answering. "Sometimes I'd wake up naked with no memory of the night before—nothing."
Deep inside, I started to shake.
"And he wouldn't let me leave the house. He took away my phone, didn't let me talk to my sister. And when he caught me on his phone..." Her voice trailed off, the memory she was trying to convey playing in her gaze. "That was the first time he scared me."
Sloan told me similar stories about Danielle.
"He scares you, too, doesn't he?" Her voice was softer now, like we were friends—allies. "I see it in your eyes. You're scared, but you don't want to be."
No, that wasn't what she saw in my eyes.
It wasn't.
But when I looked in the mirror, I realized she did see something.
Something dark and unsettled.
"You don't want to be scared, because you want to believe. You want to believe what he tells you. You want to believe how he makes you feel. You want it all to be real. The stories. The ones he tells you. I know," she said. "I was you."
I blinked, and made it all go away. I blinked, and made my indifferent mask return.
"I was there that day, when we were supposed to meet at the cemetery," she said. "I saw you with him. I saw the way you looked at him."
The walls of the small bathroom kept pushing closer, closer. Because I knew. I could see her all over again, the woman in the pink floppy hat, standing so close to the tall cross...watching.
A fan, I remembered thinking.
A fan.
"This isn't about me," I said. "I'm here for a story, that's all."
Her smile was sad. "And I thought I was here for a visit, that was all. But he's talented like that. He knows how to make you think what he wants you to think. Want what he wants you to want."
Because he was always plotting.
Always writing.
Always five steps ahead.
That I already knew.
But not with me, some place inside me whispered. Those quiet moments between us were different, unscripted.
"What about the police?" I asked. Business. All business. That's what this was. Not personal. Get as much of her story as I could. Then give Sloan hell. "Did you go to them? Detective Edwards?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I...didn't want to end up like the others. So I left the first chance I got."
It was plausible.
"But sometimes I still feel like someone is watching me. Sometimes I still turn around and see a shadow slip away. I-I..." Her eyes darkened. "If he finds out I came to you—"
"He won't," I said, not letting her finish. "I promise."
#
I didn't look back, not at first. I could feel someone there, a few steps behind me. But the Quarter was packed and the street busy. People crowded the sidewalks. I kept on, toward the lot where I'd left my car, a hand on my phone, my eyes straight ahead. By habit, I chose a well-populated route.
It was only after I turned toward the river that I realized there was no other traffic, cars or foot. Except me, and the person behind me.
This time I looked, allowing myself one quick glance behind me.
He was tall, wiry thin, faded jeans hanging low on his hips and a white tank top.
The second I turned toward him, he looked down at the phone in his hands.
I walked faster. There wasn't much further to go. One more intersection—
He came up on me fast, brushing against me as he reached for my arm—
And pressed something into my palm.
And then he was gone, hurrying around the corner to leave me standing there, staring down at my hand.
A matchbook.
The scrawled handwriting inside.
4 + 1 = 5
Enough
I saw him the second he walked inside, striding across the hardwood floor in that leisurely way of his, a man confident in his control of the world around him.
/> Very carefully, I put down the glass of wine I'd been nursing, and intercepted him. "You can stop your games now."
Sloan stilled, the wide smile on his Nordicly handsome face flattening into something far harsher. "Kendall, I didn't know—"
"I mean it," I said, not caring who was watching or listening. "If you have something to tell me, something else you want me to know, then tell me. But I'm done with all your games and riddles."
"Whoa," he said, reaching for my arm to steer me out of the mainstream of hotel lobby activity. "Slow down and talk to me."
"I am," I said. "And I'm telling you I'm done with your cryptic warnings—"
He frowned. "Has something else happened?"
"You sent her, didn't you?" I exploded. "You set the whole thing up. Tell me, does Anna even know Aidan, or was she just following the script you gave her?"
"Anna?"
"Sloan. I'm done. We both know you sent her to me."
His eyes, already deep-set and narrow, narrowed even more. "I didn't send anyone to you."
Like hell. Impatiently I slipped my phone from my purse and pulled up a picture of the most recent matchbook.
4 + 1 = 5
"Just like you didn't have anything to do with any of the other matchbooks, right?" I shot back. "Or the doll at the cemetery. Maybe you were even there at the house, too—"
The grey of his eyes turned dark, and then he was steering me further away, not to the courtyard of before, but into an office. "Kendall, I told you. The matchbooks are not from me."
"Stop it." There was this tangled mess inside me, and no matter how hard I tried to breathe, the tightness wouldn't stop squeezing. "I know, okay? I know you hate Aidan. I know you blame him for Laurel's death. But trying to run me off isn't going to change anything."
"Is that what you think I'm doing?"
I lifted my chin, narrowed my own eyes.
"Kendall," he said, reaching for me—
I twisted away.
He held himself there, so very, very still. "Damn it, Kendall, I want you safe. I've never made any secret about that. I want your eyes open."
They were.
They were so, so open.
"So yeah," he kept on, "maybe I want you scared, but only so you're careful. But I haven't followed you, and the matchbooks are not from me."