by Jenna Mills
Aidan...
Aidan.
Anna released my hands, pulling back from me.
Everything swayed.
Master storyteller, I told myself again.
Wordsmith.
Chameleon.
Impossible to know what's real.
A carousel. It was all a carousel, spinning faster and faster, faster, with no way off and no way to make it stop.
Until it did.
Until it stopped.
And I started to fall.
Float.
Drift.
Die.
"Kendall?" Anna asked.
I looked at her, or tried to, but my eyes were so heavy. Everything was heavy. Running together, all the colors, blurring, smearing, together...together...
Until there was only black.
Then nothing at all.
Night 9
4 + 1 =
Comfortable. I was so comfortable. Warmth enveloped me. Contentment slipped through me. I lay there, soaking it all in, not wanting the moment to break. On some level I knew I slept, but I didn't care. My body was too heavy, like it didn't even belong to me, and even if I tried, wouldn't respond. I was disconnected from it all, from everything, drifting in some far away place, where nothing could touch me, and nothing could hurt.
Until I wasn't.
Until I shifted, and cold seeped against the warmth, and everything came rushing back.
Except there wasn't everything. There were gaps. Big, huge, gaping gaps.
The old house. I remembered the mansion. Anna. Talking. I remembered the fatigue, like a heavy, dark blanket, engulfing me.
And then...drifting—floating.
I lay there, my body still heavy, trying to orient myself before opening my eyes.
Silence. I heard nothing.
No voices.
No music.
No sound whatsoever.
That's when I realized it. My arms. They were behind my back, wrenched at an odd angle, pressed together at my wrists. And I couldn't move them. And my legs. They were together at the ankles, and wouldn't come apart.
On a violent slam of my heart, I opened my eyes—
A bed. I was in a bed, a big beautiful bed, high off the ground with four posters and opulent curtains surrounding all sides. In a large room lit only by the filtered light streaming in from velvet-draped windows, leaving an otherworldly haze against the antique furniture, a dresser and armoire and chaise, a plush rug—
Her room, I realized. It was her room. The room upstairs, the one fully furnished. Laurel's. The one where Aidan found me the night we stayed in the house, when I'd turned to find him pale and shaken.
"Welcome back."
The voice was quiet, mildly amused, and it sent me twisting to the other side of the room.
"Anna," I murmured as she came to perch on the edge of the mattress, watching me much the way a nurse watches a patient.
"Hello, Kendall."
"What happened?"
She leaned toward me, sliding the hair from my face. "You passed out."
The sensation, the heavy blanket of fatigue...
"When?" I asked.
Her half-smile widened. "One minute we were talking...the next...you were out cold." She made a face. "So I brought you here—to your favorite place," she said, reaching toward the nightstand. "His room." She picked up a paper cup and twisted back to me. "His bed."
Odd. The way she was looking at me, like she was reveling in some massive joke.
"Where he used to make love to the only women he's ever loved."
I tried to swallow, couldn't.
Anna leaned closer, concern shadowing her face. But it wasn't real. None of it. Nothing was real.
"Thirsty?" she asked.
I reached for the cup—but nothing happened.
"Oh, that's right," she said with a soft laugh. "You need help, don't you?"
It was only then that I remembered my hands were behind my back.
Bound.
They were bound.
Like before.
When I was here, with Aidan.
When he'd tied me up...
Except this time they were more than tied together. They were secured to one of the bed posts, just like my ankles.
And the last of my dangerous illusions shattered.
"Can't you just imagine him here?" she kept on as the cold oozed through me, deeper with every crash of my heart.
"See him walking across the rug, naked—toward you?"
I tried to connect the pieces she was giving me, to drag them together, but they only slipped and slashed.
"...dropping down on the bed and reaching for you, pulling you to him and taking you...."
I thrashed, making the rope cut against my skin.
Coffee. She'd met me at the front door with coffee, because I'd sounded awful, she said. Exhausted. Her treat.
It was only after I drank the latte that everything changed.
A trap, I realized sickly. I'd walked straight into a trap. All the warnings, the threats.
Do you want to be next?
Not Aidan, I realized too late.
Not Aidan.
But...Anna.
Who? he'd asked. I'd glossed over my slip, but I could see him all over again, see the blank confusion in his eyes.
Spinning. It was all spinning faster, faster, one direction, then the next, then another. Trying to ground myself, I looked toward the window, the muted light and shadows. Not morning, I knew. Not even early afternoon.
I tried to sit up, but the room tilted, and my bound wrists anchored me to the bed.
"Easy," Anna said. "Don't want to hurt yourself." She sounded completely normal, warm and concerned, like we were friends and she was here to help me through the flu. "Let me help." She reached for me then, her hands to my arms, cold, unnaturally so, lifeless, as she loosened the bindings enough to allow me to roll onto my side.
"You're the first person he's brought here, since she died. Did you know that? The only person he's let inside."
Everything was fuzzy, edges blurred, but I made myself concentrate, watching her pull back and cross the room, to run her hands along the dark crimson of the velvet settee. And finally I knew. Finally I understood what it must have been like for him, when he'd returned to the room to find me gone. When he'd looked for me—and found me in the bathroom.
I'd seen it. I'd seen the nightmare in his eyes. I'd felt the oxygen being sucked from the room.
But I hadn't understood.
"Her dream house. Where they were going to have their happily ever after..."
That was why we were here, I knew in some barely functioning corner of my mind. It was why he came here still, after all these years. Because inside these walls he found something, they gave him something from which he'd been unable to walk away. Hope, the promise of new beginnings...
"...until he killed her."
And deep, deep inside, something twisted. "He didn't kill her," I whispered.
Finally, at last. I knew.
I knew.
Aidan did not kill Laurel.
"Maybe not with his hands," Anna rasped, and for the first time, the veneer thinned, and something dark and maniacal shone through. "But he killed her. He killed her just as callously as he killed all of us."
Us.
The single word stabbed through me.
Killed all of us.
Laurel in the bathtub.
Taylor in a car accident.
Ashley the runaway teen.
That left one. One woman.
Missing.
Vanished.
No body ever found.
Danielle.
But I didn't say her name, not while my hands and feet were bound.
"She was pathetic," she went on, wandering the opulent room, with its heavy dresser and armoire, the chest, all perfectly restored from so long ago, waiting for a woman who would never return. "She had everything. Him, the fairytale he gave her, all the f
airytales he wanted to give her, but she fell apart anyway. She'd worry. She'd come to me and cry..."
Everything inside me stilled.
Laurel...had gone to Danielle.
Nobody had mentioned they knew each other—
Aidan.
I wondered if he knew.
Anna—Danielle laughed. "And she'd listen to me," she said, turning to me through the hazy light. Something dark and satisfied glowed in her eyes. "Whatever I told her, she'd listen to me, but not him. She'd believe me...over him. She trusted me."
And then I knew. I knew.
Aidan didn't kill Laurel.
Laurel didn't kill Laurel.
Danielle did.
"She threw everything away—she threw him away—this house, their life, the happily ever after he was trying to give her, because she couldn't handle the man that he is...she couldn't handle loving him."
My heart hurt. My heart bled.
"You don't have to pretend, you know," Danielle said, smiling that pretend sweet smile. "I'm not stupid—the game is rather obviously over."
And something inside me broke. "I'm not the one pretending," I said, but with the force of my words, the room tilted all over again.
"We all pretend," she shot back. "Each in our own way. It's how we get what we want." With a flick of her long blond hair, she picked up a white taper candle from the dresser—a candle that had not been there a few nights before. "How we survive."
I tried to move, couldn't. My body responded, but the bindings held me.
"And what is it you want?" I asked as she struck a match and brought the flame to the wick. She couldn't have Aidan, not when she was supposed to be dead.
Not when she let everyone believe he killed her.
Illuminated by the soft glow of the game, she glanced at me, and smiled. "What every woman wants," she said. "—for the man I love to stay away from other women."
The pieces. More of them fell together, slicing deep.
The picture—the truth—darkened.
"I liked you, Kendall," she said as she returned the candle to one of the ornate candelabras. "I liked you a lot. That's why I tried to get you to leave."
Breathe, I told myself. Breathe.
"I did everything I could to make you realize it was dangerous to stay—"
My throat burned. My eyes stung.
The truth sickened.
Aidan.
The storyteller.
He'd made me believe him a monster, taking what I'd told him and staging the scene in his office, taking the blame and letting me hate him.
So I'd leave.
Because he knew.
He knew how this ended.
He knew how this always, always ended.
The darkness that stalked him.
The darkness that consumed...everything.
"There's a poetry, don't you think?" Danielle said, crossing deeper into the room, so that I couldn't see her anymore. "To ending and beginning in the same place?"
I worked my wrists, ignoring the cut of the rope.
"...like dying on the day you were born."
"You don't have to do this," I tried, stalling for as much time as I could. "I'll leave. I'll go away and never come back, never tell anyone-"
And then she was there again, beside the bed, long, thick blond hair falling against her face. Beautiful. She could have been so beautiful, if not for the hate and the ugly leaking from inside her.
"Kendall," she said in the voice of a parent to a child. "This isn't about you, and it never was. You leaving is exactly what he wants—which means that's the one thing I can never let him have." She had something in her hands. I couldn't tell what. She lifted it, and let liquid pour to the rug. "I saw you. I was here. That night when he brought you here. I saw you with him. I saw the way he looked at you—"
Gasoline.
The odor seared my nostrils, making my eyes burn.
"Danielle—"
"And I was there yesterday, on the highway. I saw him running. I saw him—"
"You can't do this."
But she kept right on pouring.
All over the room.
With the candles nearby.
Waiting.
"—holding you," she was saying, "his eyes—God his eyes. And that's when I knew you didn't listen to me, that he needed to be punished again—"
Everything inside me twisted.
"I told him. I told him he couldn't just throw me out like garbage," she said, finally turning back toward me. "I told him we belonged together and that I wasn't going to let anyone else have him."
Behind my back, I twisted my wrists harder.
"But he didn't listen." Reaching for the edge of the bed curtains, she dragged them closer as she perched on the edge of the mattress. "Of course, you didn't either. If you had, when we first met—if you'd left then, before..." Her eyes met mine, revealing what she didn't say, the truth that she knew.
Before Aidan and I came together.
Before we made love.
Before everything changed.
"He gets what he wants," she said, lifting a hand to drag a single finger along the line of my jaw, down my neck to my chest.
I tried to wrench back, wrench away—
"He always gets what he wants," she murmured, finding the swell of my breasts, and slowly beginning to trace. "This time, it'll be what he deserves instead."
I tried to pull back, couldn't.
"Poor Aidan," she mused, rubbing her thumb back and forth, "He thought he could beat me at my game and scare you away. What do you think he'll do when he runs upstairs and finds the bedroom on fire...and you trapped and dying in the bathtub?"
My heart twisted. Because I could see him.
Here.
In his house—her house.
Where it all started, the nightmare he'd been living the past five years.
Where his happiness ended.
"Do you think he'll try to save you?"
I could see him, Aidan—Nicky—running into the bedroom—her bedroom. I could see him through the flames, seeing me.
Seeing her. Laurel.
Seeing us both. The past and the present.
Twisting.
Mixing.
Fusing.
"Two minutes, five...seven...an old place like this? It's a tinderbox." The strangest light glowed in her eyes. "He won't have long."
Especially with gasoline everywhere. "What if he doesn't come?" I challenged. He'd already done his best to send me away, sever ties between us. "What if he won't play your game?"
Please, please don't let him play her game.
She shrugged. "Then it'll be the firemen. And Aidan, he'll tell them he broke up with you. That you were supposed to leave New Orleans. That he has no idea what you were doing here, why you lit candles. How the fire started." She pulled back, her mouth curving. "But Detective Edwards, he'll see the holes and lack of logic.
"He'll know that four, plus one..." Smoothly she twisted toward the nightstand, returning with a syringe. "Always equals five."
I jerked back, but there was nowhere to go, and the needle vanished into my arm.
"We'll have to wait and see which way it goes."
Checkmate
Shadows. I watched them. Or tried to. But my eyes were too heavy, and when she saw them open, Danielle returned with the syringe.
Darkness bled from all directions. The windows. My mind. There was no clock, but each passing minute wound through me, an inevitable vise that refused to release. Aidan would come. She would text him, and he would walk straight into whatever nightmare she had planned.
Vaguely I was aware of the candles, the way they flickered against the deepening night, the big ones and the small ones, the tendrils of smoke dancing around the room. Of her. The way she paced. Murmuring to herself. Wandering in and out of the bathroom, to and from the window. But I didn't let myself track her too closely, or respond. Because then she'd know I was awake, and she'd send me away again.
>
Sleep took me again, thick and heavy, waves pulling at me, sucking me under, deeper, all the way down and holding me there. Holding me tight. Tugging. Dragging—
"Kendall."
A voice.
His voice.
Rough, urgent.
"Kendall!"
My eyes. I made them open, and he was there, on the edge of the bed, leaning over me. "Aidan..."
His eyes. They were dark and they were hard, carved by a violence I'd never seen before. Even through the haze I could see that. And his hands. They were on me, working against the straps at my wrists.
"I'm here," he rasped. "I've got you—"
The whirlpool. It spun so hard. The darkness. "Danielle..." Warn him. I had to let him know. "She's here, it's a trap—"
His body covered mine like a shield. "I'm going to get you out—"
But I saw what he didn't, what he couldn't. The blur, the raised candlestick. "Behind you!"
He twisted as she lunged, grabbing her wrists and stopping her, driving her backwards, away from the bed—toward the dresser.
The candles.
Still flickering.
And the beautiful rug.
Soaked in gasoline.
It all happened so fast. They crashed hard, and darkness exploded into light.
I screamed and shot toward them, but the bindings held me there, held me there in the bed, trapped as the rug went up in flames. "Aidan!"
Releasing Danielle, he twisted toward the wall of fire growing between us. "Kendall!" Without hesitation, he darted toward the far side of the bed, the bed surrounded by gasoline-drenched curtains—
But then he was on the floor, and Danielle was standing there, standing over him with a gun in her hands. "That's right," Danielle was saying. "You're figuring it out, aren't you? Finally."
I couldn't see him. I tried. "Aidan—"
The flames licked closer to the bed.
"This time, it isn't your ending to write," she taunted in the same sing-song voice she'd used earlier in the day. "And now we say goodbye again," she said, standing there so eerily still, while the room burned around her, standing there with the gun pointed down. "You want to come, too, don't you?" she spat. "I see it in your eyes," she said through thick coughing. "You want to follow me." Her laugh was distorted, barely human. "You can...but we both know," she said, glancing toward me, "what happens if you do. Four. Plus one—"