Page 21 of Moonlit Thorns

The silence stretches between us again until I realize that Jack probably knows whoever found my father’s body on the Voss property, or he may have even found him himself. He could have seen my father’s body before the authorities arrived.

I don’t want to put Jack on the spot, but I feel like I need to know. It feels like the thing between us that isn’t being said.

“Can I ask you something, Jack?” I let my arm drop from brushing Poe, cringing at the pain in my shoulder.

It’s like Jack senses what I’m about to ask, because he stops working on his horse and turns to me, eyes full of remorse. “Of course.”

“Did you… were you the one who found my father?” My chest feels as if a hole is burning through it.

Jack gives his head a small shake and frowns. “No, that was Don, who works for me. But I got the call from Don and went out there.”

I don’t know what I was hoping that information would give me, but all it does is bring back the image I’ve had in my head since the day I got the phone call—my father’s ravaged body lying in blood-soaked grass. We had to have a closed casket because the funeral home told my grandmother that the injuries were too great for an open casket.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the unshed tears that burn my eyes, then suck in a breath and look at Jack. “Do you think… he suffered?”

Jack softens his expression as though he wants to wrap me in a hug as if I’m a little girl who needs consoling after a bad dream. But this is my new reality. My father is dead, and my mother has essentially checked out. I lost both my parents in one fell slash of the Grim Reaper’s scythe.

“I don’t think so. I think as far as these things go, it was a pretty clean death for him.”

I don’t know whether he’s saying that to try to make me feel better or whether he believes that, but I choose to take him at his word.

The official cause of death for my father was listed as an animal attack, though there didn’t seem to be any agreement over what kind of animal. A bear? Wolf? Something else? Not that I suppose it matters either way.

We go back to brushing the horses in silence until the words I probably shouldn’t say slip from my mouth. “My father isn’t the only person who has died at Midnight Manor.”

Jack stills, glancing over his shoulder at me. “We don’t talk about such things around here, Anabelle. If you’re smart, you won’t either.”

It’s obvious from the look on his face that this is the end of any conversation between us, and I continue brushing the stallion while loneliness settles in around me, threatening to suffocate me.

I have to work hard to regulate my breathing as the grief of losing my father hits me all at once. Since the funeral, I’ve been pushing against it, erecting a wall in my mind to keep it away. The household needed running, and my mother’s recovery felt more important. I’d already lost one parent. I didn’t want to lose another.

But being away from the estate where my family lives has left me more time with my thoughts, and those walls I’d so perfectly built are crumbling into ruins.

Now, being alone in this enormous estate, under the thumb of a man who disdains me, I feel as though I have no one in the world. That I’m truly on my own.

I cry myself to sleep that night while despair covers me like a weighted blanket, holding me down.

Chapter

Ten

ANABELLE

By the time Saturday night comes, I can’t wait to get off Midnight Manor’s grounds. Normally I would head home to see my family, but I can’t handle the idea of seeing zero improvement in my mother this week.

Ever since my conversation with Jack yesterday, I keep seeing flashes of my father’s dead body in my head, so instead of driving home, I ask one of the workers who is leaving until the morning if he would mind dropping me off at the Black Magic Bar. My only mission for tonight is to drink so much that the image of my father’s dead body leaves my head. I’ll worry about how I’ll get back to Midnight Manor later.

I push past the rickety door of the bar and glance around inside. There’s no one here that I know right now besides the bartender, which is preferable. I’m not up for making chitchat with anyone.

“Hey, Sawyer.” I take a seat on one of the wooden barstools along the bar.

The place hasn’t changed since high school. We’re a small town, and the Black Magic Bar has never been huge on making sure you’re of age to drink. The owner is a strange woman—in her late fifties now, I’d guess—and there are always rumors that she’s a witch or something. I think it’s just because of the bar name, but there’s no doubt she’s a little out there.

An exposed brick wall holds the shelving where all the bottles of liquor are lined up like soldiers. Interspersed between them are various knick-knacks—voodoo dolls, portraits of tarot cards, half-burned candles of different colors, crystals, skulls. Those themes repeat throughout the small bar in the wall décor and the things hanging from the ceiling. I’ve always likened it to a creepy dive bar.

“What can I get you, Anabelle?” Sawyer asks.

He was a few years ahead of me in school and never went anywhere after graduation. I can’t imagine why.

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