Page 9 of Hush Money

My watch alarm wakes me for another wellness check on Ravenna at two a.m. I turn off its little chirp before it wakes everyone up and groggily push aside the blanket on my sofa and sit up. A quick glance around the room shows that all is well and all is quiet. We left a few candles burning on the mantelpiece, so I see that Ravenna is resting comfortably on her sofa. Daniel found a sleeping bag and claimed a spot on the floor in front of the fireplace. He said that he preferred the floor to a sofa because of back issues. Lucien occupies a leather wing chair in the far corner and dozes peacefully, his feet up on an ottoman and a blanket draped over his lap. On the other side of the windows, the storm has finally blown itself out except for a gentle, lingering rain that patters against the windows.

I get up, yawning and stretching to work the kinks out of my lower back. I hate to keep waking Ravenna every time she gets comfortable and starts to rest, but I want to make sure her head injury isn’t getting any worse. So far so good. Still, I decide to tiptoe to the bathroom first and give her a few more minutes of uninterrupted sleep.

I grab one of the flashlights and head out into the hallway, the light’s beam somehow compounding the house’s eeriness. The flashlight is one of those ultra-great and powerful models that could probably guide a ship through a craggy shore and home safely. But the hallways and rooms here at Ackerley are so vast that there are always shadows encroaching from the corners that the light can’t reach.

I hurry into the bathroom and quickly take care of my business, telling myself I’m being an idiot for getting the creeps. It’s a dark house in the middle of the night. So what? The bogeyman is no more likely to find me here than he was anywhere else in my life. But I don’t like being out here alone. Especially when I didn’t have the chance to lay a trail of breadcrumbs to lead me back to the others, and there’s every chance that I’ll get lost in the bowels of Ackerley, never to be seen again by human eyes.

I head back down the hallway, the hair on my nape prickling and my skin crawling. So you can imagine my surprise when the darkness shifts up ahead of me and a form materializes out of the darkness.

“Lucien,” I cry, jumping out of my skin. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Not really.”

He didn’t bring his own flashlight, I realize. I guess he followed my light. I don’t want to blind the poor man, so I point my beam at the floor between us. A disturbing side effect of this particular angle is that it twists his features, giving him more harsh lines and angles than usual. Worse, it creates gleams in his eyes and hollows underneath that make him look a little unhinged. His hair, dried by now, is wavy and falling across his forehead. Nothing like the carefully brushed and controlled daytime Lucien I’m so used to, but also not quite the tousled and sexy lover, either.

But that’s the sad fact of the matter, and the sooner I get used to it, the better. This isn’t my Lucien anymore, to the extent that he ever was. He’s Ravenna’s husband. And I need to remember it.

“I want to talk to you,” he says.

“Like I said, I don’t think this is the time?—”

He makes an indistinct sound of impatience—annoyance?—and clamps a hand around my wrist, cutting me off. Then he tugs me sideways through one of the many doors in this endless hallway and quickly shuts it behind us. It’s one of the darker wood-paneled rooms that I saw earlier when he gave me a house tour, the one with several ornate and expensive-looking chess sets. So now I’m stuck inside the room with him and precious few emotional reserves for any big conversations.

We stare at each other long and hard, our breath coming a little faster than normal in the relative silence. My pulse thunders so hard in my ears that I wonder if I’ll be able to hear him when he finally speaks.

“I’m sorry,” he says at last. His voice is, like the rest of him, much rougher than normal. “I didn’t know she was alive.”

“I know. I understand.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” I say, determined to be as upbeat and dignified about this whole situation is possible. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’ve been thinking about it, and I bet Mrs. Hooper will let me stay in her apartment on the Upper East Side until my apartment is ready in September.” Mrs. Hooper is the elderly heart patient I was accompanying to Europe when I met Lucien. “I think she’ll probably list it for sale now that she’s moving to Florida with her niece, but it’s still available for now. So I’ll call her in the morning and get that set up.”

He goes very still, his expression growing darker with each word I say. By the time I finish with my little speech, his features are so strained and tight it’s a wonder he can speak at all.

“What the hell are you talking about? Why would you need to stay with Mrs. Hooper?”

“Because I’m leaving in the morning,” I say, as startled by the deathly quiet of his tone as I am by the question itself. “First thing in the morning.”

His lip curls. “No, you’re not.”

What the—? I blink and sputter like an idiot, trying to come up to speed. Why isn’t he trying to get rid of me? I expected a compassionate and carefully worded speech about how my affections were no longer needed now that his beloved is back. Not an outright refusal to let me go, as if he’s got a baying pack of bloodhounds he’d be happy to set on my trail if necessary. “What the hell are you talking about, Lucien?”

He looms over me, staring me down. “You’re. Not. Leaving. Nothing’s changed.”

“We’ve just had a miracle resurrection,” I cry. “Which means that everything’s changed.”

“Not between you and me, it hasn’t. You and I are building something. We still can.”

I nearly gag on my outraged disbelief. What exactly is he trying to do here? Isn’t the situation bad enough without his adding insult to my injury? I’m trying to be gracious about my loser status, but I have my limits. “Building something? No, we weren’t. We were having great sex while I pretended not to notice your emotional brick wall. And tried not to notice the ghost of your wife casting a shadow over everything. Only guess what? She’s not a ghost. She’s back and you’re married, and I never belonged here in the first place. So I’m leaving the first chance I get.”

“Fuck that. I’m not letting you go. It’s not happening. You’re here. You’re mine. That’s not changing.”

“Yours? So I’m a prisoner now?”

A humorless laugh. “We’re both prisoners of our relationship. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

My brain glitches out in the face of his unreasonable and unyielding stance. I’ve never encountered this kind of mind-fuckery before, and certainly never expected it from Lucien. “What are you going to do? Fuck me under your wife’s nose? You think I’m okay with that? Is that who you think I am?”

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