Page 111 of Seduced

But there was no concrete evidence, nothing solid he could latch onto and give himself hope that she was alive.

“There is nothing,” he said, too quietly to be heard by Wilder. “Nothing.”

His voice was dead.

“Nothing,” Wilder agreed. “Come on, let’s go into the house. We seem to have misplaced the vicar anyway.”

Alexei couldn’t find the strength to pick himself up from the ground. His limbs had grown too heavy and his breath was coming too short for any kind of movement.I can’t, he tried to say, but he was too tired.

The ground was swaying beneath his knees, the skies threatening to swallow him in their greyness.

He was really going mad, there was no question about it.

“I cannot bear this a moment longer,” he murmured, coughing. “I am going out of my mind. Good God, it’s as though the very ground is groaning.”

“Is it?” Wilder replied from somewhere above his head. “If anything, it sounds more like it’s meowing to me.”

Alexei’s eyes snapped to his.

“What. Did. You. Say.”

twenty-nine

Alexei

The skin around Wilder’s lips turned pale.

He looked down at Alexei with panic in his eyes.

“Eh?” he whispered, grasping Alexei’s hand so hard it was painful.

Alexei understood: his mind had gone blank. But his own had finally cleared.

Everything made sense all of a sudden: an unnatural, perverted kind of sense, but it was the only sort of sense to be had, and he would take it.

‘I have buried your seed.’

Thoseweresigns of a struggle, after all. And the soilhadbeen too hard and frozen, as he had initially thought, for a slip of a girl to dig up all that dirt by herself. Someone else had done it.

And buried her under it.

Alexei dropped on all fours and started digging with his own two hands like a lunatic.

“What are you—?” Wilder was screaming at him.

“Dig!” Alexei screamed back. “That mewing we heard…I think the cat is buried under here, alive, and P-Poppy might be too! Help me, for God’s sake!”

Once upon a time, a lifetime and a half ago, he had insisted that he did not scream. He did not need to shout to be obeyed. He did not need to raise his voice, not once, to get what he wanted.

How he had prided himself on being calm and collected at all times. At not caring. At putting up a stony, icy front, that no one could penetrate.

How utterly ridiculous it all seemed now.

Now that he was screaming himself hoarse calling Poppy’s name as he dug on that garden’s soil for her. He roared as he used his fingernails, his legs, his arms, even his teeth at some point, to part the black, frozen dirt.

Dirt was flying in every direction around him, getting inside his eyes, his hair, his shirt. He did not even notice.

“Wilder,” he shouted. Wilder was digging furiously next to him, but they weren’t being quick enough. They were being too bloody slow. “Get a shovel! A shovel, man!”

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