Page 69 of Lair

“G’way,” I moan into my pillow.

“Arie. Honey. It’d be good for you.”

“Ugh, fine,” I huff, rolling over and blowing out air at the ceiling.

Anxiety prickles through me as we approach the harbor. Is the Lair still there? A small, childish part of me sulks at the fact that Adrian didn’t hunt me down, that I never heard a knock on the hotel room door and found Mrs. Colding waiting chilly and impeccable in the hallway, ready to escort me back.

But Adrian wouldn’t do that. He would respect my wishes.

What would I do, though, if I bumped into Mrs. Colding out here on the dock? Would I give in?

I’m spared this conflict. The yacht Cailee and I are washing down is moored inside the harbor, away from the Lair at the outer quay for the bigger boats. This results in a whole afternoon spent doing a washdown while forcing myself not to look over at the Lair.

Cailee, mercifully, switches to full gossip mode to distract me.

“You were right, these rich yacht owners?” she says as we squeegee bridge deck windows. “All the same. Sucking bottles and fucking models.”

Or sucking models, in my case.

“I mean, the yachts are just extensions of their dicks. Why do you think they’re always comparing the lengths of their boats? ‘Mine is a hundred and fifty-five meters,’” she mimics in a dry British accent, and snorts. “But Corsica, right? I mean, Bonifacio? All those cliffs and cobbled streets? A-maz-ing. And you wouldn’t believe how hot the guys were on my charter. Like, mega hot. There was this engineer from Jamaica, and this one time I bumped into him in the engine room...”

But I can’t tune into it. Adrian tumbles through my brain, smiling at me and then turning into a desiccated corpse with blood bearding his chin—

“Babe!”

“Huh?”

Cailee looks at me with patient understanding, squeezes my arm. “We’re all set. I’m gonna talk to the captain, okay? Get our pay. Maybe see if I can get us hired for a charter trip.”

“Yeah, sure. Of course.”

I nod, trying my best smile, and she pads down the teak gangway still damp from our wash, dips into the wheelhouse with an uncertain look back at me.

Get it together, Aurora.

I coil up the hose, set about drying up the last of the puddles on the deck. I’m wringing my mop out into a bucket when I see it: a smudge of blood, tiny and inconspicuous, on the hatch of the anchor-chain locker.

Oh. Oh crap.

Panic buzzes up in me like wasps, and I think, It’s nothing. You’re just being paranoid. After Adrian, you think all blood has something to do with that. All yacht owners can’t be them, right?

It’s just... sportfish, perhaps, a marlin or tuna stowed away after a catch.

But in an anchor-chain locker?

I look about to make sure the decks are clear before lifting my mop out of the bucket. One step at a time, Arie. Hold the mop at your side. Creep forward. You’ll be laughing about this in a minute.

My heart is clamoring up into my throat when I shriek up the hatch and peer down.

It’s a small space, the anchor-chain locker, but big enough for someone to fit inside. New deckhands—or “greenhorns,” in yachtie speak—usually get the unenviable job of climbing down into that stifling dark and “flaking the chain.” That is, spreading it out in great loops as the anchor is lifted so it doesn’t get tangled up. But the body I see splayed out on the small mountain of rusting metal doesn’t look like a greenhorn who got trapped and forgotten down there.

I know because it’s the body of a young woman, and her head is flopped back to reveal a pair of fang marks crafted into her throat, her pale face frozen in an expression of utter horror.

Aurora, meet yesterday’s dayworker.

I take three small, staggering steps backward, overturning the plastic water bucket in a spray of soapy water. Suds foam about my bare feet. My eardrums boom. The breath whistles in my lungs. At the bow jackstaff, a flag—faintly familiar—ripples in the wind: two inverted white triangles on a black field.

A chill of vague recognition seeps through me. And then I remember: Cailee.

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