Page 41 of Lair

And he strides on down the passageway. Just like that.

Gone.

I blink in place, look down at myself with burning cheeks and tug at my torn dress. I’m hard-used between the legs, swollen and stinging. How can the procedures of love turn, at a moment’s notice, into the most shameful of things?

Shameful, yes. Such well-deserved shame.

To think that I’d fallen for another man who’d do that to me.

I start for my suite in a daze. The next step is clear: I will pack my bags, get off at the next port. Fly back to Cailee, or stay here in the Mediterranean and get hired on another boat. Have another life, without this man.

No.

I halt before the door to my suite, trembling. That will not be my story. Not again. I deserve answers, and I will get them. I march down the passageway, swept along on a tide of certainty. This confusion will be cleared up, this story reverted back to where it should be.

For is that not what love is? What it has always been?

A capturing tide, sweeping all before it. To happiness or ruin.

Let it be happiness.

I find him on the portside gangway, a darkly handsome silhouette against the bone whiteness of the teak decking. My call to him lodges in my throat when I realize: That shape is not one, but two people. For Thea is there, with her back to me. She seems to be embracing Adrian. No. Not embracing. At least, that is no normal embrace. She is swept up, twitching and bare toes grazing the deck, in Adrian’s white hands gripping her by the shoulders. He seems to fold himself over her, his face burrowed in her neck, as if feeding on her. For that is what he is doing. He has crafted two long foreteeth into her neck and is drinking her blood.

When he looks up at me, those gorgeous blue-black eyes rolling up from under his brow to show the lower half of his face is bearded in gore, it is as if all the air has been sucked out of the sky.

Adrian. My Adrian. Drinking the blood of women.

This is the destruction: the sentence forms in my mind. This is the destruction of your life.

Thea’s corpse drops from Adrian Voper’s long, talon-like hands—thump—and I’m trying to scream but there’s a stuttering of his pale shape toward me... and darkness.

TWENTY-TWO

I wake in utter darkness. My skull is pounding, and when I touch it my fingers come away damp. That’s when I remember: Adrian Voper. Out on the teak decking. Flowing toward me like a pale nightmare.

“Hello, Aurora,” comes his cool voice out of the darkness, and I shriek and scramble back against what must be a bed’s headboard. I’m suddenly trembling all over. My heart wants to pound out of my chest. “Get away—get away from me!” I shriek into the pitch black, sobs catching in my throat, and I have to clutch at my head, whimpering at the pain.

His voice is heavy, and full of regret. “I apologize I had to resort to that. I could not risk your screams alerting anyone.”

But Thea. But Thea.

I lurch away and fall out of bed, onto the floor. I can’t even see my hands in front of my face, such is the purity of the darkness in this space. I grope along the wall and away from that voice, my chest ragged with pants. The door. There must be a door. The thought flies through my mind like a bird going to and fro in wild and marveling terror. Get out. Get away.

“Aurora. Please.” A deep sadness in his voice now. “We need to talk.”

And there. A doorknob. But it won’t turn. The door won’t open.

“Help—help!” I scream. “Mrs. Colding! Jason! Help me!”

“This room is soundproof.” The explanation is calm, quiet, full of displeasure at that last name. “No one can hear you.”

So. I am trapped here. In the dark. With the murderer of my friend.

I sink down against the door, weeping. There it is. The fact has hardened, has taken on its undeniable shape: Who I have loved. What I have loved. There is no going back from this, no turning away. Say to yourself, You did not know. Say to yourself, Anybody could have been taken in.

Unless it takes a certain kind of fool. A certain kind of foolish woman to believe there was love there.

I am in a ball, sobbing uncontrollably, when he touches me. “Aurora.”

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