Page 51 of The Villa

But a thought occurs to me, electric enough that I jump to my feet.

It’s probably nothing,I keep telling myself as I walk upstairs.You’ve found connections between the book and the house, but that doesn’t mean everything is some kind of clue.

But just like before, there’s this sensation, almost like a hand guiding me, and I move toward the window seat.

TheMetched in the glass seems to be watching me as I liftthe cushion off the bench, feeling stupid even as my heart races and my palms sweat.

There’s just a flat wooden surface, and when I pull at the edge, nothing happens. I hadn’t really expected the entire seat to lift up, revealing a treasure trove, but I’m still a little disappointed.

But it was silly to think that Mari would’ve left anything here back in 1993. She probably just came for some kind of closure in her final days.

Except that I kept returning to that same thorny issue. This was the spot where her boyfriend had been horribly murdered—wasn’t that closure enough? Why revisit the scene of the crime, literally?

But after she died, several unpublished books—everything she had written sinceLilith Rising—had been found hidden around her apartment.

So, maybe it wasn’t completely crazy to think Mari came back here to hide one last thing. Maybe I just misinterpreted the riddle.

That’s when I spot it.

The window seat isn’t completely flush with the wall, and at some point, someone had added a thin piece of wood to fill in the gap. It’s painted the same shade of white, so the seam is barely visible, but it’s there.

I grasp the end of the board and gently pull.

At first, it seems as solid as the rest of the seat, but then there’s a slight give, and suddenly there’s a thin piece of wood in my hand.

Gingerly, I slide my hand inside the gap between the wall and the bench, visions of something lurching out of the dark to bite my fingers, my heart pounding in my ears, but there’s no sharp sting, no pain.

There’s just the rustle of paper.

Mouth dry, I pull out a folded stack of yellow paper and when I open it, I see each line filled in a neat, economical scrawl.

And at the top, the words that make me lift a trembling hand to my mouth.

Mari—London, 1974.

MARI,1974—ORVIETO

The scream doesn’t just wake her.

It sends Mari hurtling into consciousness, her brain rattling in her skull. She’d always thought it was a cliché, that moment of someone sitting straight up in bed, heart pounding, but that’s where she is now, hand pressed to her chest as she searches the room for the source of that sound.

She’s sees almost immediately that it’s Pierce. They’d fallen asleep peacefully enough earlier, wrapped up in each other, sweat still drying on their skin, but now he’s out of bed, crouched naked in one corner of the room, his hands over his ears, his eyes wild.

And he’s still screaming, screaming and screaming, the sound so loud that Mari is forced to get out of bed and go to him, grabbing his wrists as she tries to wake him.

“Pierce!” she says, her voice sharp. “Pierce!”

She can hear footsteps in the hall, and then Lara’s voice at the door. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Mari calls back, even though Pierce is still whimpering at her feet, blinking like he’s trying to clear his head.

“Go back to bed!” Mari adds, and she kneels down in front of Pierce. He’s covered in sweat, almost glowing in the moonlight spilling through the window, and Mari brushes his hair back from his face.

The rain has returned and with it, the oppressiveness of the house, a feeling that seems to affect Pierce more than any of them, and Mari sometimes has the crazy thought that maybe they were the ones causing it, that all their tension and weird energy was spinning out and up into the sky.

“It’s all right, love,” Mari says, and she’s assailed by the memory of holding Billy as he burned like an ember against her chest, shushing him and speaking the same words into his damp hair.

It’s all right, love.

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