Page 69 of The Villa

But still, Mari thinks she might be able to forgive him. It’s a stupid accident, after all, nothing Pierce meant to do. He’s drunk and tired, and they’re all upset, and Mari could absolve him the same way she’s absolved him for everything else.

And then he laughs.

It’s a shrill sound, high and grating, and Mari is moving before she knows it.

“Stop!” she hears herself yell as she runs down the stairs, her palms hitting him hard in the chest.

Harder than she’d meant to, but also not hard enough, not nearly hard enough for the rage in her heart in this moment.

He stumbles again, and his eyes meet hers, wide and confusedas he falls back, and Mari will never forget the sound of his head hitting the stone floor, not as long as she lives.

It’s bad, she sees that immediately. Pierce lies there, dazed, his hand going to the back of his head instinctively, but then that same hand jerks like some invisible force has caught it, and those beautiful blue eyes roll back, his body convulsing.

“Oh god, ohgod,” she hears Lara screaming, and Mari just wants it to stop, wants him to stop making those sounds, stop moving like that.…

There’s a sculpture on a pedestal by the front door. It’s heavy, solid stone, a naked and muscular man holding a harp, and Mari takes it in her hands now, feeling the weight of it, how almost impossibly heavy it seems.

But it’s not impossible after all.

She brings it down.

On the floor, Lara moans, but Mari can’t make herself stop.

She brings the statue down again and again, and she sees Frances, walking into that pond with stones in her pockets, and she sees her and Lara, locked forever in this sick triangle, and she sees Billy, trying to catch his breath and Pierce is saying,He’ll be all right, stop worrying,but he wasn’t all right, he would never be all right again, and nothing Pierce ever said came true.

Nothing he’d ever promised her had ever been real.

The statue cracks, but by then, Pierce isn’t moving anymore, and Mari is breathing so hard it sounds like she’s sobbing.

She is sobbing, she realizes, tears and blood mixing on her face.

Lara is still crouched on the floor, her face gray, her eyeswide, and when she looks up at Mari, there’s something like awe in her face.

“What do we do now?” she asks, and Mari is so, so glad she said, “we.”

They both remain there, and Mari thinks how quiet it is in the house. Noel is gone, of course, but Johnnie…

Where is Johnnie?

They find him passed out on the sofa, deep in a drugged stupor, and Mari understands how it has to happen now. Understands why Johnnie was here.

She’s inevitable,Pierce had thought in his dream, and she was.

So was this.

Once Johnnie has been smeared with Pierce’s blood, once she has smashed the statue into even more pieces and left them, bloody and broken at Johnnie’s feet, she and Lara go up the stairs.

Mari’s hand is still streaked with red, but Lara takes it anyway, the two of them silent as they make their way into the bathroom.

She turns on the tap in the bathtub, and Lara takes her dress, the black one with the red flowers on it, the one she’d bought the last time they were in Italy.

Pierce teased her that those flowers looked like splashes of blood, but he was wrong. She knows now because his blood is all over this dress, and it’s dark and thick and nothing like those bright red poppies at all.

Mari showers, making sure there’s not a single drop of blood left behind.

She’s not worried, oddly. She has Lara, and Lara has her. Johnnie and Pierce had fought just a few days before. Johnnieis passed out, Johnnie is covered in blood, Johnnie has the broken statue beside him.

Mari is going to get away with this, she knows.

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