Page 49 of Drawn to Death
My throat closes up, and I fight back tears. This isn’t Talon the killer; this is the man hidden underneath. The man who has been buried for years under the deadly exterior. “I’d like that.”
We go through the house together, pulling sheets off, opening windows to let the sea air in. Every room is something new, a sunroom with dead plants and wicker chairs; a dining room with a table for twelve; a kitchen with cracked terra-cotta tiles and copper pots hanging from a rack. Everything feels solid. Permanent. Like it could survive anything.
“Your grandparents built this place?” I ask, running my fingers over the kitchen counter.
Talon shakes his head. “Grandfather inherited it. His family had money. Old money. His father was supposed to be a banker or a lawyer, something proper. Instead, he married my great-grandmother, who had nothing to her name but her true love for him, and they moved out here to scandalize everyone.”
He says it with a warmth I’ve never heard from him before. I turn to reply but stop before I can get a word out. He’s standing by the window, sunlight in his hair, making it look almost soft. Almost gold. Without the city, without the constant threat, he seems not relaxed, but more here. More real.
“They sound amazing,” I say.
“They were.” He opens a window, and the salt air rushes in, making the old curtains billow. “My grandparents took me in when my parents died. I was eleven. Angry. Difficult. They never seemed to mind.”
I try to picture it. Talon as a kid, angry and grieving, brought here to this place by the sea. I entered the foster system before I was old enough to remember anything different, but I'd seenplenty of kids who came with a ‘before’, a history they brought with them as mental scars. I watched as they ‘got better’ by burying who they were under an armor of defense.
Did he swim in those waves? Help his grandmother in the garden? Climb the pines that shelter the house? I can’t quite see it. I can’t line up the killer I know with the boy he must have been.
We head upstairs, opening windows as we go, letting sunlight flood into rooms that have been sealed up for who knows how long. The bedrooms are plain, but not in a bad way. Patchwork quilts, old wooden dressers, views of either the ocean or that twisty road we just drove. At the end of the hall, we find the studio. It’s big, almost echoey, with easels still standing where someone left them, jars of brushes, blank canvases stacked in a crooked line against the wall.
“She would have liked you,” Talon says, voice low, watching me as I take it all in.
The words cut right through me, not sharp, not painful, but slicing something open I’ve kept buried for years.
“How do you know?” My voice wobbles, and I hate that he can hear it.
He leans in the doorway, arms folded. “She believed in visions. Dreams. All the stuff you can’t explain but still know is real.” His mouth twists in a way that isn’t quite a smile. “She’d say your gift was the universe’s way of making sure we crossed paths.”
I laugh, a weird, startled sound. “Did she actually talk like that?”
“All the time. It drove my grandfather up the wall. He was all logic and plans, but he’d do anything for her. Including living in this big, impractical house by the sea because she said the light was perfect.”
I walk to the window and look out at the water. Sunlight makes the waves glitter, each one folding over the last, on and on.Suddenly, it all hits me. Not just the running, or the fear, or the constant checking over my shoulder, but everything before that, too. The dreams. The deaths. The loneliness of seeing through someone else’s eyes and never knowing why.
“Is this real?” I ask, not turning around. “Are we actually safe here?”
I feel him behind me, not touching, but close enough that his warmth reaches my back.
“For now,” he says. “Nothing lasts forever. But this place… it’s the closest thing to home I’ve ever had.”
Home.The word just hangs there, huge and breakable at the same time. I turn. We’re close, golden afternoon light making everything softer.
“Thank you,” I say. “For bringing me. For trusting me with all this.”
His eyes lock on mine, steady. “You’re the only one I’ve ever trusted with any of it.”
The moment stretches, sharp and gentle. I reach up, fingertips grazing his jaw, feeling the roughness there. We haven’t touched since that night in the apartment. Too busy running. Too busy surviving. But now, here, with nobody watching and nobody chasing, I feel everything I’ve been holding back come rushing in, hot and impossible to ignore.
“What was your name?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. “Before you were Talon?”
He goes still. I think he might just leave it there, but then his eyes search mine, looking for something I can’t name.
“Alfie,” he confesses finally. “Alfred Thomas Harrington the Third, if you want the whole thing. Named after my grandfather and his father. Although they were known as Alfred.”
I blink. The name doesn’t fit him at all. He’s all sharp lines and danger, andAlfiesounds like a kid from some old book.
“Alfie,” I repeat, and a laugh slips out before I can stop it. “You really, really don’t look like an Alfie.”
He raises an eyebrow. “No?”
