Page 64 of A Light in the Darkness
“Fuck.” I say, all the terrible pieces to an ugly puzzle falling into place right in front of me. My eyes flick up to find him staring at me, awaiting whatever revelation I just had. He’s not ready for it—I’m about to blow his world apart, but I can’t bring myself to worry about him. “You said your wife was Lauren’s guardian?”
Victor nods, and I can see him trying to figure out the puzzle I already solved. “Fuck,” I say again. I feel like I may throw up, but I push it down as I turn to the man I’m sure is Claire’s father. “I could be wrong, but I think I know what happened to Lauren all those years ago.”
Desperation is a sad look on him, but I imagine I’m wearing it just as poorly right now. I just need them to open the doors, to tell me she is going to be okay, to let me hold her.
“Your wife had her murdered to keep your daughters from you.”
Chapter thirty-seven
Claire
I woke up a few times in the hospital with Remy’s arms around me, and since we left the hospital, he’s been at my side every waking moment… and presumably the ones where I’m asleep. I haven’t gotten the courage to face him yet. I don’t know how to tell him what I know to be true… the matter of how I came to be. I haven’t figured out how to tell him that I am a void, that I can’t give him any of the things he wants from me. I haven’t figured out how to tell him that when I broke this time, some of the pieces got left behind… that they went up in flames in the basement of a man I don’t even know the name of.
I don’t know how much time has passed since we left the hospital. I just know that sometimes I am awake, but my brain isn’t. The rest of the time, we’re both asleep. I can feel the weight of him against me, but never his warmth.
I don’t know why he brought me to a hotel, why he keeps ordering food I have no interest in eating, why he keeps telling me he’s sorry.
“Claire?” His sleepy voice makes me still as I’m trying to slip out of his hold. I pause, my feet dangling above the ground. A little slip of light that crept in through the blackout drapes forms a line on the floor pointing right toward the exit, and part of me wants to run toward it. His hand gravitates to the back of my neck, and I hear the mattress croak in protest as he moves toward me.
When his touch slips down my arm, his thumb coasting down to stop just above the bruising on my wrists, I jump up and run to the bathroom, putting as much space as possible between us.
I love him. Even though I can’t feel anything, I know that I do… or I did, before I lost all of my emotions. It’s why I know he isn’t trying to hurt me, and yet I can’t stand his touch right now. I can’t stand him hovering, coddling, encompassing me.
I’m suffocating, drowning, and I can’t tell him.
The smoke in my lungs feels like it reached deeper than they told me. It feels like it slipped all the way through me, like it turned my insides dark and rotten. Talking hurts too much, and the feeling of the chain around my neck weighs me down.
I lock the door behind me as his footsteps approach and walk to the sink to get as far away from him as I can. I see a sliver of myself in the mirror as I approach, and something in me tells me to turn the light on.
It must be the masochist inside me, the part of me that needs to suffer, that told me to do it, because I have to fight back a gasp when I do.
This is the first time I’ve looked in a mirror since before I went to that house of horrors, and I should have never done it. The harsh incandescent lighting does nothing for my pallor, and it makes the red splotches across my skin all the more prominent. Broken capillaries run under my skin like a road map going nowhere and everywhere all at once, my nose is black and blue and not the exact shape I remember, and the pool of blood on the white of my eye looks like it should be dripping past my lashes. But none of that is as bad as my neck—the chains left a stamp on my skin—purple bruises in the exact shape of the links that had cut off my air supply.
I think of his words when he first left me to strangle.“You were such a pretty shade of red when he choked you, but I always favored purple.”
“Claire!” Remy’s voice comes to me through the door, pulling me from the memory of being left to hang. “Are you okay?”
My eyes track the marks of the chain, disappearing behind my neck, so I turn to see them from another angle. The loose neck of my pajama top reveals a hint of a blue bruise on the top ofmy shoulder, so I find the buttons, curious to see the damage. I remember him grinding me into the brick wall on his front porch, trying to conceal me from the view of the camera. I wonder if it dislocated then or in the basement, when my arms had been jerked over my head. The nurse popped it back in place before Remy showed up, and the pain had been immediate, but so was the relief.
When I let my top fall to the ground, the bruise wraps around the shoulder and tapers off near my shoulder blade, where it is already yellowing.
“Such pretty skin. It will be beautiful, covered in my marks… red that fades to blue and purple. I will make art out of you.”
I appraise myself, taking in both the marks he left upon me, and the ones left last year by Slick’s blade. My body doesn’t feel like my own. I’m not sure it ever has.
“Claire!” Remy’s voice is more urgent this time, his knocking harder. “Are you alright?”
I slip my fingers in the waistband of my bottoms, pulling them free and letting them drop on the floor, too. Just one thigh bears the proof of his touch, faint blue fingermarks disappearing in the space between my thighs.“Call me daddy either way.”
Nausea swells through me, but I haven’t eaten in hours or days, I don’t know. Regardless, nothing comes up when I heave into the sink, the dry retching making my sore throat scream in pain. “God damn it, Claire, you have three seconds before I beat this door down. Just talk to me.”
The world gets a little darker, so I grip the counter tighter, just so I don’t go down and bust my head on the granite.
I don’t even realize he got the door open until I catch Remy’s reflection in the mirror. He pauses, coming to a dead stop when he sees me naked in front of the sink.
“Claire?”
I don’t know if the stranger took my voice or if that was all the smoke I inhaled, but I can’t speak even if I tried, so I don’t even attempt toanswer him.
