Page 112 of A Heart So Haunted
I dipped my chin. “Yes, but I’ll warn you, I’m not any good.”
“I’m poor enough at it for the both of us,” he teased. His hand slipped down my arm, then captured my right hand. I stepped forward at the same time he tugged. My hip hit the top of his thigh, my other hand landing on his shoulder. He cinched me at the waist. Two stacks of blank pages, pressed together by a book binder. Something told me the glue was already setting between us.
And it terrified me.
Because I couldn’t keep this man.
“Poor in love from a father, maybe,” I said. I meant it as a tease, but there was something sad in my words. I tilted my head back and watched his eyes drift over the living room. Soaked up the feel of him being this close.We could give each other that missing piece, though,is what I didn’t say.
“Poor in love does not mean rich in life.”
My throat burned. “You never loved your wife, then?”
“Arranged. Her father was one of the first migrants to strike oil. Maybe I would have grown to love her as a friend, if we’d had enough time.” His sincerity was refreshing.
“No one came into your life after she passed?”
“I traveled too much to settle. I took over everything after my father died. Made a few poor choices, to say the least. Decided to go west for a while. I made a few connections with Cora’s father, which kept the shipping port afloat, and …” He shook his head. “I became jaded. Arrogant.”
I chuckled. “You, arrogant? Never.”
“You tease,” he breathed. He squeezed the low of my back. Then, his expression hardened. “I would search these brothels for the men my father worked with and I would wait to see what they would do. I would see if they—took part in acts with children. And women without the woman’s consent.”
“What?” My feet tangled with his.
He met my gaze. “My father was a monster, Landry. The only way monsters stop eating is if they die.”
The dots connected, one by one; my hand gripped his shoulder so hard, there would likely be crescent marks beneath the fabric of his shirt. Children. A port. Multiple, not just him. Could it have been a trafficking situation?
“Did they—did you—” I couldn’t ask. The words died on my tongue, hugged by the taste of vomit.
“Kill them? Yes.”
My cheek fell against his chest. The wild beat of his heart in my ear matched my own. I thought I was going to be sick.
Hadrian’s father—I couldn’t ask, but I couldn’tnot. I needed the full picture, and the thought of not knowing what happened to him as a child would eat me alive.
“Did he ever do things to you?” I whispered against his shirt. He was so warm, soalive.
We swayed in a slowly unraveling silence. I let him marinate in his thoughts, while I sorted through my own. While trying to navigate the dread in my gut.
And Hadrian had been in that room for over one hundred years? Knowing everything his father had done? Reliving past memories, and who knows what other kinds of figments, as they’d appeared?
“He attempted. Once,” he said after a while. “I was perhaps seven, maybe eight. Bunny walked in on accident.” He paused. “I remember little of what he said after. If he defended himself to her. He’d been in a foul mood the majority of the month, and this was the … pinnacle.” He took a calming breath; it rushed through my ear, vibrated againstmy jaw. “I just remember this baby rabbit I found outside while she was drying clothes that week. I’d begged her to let me stay outside and watch it. Out of pity, I suppose, she allowed me to feed it, morning and night for the following month with excess goat’s milk. Really, I wanted an excuse to keep out of the house. And he never attempted again.”
I couldn’t help but imagine it. That moment. That feeling, that visceral wrongness of knowing that something was happening that wasn’t supposed to and there was nothing he could have done about it. That innocence, teetering into oblivion with gnashing teeth snapping below.
I gripped Hadrian tighter. As if I could shield him from the world.
“I’m so sorry,” I choked. I could see it clearly—the hatred he’d had for Bertie, the butler. The insinuations that Bertie had known, had aided. And then Hadrian, an adult, ending the line.
Then Bunny, trapping him within the house.
A coil of hatred emerged. How could she have subjected him to the house if she’d known what it would show him?
“You relived it because of the curse keeping you in that room,” I murmured. “How could she do that to you? After helping you?” Tears threatened my vision.
“You do not understand, dearest. I think that is the issue we have at hand.”
