Page 70 of A Heart So Haunted
I straightened. The business card started to burn in my peripheral, as if whispering,IvanIvanIvan. She was right here, available, I could ask her right now—even if it was just about the Reddit thread—
The silence hit me, then, and I realized the children had been ushered out of the building. The college student was gone. One older gentleman held a book in his arms behind me, ready to check out.
My time was up.
“Come back if you need to look for anything else?” she asked. The corner of her mouth turned up. “And … I’m sorry to hear about your aunt. She was very sweet.”
“Thank you.” I hesitated, the words right there. I wanted to take that leap, but her eyes held pity, and it threw up a barrier.
She moved back to her monitor.
And I turned and left.
My bedroom glowed a pale blue from my TV, but it was muted. I saved the document I was working on and exited out of it. My hoodie was tucked over my mouth, my hood up and knees propped for my laptop to sit upright. The wind whistled outside, tree branches skittering over the glass panes in preparation for a thunderstorm.
I really needed to get a mock-up ready for a client. But I couldn’t bring myself to open her file. Instead, I’d spent the better part of my afternoon scouring the internet for anything related to the property. Library archives, my old university source compilations, research papers,anything. But instead of finding leads on what I should be worried about—Hadrian being stuck in this house—I’d searched articles that detailed his time period. What he might have seen in the newspapers. What he might have done in a day’s time. Historic events around the years that would have mattered to him. What kind of lightbulbs they had before he’d … passed.
Then I’d searched burial records. I’d stopped myself before I’d gotten too far.
I set my laptop aside and reached for my nightstand drawer. The papers were folded together, one over another, so at first glance they didn’t look like anything important. Prying eyes wouldn’t notice.
I took Hadrian’s photograph off the top. Was it the eyes that were throwing me off? Or the way he held his jaw, clenched and rigid?
Then—a faintclick click click.
My fingers tightened on the page. The TV’s mute sign still held strong in the screen’s corner. To focus, I patted the bedsheets for the remote, and turned it off.
Immediately the housesoundedvast. The whir of the refrigerator could be heard from downstairs. Gently, I placed the papers back in my nightstand. It was probably the tree branches on the window, if I thought about it. And even then—
A shadow swept under my closet door. The room was dark, but the shadow was so deep it looked like a hole that swallowed the floorboards.
My fingers tightened around the nightstand drawer handle.
For a split second, I thought it might be Hadrian taking me up on the closet hiding. But then I thought about the light issue I’d had when I’d stayed that first night. How things had happenedbeforeHadrian had been out of that room.
“Hadrian,” I whispered. My throat tightened when theclick click clickcame again.
Maybe it wasn’t him after all.
I started to pull my sheets back—sleeping on the couch would be better than this—when the door unlatched and drifted open, tender, before stopping a few inches later.
One clawed hand curled around the closet door’s edge.
Both relief and anger flooded me.
“You”—I lowered my voice to a hiss, grabbed a pillow behind me, and chucked it at the closet—“youjerk. You scared me.”
That chattering came again. A glint of ivory on the other side—jagged and sharp—made me realize it was his teeth that were making that noise. He was chuckling.
At me.
“I wanted to give my gratitude.”
“I don’t want gratitude, I want my blood pressure to come back down.”
“Either way, Landry, I would appreciate it if you at least took my thanks.” A long pause. He ushered the pillow aside. “The lightbulbs you chose are much better.”
The sudden seriousness in his tone felt like a weighted blanket on my chest. Any hint of irritation seeped straight out of me. If there were any moment to be thankful that the lights were all out, it was then, because the heat crawling up my neck felt like a collar ready to strangle me.
