It took me longer to find than it should’ve, all things considered.

Then again, I wasn’t actively searching for things. Skeletons. I didn’t want to search the sprawling mansion that I’d decided needed to be named an estate.

One didn’t need to go outside to understand the sheer size of the house and its surrounding grounds. I excelled at watching the world from the inside, so I had discovered a lot from just looking out the windows.

And there were a lot of them. Floor to ceiling on most of the ground floor. They showed off the expanse of lush green grounds and huge leafy trees. The back of the house was, simply put, beautiful. I decided someone before him must’ve created all the beauty. He wasn’t capable of that.

A large patio opened off the french doors in the dining room and onto a paved area that housed beautiful pale brown wicker furniture, a large bricked outdoor fireplace and a grown-over walkway inviting the explorer out into the gardens.

It made me think of one of my all-time favorite books, The Secret Garden. Because for all its beauty, it held mystery too. Like there were secrets buried in that beautiful garden. Not the harmless juvenile ones that lived in books, but ugly, dangerous ones.

Knowing the owner of this house, I suspected the beauty of the garden was built atop decaying flesh. Maybe not real bodies and skeletons—though I thought there was a good chance of them too—but something more sinister that clung to the air around here.

Around the sides and beyond, there were trees surrounding the house. The landscape was flat and green until the edge of the horizon, where hills pushed from the flatlands, framing my prison in beauty.

They were seen over the thick red brick walls surrounding the house, green ivy growing atop most of them.

The windows at the front of the house showed me the sprawling driveway, but there was no vantage point that offered a view of the entrance, as it was obscured by trees.

I guessed it was locked and gated. Not that I needed to know such things. I was sure my would-be killer would happily give me everything I needed to exit the gates of the property if I so wished.

I did wish. Violently.

I had desire to leave. Explicit desire so thick it choked me.

But I wasn’t going anywhere.

I could still breathe in here, in this stale air of decay. Barely, but I could do it.

Outside, in the crisp and fresh country air, I’d suffocate. That beautiful blue sky would crash down and crush me. And that would be that.

Outside escape wasn’t an option.

So I tentatively explored. I didn’t snoop, because that felt somehow wrong. Rude. Which was comical—I wasn’t a rogue houseguest, testing the boundaries of etiquette. I was a prisoner.

He told me I could leave whenever I wanted, and I was sure that was true, but I was still a prisoner because of him. Because he tore through my paper-thin walls and my paper-thin life and ripped it all to shreds.

But I still felt strange violating him like that. My murderer.

So I didn’t. I’d wander around on light feet, my eyes trailing over objects in various rooms. My fingertips might sometimes follow, but I didn’t open things that were closed, rifle through drawers, pick locks.

I just wandered.

It was part of my routine, after all. Once I’d done my yoga, showered, eaten, worked, stared aimlessly out the window and toyed with the idea of killing myself, I wandered.

The ground floor consisted mainly of entertaining rooms and a cavernous foyer with marble floors and a double staircase climbing into the depths of the house.

I hated the foyer.

No matter the temperature inside the house, it was always freezing. Taunting me with its purpose, for leaving and entering. Neither of those things I could do under my own control.

The double doors to the front of the house were like two unyielding eyes of a beast that promised to chew me up if I got too close. Too brave. Too alive.

I wasn’t brave or alive, so I never got too close to those doors, to freedom. No, I skirted past them and resumed my wanderings.

And that’s where I found it.

At the very end of the house, the other side to what I was coming to think of as ‘my side.’ I instinctively knew this was his side. The whole house was his, of course, but this was him. Entrenched in the walls, in the carpet, in the air. The shadows seemed to multiply, seemed to blanket every square inch of the room, of me. Strong scents of cedar and clean linen mingled with the chilling aroma of death.

That was his scent.

Blanketing the air.

My heart became a land mine in my chest, something in danger of exploding if I took a wrong step, a path that would lead me face-to-face with him. The prospect terrified me, sickened me, yet it also enticed me. I wanted it.

Him.

To be presented with his empty and cruel eyes, his attractive façade hiding the monster beneath. Because he wasn’t hiding the monster, not really. If you looked close enough, you realized he wasn’t hiding it at all.

And I found myself craving that. I spent my whole life around monsters masquerading as men. They didn’t scare me. But this man who didn’t wear a mask did. He scared me, and he enveloped me in his darkness.

So I crept deeper into the shadowed hallway, bypassing the stairs to my right, instead feeling the magnetic pull toward the door at the end of the hall.

It was strange that I couldn’t even stand six feet away from the doors that held the outside world, freedom, some warped form of safety—if you removed my crazy, of course—but my fingers grasped the cool brass door handle and turned it without hesitation.

Maybe I had a death wish.

Maybe I wanted to find him in here, catch his magnetic stare and then watch as he killed me, finally.

The room was empty of him and his magnetic stare, and my death. But it was full of other things, bathed in an amber light.

It was the middle of the day, but you wouldn’t have known it. All the heavy velvet curtains were drawn, and the air had a shadow to it that told me sunlight didn’t warm this room often. There was a fireplace in the corner for that, two large leather armchairs positioned around it, an ornate oak side table between them. I stepped forward, letting the room swallow me up.

When I glanced around, I found myself surprised, and maybe a little disappointed. I didn’t know what I’d expected—skeletons lining the walls, corpses hanging upside down from the ceiling, women in cages, something deranged to suit the evil in his eyes.

But no, despite the shadow and menace lingering in the air, this was… normal. The den of a wealthy middle-aged businessman, where he came to escape the nagging, Botox-laden trophy wife and Ralph Lauren–clad children. There was a polished and expensive-looking wooden desk at one end of the room, perpendicular to the fireplace. A leather chair sat behind it. The desk was tidy, obsessively so, with a desktop computer—with two screens—an array of expensive pens, a box of cigars and not much else.

There were pens but no paper, which struck me as strange.

That struck me as strange.

As my feet carried me farther into the room, everything inside it, the muscle memory of him, enveloped me. It was cold despite the humid air, the chill of him left behind.

My hands trailed along the polished wood of the desk, not a speck of dust. I glanced behind it to the wall of books, floor to ceiling. There was enough space between the wall and the back of the chair for me to comfortably wedge myself into, but it wasn’t exactly an ideal setup. I inspected the books, frowning as to why they were here. He had an entire room as a dedicated library, and though it was well stocked, it wasn’t overflowing. These books on—I picked one up—Drawn from Paradise could’ve easily fit in some of the empty shelves.

I squinted at all the spines, realizing that every single book was on the same topic.

Birds.

“Strange,” I said aloud.

Again, that was what I noted as strange.

I was paying close attention to the books, making sure that Ten Best Ways to Hide a Body or something similar wasn’t tucked away in there. But then again, this man—the one I still didn’t know the name of—didn’t strike me as someone who hid bodies. He created them and then disappeared in a puff of smoke, likely leaving no evidence behind.

I idly wondered what evidence was left at my farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. I had no job to notice my absence, no family or spouse to report me missing—since to both my husband and my family I was already missing, to their pleasure. No one to miss me. My delivery men might notice the deadness of the house, the fact that I didn’t answer the door, the packages piling up. But they knew of my condition, or at the very least made up something similar if a little more dramatic. They’d probably think I’d finally been committed, or some family member or friend had staged an intervention. They’d hardly think I was interesting enough to be kidnapped by a hit man with a strange fascination for birds.

I was in the middle of it, and I still didn’t quite trust the reality of it. I half believed that I’d finally had a break from reality and was really lying on the wooden floor of my farmhouse, half-frozen, half-dead, fully insane.

In the middle of my thoughts and hopes about which reality I preferred, my eyes caught something. A glint in the dim light.

I squinted and looked downward, to hip level.

A latch. Not quite hidden but not exactly easy to find either. It was sandwiched between two thick books, with just enough room to hook my finger into the cool metal and pull.

This is where I’d find the corpses, I reasoned.

When the wall of books swung inward and a sensor light illuminated the room, I found I was right.

That was where I found the corpses.

* * *

The dead things were framed. Preserved in glass, their beauty magnified in their death, against the stark white wall behind them that illuminated the colors on their corpses.

They were everywhere, those frames. Not cluttered, though. Expertly spaced to make sure they each stood out on their own and the graveyard on the wall didn’t look tacky.

I didn’t want to, but I stepped forward into the room. It was noticeably cooler than the one I was stepping out of—temperature control, I guessed. My eyes ran up and down the walls, observing every facet of the things in the frames, in all their horrible beauty.

They weren’t humans, of course. Or even parts of humans.

They were birds.

Beautiful, unique birds. None of which I’d seen before.

There was one with a midnight black head and neck and then a startlingly bright turquoise torso. Bright fluff the color of embers illuminated the tail of the creature.

Another looked like a blooming lily, a watercolor of oranges and blues and violets, more striking than any talented painter could create.

The one beside it was all black, inky with the shininess of its feathers and a stark contrast to the rest in the room that seeped colors into the white, even in their death.

It would’ve been normal, ordinary, if not for the glorious tail that spread below it, at least twice the length of the small bird’s body. I moved forward, entranced by the simple and magical beauty of it. My fingers hovered above the glass, the charcoal feathers looking like they belonged on the wings of an angel. Unexpectedly, tears prickled the backs of my eyes at seeing such a magnificent and fantastical creature suspended in its death, simulating flight but frozen in a glass cage.

When I got closer, I found out it wasn’t that inky blank I originally thought. Only beside its bright counterparts did it sink into the abyss, did it become the abyss.

No, the face, staring at me in death like that man all those years ago, was the color of obsidian but as the feathers descended, it became lighter, almost metallic green before morphing into an onyx-flecked violet. It had the same beautiful blend of colors as the others, but it wasn’t obvious upon a cursory glance.

Only on closer inspection did one see that it was just as beautiful as the others. Even more so, because only those who were drawn to the void got close enough to witness the splendor.

I wanted to rip the frame off the wall, smash it, give the bird freedom to fly. But it was too late for that. There was no freedom for the dead or the damned. I wondered which one I was.

“Sakabula,” a sharp voice cut through the stillness of the room.

Immediately the temperature of the room dropped with the singular word.

With his presence.

I didn’t turn, but the increasing chill on the back of my neck told me he was coming closer.

“More commonly known as the long-tailed widowbird, but I prefer the former name,” he said, voice bland but also multifaceted at the same time. “Found in the Kenyan highlands, Angola, southern Zaire and Zambia, and Southern Africa.”

I held my breath as he came closer.

“I procured this particular specimen from Kenya,” he said, his voice still even but sharp, cutting.

His icy aura enveloped my back, and I knew he was inches away from me. Once he spoke again, I’d feel his breath on the nape of my neck. I should’ve moved, run, at least faced him.

I did none of those things. I stood in front of the frozen beauty and braced myself for the frozen menace behind me.

“Part of the Ploceidae family, named in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus,” he continued. "This is a female. Some researchers have found evidence that suggests female choice in sexual selection.”

His voice was as obsidian as the bird in front of me. The warm breath on the back of my neck contrasted the ice of his presence.

“This indicates trade-offs between sexual appeal and physical constraints with regard to the evolution of sexual ornaments—males comprise comfort for aesthetic appeal. An interesting subversion of the human equivalent.” His tone was death, his breath toxically intoxicating and even, though pure menace radiated from the very core of him.

Something carnal, something dark and menacing of my very own, awakened with the small sliver of seduction that came from his fatal tone.

“Interestingly, the male has a longer tail than the female, often more than twenty inches long, and the female has been shown to prefer males with longer tails.”

He moved closer, a hair away from the fabric of my shirt. The chill of his soul seeped into my bones, despite that being technically impossible; the goose bumps on every inch of my flesh told a different story.

“This is despite the fact that longer tails are detrimental to the survival of the males. Those that carry the trait have decreased chances of survival but are more likely to attract a female mate.”

Strands of my hair moved off my back. The movement was so light, so discreet, it had to be a breeze, a draft that was responsible for it. But the air was as still as a tomb.

“The males literally forsake their survival in order to find a female,” he murmured. “They endanger themselves, opposing the forces of natural selection… for a female.”

My hair returned to my back. I might’ve imagined the touch in my state of terror. In my state of something I couldn’t quite grasp.

Attraction?

No. Something worse, darker, much more fatal than mere attraction.

Then again, they made a whole movie about how deadly attraction was, and didn’t my captor just tell me something of the same, though not in so many words?

This was not the time to ponder such things.

This was the first time since waking up, since becoming something resembling a human being once more, that I was faced with him.

I turned, slowly and purposefully.

He had moved back at some point, as if he sensed I was going to turn, as if he was making sure his closeness was something I couldn’t witness, so I would ask myself if I imagined it, so he could play with me.

Or was I thinking too hard?

Or not thinking enough?

He was stark, jarring against the white walls, the white carpet and the striking and tragic beauty around him.

Everything was black, matching his soul. Another suit. Expertly tailored. After living in his house for two weeks—I wasn’t counting the time I was unconscious since I couldn’t count it—I surmised that everything he owned would be only of the highest quality.

He surrounded himself with luxury. Beauty.

Which begged the question, why was I here, amongst it all? I wasn’t luxurious. Beautiful. I was the harsh and exact opposite of these things.

“What is this place?” I asked his iceberg eyes.

He didn’t answer immediately, or even after a handful of moments. He left us hanging there, suspended in time, suspended in life just like the creatures on the walls surrounding us.

“Are you sure that’s the question you want to ask?” he said finally.

I blinked. Something started to crack from beneath the layers of ice he had created with his pure presence. Something white-hot.

Anger.

Pure, unadulterated anger.

“You made a mistake not killing me,” I spat, my attention moving from the room to my more pressing situation.

He regarded me coolly. “That’s not a question.” He weathered my glare for a lengthy amount of time before he answered. Then again, such a meager thing as a glare from something as pathetic as me wasn’t exactly going to rattle this man. “Maybe,” he agreed finally.

I sneered at his calm façade. Hated it. Hated him. “There’s no fucking maybe about it,” I yelled. “I’m a full-time commitment, in case you hadn’t noticed.” I waved my hands up and down my body, as if it showed the cracks in my psyche outwardly.

Not that he hadn’t seen it. He’d witnessed my full-on mental breakdown, seen every ugly part of me. He’d caused it all.

He didn’t move. “I’ve noticed. I notice everything, Elizabeth.”

I laughed. The sound was cold and ugly but somehow suited the room of sickening beauty. “Oh yes,” I hissed. “You notice everything. You know everything about pain, suffering, death and ugliness, which means you know everything about me, right? Because that’s all that makes up this miserable excuse for a human being.”

I gestured to myself more violently this time. “Maybe that’s why you didn’t kill me in the first place,” I said, deciding I’d imagined the glint in his eyes that came with my words. That would mean a reaction. Emotion. “I’m not interested in why I came to be here,” I lied. “What matters is that I am here. For better or for worse, I’m now a permanent resident of your little mausoleum. My ugliness means I can’t leave, unless you want to sedate me and drop me in the middle of nowhere.”

I eyed him. “And I’m sure that’s crossed your mind once or twice. But since you know it all, you know doing such a thing would be the same as putting a bullet in my brain. So we circle back to our original problem. You saved the girl, right? Maybe so you could have one teeny light mark on your midnight soul, I don’t know. I don’t care.” Another lie. “But it doesn’t matter the reason, because that split-second decision you made in the dark that night, that has permanent consequences. You chose life for me. And that’s about as permanent as death right now, and for the foreseeable future.”

I sucked in a breath filled of broken glass, the outpouring of my hurt, my desperation, my truth working like a mini marathon. It was also the most words I’d spoken in weeks, making my throat dry and scratchy.

Until now, I hadn’t yelled.

Ever.

I wasn’t a person who yelled. For a number of reasons. One was that my mother’s rules of ladylike behavior forbade such unrestrained explosions of emotion.

Another was that yelling was pointless. In my family, in my marriage, in my life. Screaming at the top of my lungs would do nothing. Wasn’t screaming and yelling for attention, maybe for help, salvation? I wasn’t rewarded with any of those things in my life.

Yelling wouldn’t give me help, or salvation.

I got attention, of course. From the man who’d glimpsed me skulking through the house while meeting my father. From the man who’d decided then and there that he was to have me. And have me he did.

I was an object to my father, something to be given, a business favor, something to increase his standing in the underworld. Plus saying no to one of the top arms dealers in the country was certain death. My father was rather attached to survival, so he bartered my life for his, without remorse.

It took a while to get everything decided, planned. My father was meticulous about planning. Not because I was his youngest daughter and he was concerned about my fate. No, because this was important to him. It had to happen. Even though he’d heard about my husband-to-be’s tastes. His former wives buried in shallow graves.

There was nothing complex behind the why of it—he simply didn’t care. Neither did my mother. Nor my brothers or sister. They were all a part of the same cold-blooded dynasty.

I hadn’t yelled at any point of the process. When my father had briskly informed me of my fate. On the first meeting with Christopher when he’d shaken my soul to the core with the unrestrained cruelty in his eyes. Not on my wedding day. Or my horrific wedding night. Or the many horrific nights—and days—after that. Not even the day I lost my daughter.

Or the day he kicked me out—quite literally—onto the street.

Words had the power to wound me, cripple me, but I had no power to do the same to others. No dominion over something like a war cry or a scream.

Until now.

In front of my murderer, surrounded by his beautiful corpses.

My yells weren’t going to grant me salvation from him. I wasn’t looking for salvation. You didn’t look to the damned for salvation, after all. He wasn’t going to help me, either. The closest he’d come to helping me—I suspected the closest he’d ever come—was not killing me, and even that wasn’t for certain yet. I suspected my death was still weighing heavily on his mind.

But I got attention.

Something so heavy it rivaled the weight of the sky, of my sorrow. It seeped into every part of me. His gaze, every inch of him, was focused on me. Pouring onto me. Into me.

It was sweet and sour on my tongue, that attention. It wasn’t the cruelty of my husband, the sadism. It was something in the same family, but not quite immediate.

“Nothing is permanent,” he said. “Not even death.” He glanced around the room. “We all wither and decay eventually. Everything does. Everything becomes nothing.”

And then he turned on his heel and walked out.