Childlike wonder for the looming structure returned as I dragged my fingers over the rails and walls, drowning out any remnants of trepidation.
Thoughts of my mother, of Thomas’s mother, haunted me as I wandered deeper into the gigantic house the next day. Not to escape, but to explore.
No matter how hard I tried, my thoughts would always shift back. My fingers would always try to climb to my lips. And my heart would always try to block out rational thinking.
Inside a parlor, I trailed my fingers over the glass, staring at the couple behind it. It had to be one of the only photos of them in this home as I hadn’t come across any others.
He was every inch his father, and for that, I couldn’t entirely blame my mother for being tempted to risk it all.
Except for his eyes.
The rare shade of blue belonged to the blond-haired woman with a tight, red-lipped smile. She was beautiful in a classic way. The kind who won pageants and had men looking more than once.
My finger drifted, tracing the place where her husband’s hand held her waist, and although I tried, I couldn’t find the room to hate her for what she’d done. For her hand in stealing something irreplaceable from me and my family. There was only a resounding pang of sorrow for what could have been.
It was a tragedy caused by love.
And I was no stranger to the risks and perils that accompanied losing your heart.
“Beatrice and Antonio Verrone.” Murry’s voice startled me, and my hand fell away as I turned to find him in the doorway.
“They were beautiful.”
A hint of a smile nudged his lips, his arms crossed over his chest as he looked from me to the floor-to-ceiling window behind me.
Behind the window sat a courtyard of sorts, and in the center of it, surrounded by rose bushes and sandstone benches, was a pool.
Entranced, I stepped closer, then stopped, standing breathlessly still at the sight of Thomas doing a flip turn before swimming half the length of the pool underwater. Even as my cheeks started to flush, heat spreading through my body, I couldn’t drag my gaze away. I now knew how he maintained that lean swimmer’s physique as I watched him swim lap after lap, his movements fluid, arms slicing through the water.
Murry cleared his throat, and I stepped back, ducking my head and tucking some hair behind my ear. “You know, for someone who was hell-bent on getting out of here a few days ago, you’re looking pretty comfortable now.”
I was, and that was a problem. One I was trying to solve. That was hard to do when Thomas seemed to hold me prisoner through his presence alone.
“And what about you?” I asked, strolling out the door. “Why are you still here after what he did to you?”
Earlier, I’d discovered the third floor contained an attic, or storage room, and a cracked open door revealed what I guessed to be Murry’s room. I’d peeked inside to find a room that was the size of three bedrooms, handsomely decorated in reds and grays with the turret providing a circular living area.
Murry decided to follow. “I don’t know if you’re ready to hear that particular story.”
Tossing a smirk over my shoulder as we neared the stairs, I said, “It would take a lot to shock me at this point.”
Murry considered that, then joined me as I continued down the hall. “I wasn’t a good man before I came here,” he said, then scoffed. “In fact, I’m not completely sure I’ll ever be.”
“Oh?” I didn’t believe that. Not wholly. “What about the way you run this place, and the way you take care of him and Lou?”
“I get paid very handsomely for all I do, trust me.”
I knew that wasn’t why he treated Lou like a loving uncle would, and by my silence, he knew I saw through his words.
“I used to smuggle women across the border.”
I stopped walking. “To help them flee?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, eyes flitting around. “Not exactly.”
“You abducted them,” I said, the words cutting into my tongue as guilt creased his features. All except for his scars.
“Yes. The sex slave industry, which I guess you’ve heard about to some extent, is big in some parts.”
Walking again, to keep from sliding an accusing glance at him, I asked, “And how did that lead you here?”
“By stealing the wrong girl,” he said dryly. “She was a senator’s daughter and had been out partying for her eighteenth birthday in Mexico with her boyfriend and some friends. Me and the guy I worked with at the time stalked particular hotspots where more privileged beauty would appear, and we took her and three other girls.”
“Did you”—I shook my head, trying to understand—“did they escape?”
“No,” he said. “Years later, the daughter was found half dead in some sixty-year-old millionaire’s bedroom. He’d purchased her. And the others …” The way his eyes glassed over said it all.
Dead.
I blinked at him. “How did you do it?”
He knew I didn’t mean in the literal sense. “When you grow up with nothing, and your next meal isn’t guaranteed, it … hardens you. You need to become as hard as the life you’ve been living to survive. As a kid, I started dabbling in the drug trade, just trying to make ends meet. And as I got older, I wanted more. More than the run-down trailer I lived in, more than the constant scent of mildew on my clothes. I wanted more than a cheap, watered-down existence. So slowly, I started asking around, and eventually, I got an in.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Never,” he said with vehemence. “I did it for ten years, but money means nothing when you can’t taste the food you can afford to buy or see the nice new apartment you were able to lease. I was either working, or I was blowing what remaining money I’d earned on booze and drugs. Anything to block out what I’d sentenced hundreds of girls to.”
The word hundreds wrapped around my heart like a noose, and I wanted to reach over and gouge his eyes out, but when I looked, really looked, I saw the wetness in them, saw the way his strong chin trembled, and relaxed my hands.
“One night, I was walking back to my apartment, drunk as fuck and strung out after coming down from some average high, and there he was.” A smile lingered in his voice. “Sitting on my apartment steps, a gun in hand, and no expression on his face.”
“He shot you?”
“No,” he said. “But I was beyond giving a shit if he did. To be honest, relief was the only thing I felt beneath the numbness. I went to him willingly, which I think shocked him more than any other client he’d had, not that he’d ever shown it.”
“But you know him now.” I stopped at a tall oblong window that faced another dam, this one decorated with shoulder-high weeds.
Murry made a sound of agreement, stopping next to me and leaning heavily against the wall. “Anyway, I woke up in his chair, courtesy of the half dead girl remembering my appearance and that my colleague at the time had said my name, and it soon began.” He smirked as I waited for more. “No need for those details.” A visible shiver assaulted him as he straightened from the wall.
“Wait,” I said before he could walk away. “So the senator wanted you dead?”
He nodded. “But he wanted answers first. The whereabouts of my colleagues, my employer, anything he could get.”
“And clearly, Thomas didn’t kill you.”
“Clearly,” he said with a lift to his lips, then sighed. “I’d answered anything he’d asked instantly, and I think the fact I didn’t beg for my life, but instead, begged for it to be over, made him stop.”
“Then he offered you a job.”
“It was that or death,” he said, leaving me to work out the foggy details. “Which was what waited for me if he’d set me free anyway.”
“But don’t you have any family? In Mexico? Anywhere?”
His hands dipped into his suit pockets as he walked backward. “None more important than this one. They assume I’m dead and never helped in making sure I survived growing up. So”—he shrugged—“blood ties don’t exactly mean a lot to me.”
Pondering that, I leaned back against the window, staring at the floor.
“Oh, and Jemima?” I looked up as Murry threw a quick glance behind him, then said quietly, “I always thought he was asexual, so take that into account before you eventually race out of here.”
That drew a burst of laughter from me, but then I frowned. “Wait, seriously?”
“We don’t tell lies here.”
“Huh,” I said aloud, my heart sticking to the bottom of my throat. “Hey, Murry?”
His head appeared around the corner of the end of the long hallway. “Hmm?”
“I am sorry … about your plate.”
His deep laughter made my next breath scathe as he left me with all he’d said.
Letting it sink in, I mulled over what kind of life Murry must have had before. How bad it must have been for him to sentence his soul and many women to a lifetime of hell.
In the study, an old record player snagged at my peripheral. Traipsing over to it, I spotted a shelf of records, and after only a momentary pause, I started shifting through them.
“Boo!”
Jumping, I sputtered out a laugh as I turned and saw Lou, her hair damp and her smile warm. “You scared me, little Lou.”
Her smile grew, her bare feet shifting over the floor.
“Have you been swimming?”
Lou Lou nodded. “Daddy teaches me twice a week, but I finished a while ago. I had to take a shower, then I’ve spent forever trying to find you.”
I grinned at this newfound knowledge. “Well, you’ve found me.”
She sidled up to me, inspecting the records. “Daddy says those belonged to Grandma and Grandpa.”
“Are you not allowed to touch them?”
She peered at the record player, which looked to be in perfect condition, and without a speck of dust atop it, then hummed. “I’m not, but”—she grinned up at me—“did he say you can’t?”
“Nope.” Normally, I’d abide by parents’ wishes but not this time. “He did not. How about you close your eyes, and wherever your finger lands, that’s the one we’ll play.”
Lou bounced on the soles of her feet, her lip tugged into her mouth as her hand blindly slapped at the air. We laughed as I directed her hand closer, and she plucked out the first record her finger touched. My heart sank and soared at the same time when I saw it was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors.
The memory of my mom, hips swaying and gentle voice humming to that same album as she cleaned the house or gardened infiltrated with razor-sharp talons.
I pulled the record free as Lou opened the plastic casing on top of the player.
Wanting to see if it worked, and because I wanted to rid an array of heartbreaking stories from my head, even if only for a little while, I carefully placed the record down, then set the needle to track number four.
A scratchy noise filled the room, and I tweaked the tonearm a little until the strains of “Don’t Stop” began.
“Ooh,” Lou sang, clapping her hands. “I like it!”
Tears smarted, and to keep them at bay, I took Lou’s hands. “Come on.”
In the middle of the room, surrounded by ghosts of ancestors gone by and haunted by their stories, I swung my arms and moved my feet with Lou, and I smiled it all away.
Her laughter was almost as loud as the song and even more magical. It had the ability to dry tears and chase away ghosts. Her little soul was a gift to a dark, enigmatic man and to anyone else who was fortunate enough to know her.
And it didn’t matter that I was dancing like I was at a children’s disco. For a fleeting minute, nothing mattered except being.
“Daddy!” Lou dropped my hands, and I froze at seeing Thomas in the doorway, his hair and his white shirt damp as though he’d hurriedly tugged it on.
I swallowed, expecting to see anger at having touched his things, at filling his house of horrors with laughter and music, but then I swallowed for a different reason. He was smiling, his teeth imprinting his bottom lip as he tried to contain it.
“Come dance, come dance!”
Still looking at me, he let Lou pull him into the room, and a second later, I felt his hand in mine. Smiling, I ducked my head, and we began to dance once again. Thomas was just as goofy as we were, made worse by his stiff and restrained movements. But for Lou Lou, he was trying, and for my heart, that was a dangerous thing.
Because it dawned like a late to rise sun that if Thomas Verrone loved someone, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for them.
The song skipped to another, and I felt Lou’s hand slip from mine, but too caught up in the hand that’d replaced it, and the slow tune of “Songbird,” I didn’t look to see where she’d gone.
“Little Dove.” Thomas pulled me close and whispered his lips over my cheek. “What am I to do with you?”
I was embarrassingly close to saying something I shouldn’t, so I shut my eyes. “You’re a fantastic dancer, Monster.”
He chuckled. “I’m well aware that’s a lie, Dove.”
“Fine, a whole bunch of six and seven-year-olds dance better than you.”
His head fell back, a loud laugh bellowing into the room, cording his neck and drowning out the music.
Marveling at the sight, I blinked a few times as his head lowered, and then he pressed his forehead to mine.
“And how about now?” he asked as his hands brought mine flush between us. One moved away to hold my back, and he rocked us side to side.
“Passable,” I admitted, my voice unrecognizably soft.
He heard me, his lashes fanning over his cheeks as his eyes dropped to my mouth. His scent was something I’d become accustomed to long ago, yet try as I might to ignore it, it still made my stomach clench and my mouth water. “You’re still here,” he said, more of a plea than an accusation.
“So I am,” I said.
A heaviness sat upon my chest as he lifted his eyes to mine, gentle wonder swimming among ice layered depths. “Why?”
It was a whisper, and I answered in kind. “Honestly?”
He blinked, the smooth skin of his forehead rubbing mine as he jerked his head in a nod.
“I don’t know.” As true as it might’ve been, what was more alarming was that I was growing less concerned with not having a reason.
For the remainder of the song, our bodies swayed to the music, but our gazes never strayed.
Before the music came to an end, his forefinger and thumb found my chin and he closed the tiny distance between our mouths. His warm lips scorched a trail to my heart, setting aflame every nerve ending in my body, and all he had to do was rest them on mine.
For that was all he did, and I stopped counting the seconds after twenty, riding on the sensations of breathing him, tasting him, and feeling him—of feeling everything.
It was the most intimate experience I’d had in my entire life, and it wasn’t until he pressed his lips to my forehead and left the room that I remembered I’d had it with a murderer.