The Pythonist: First 50 Pages

Prologue

The Damned

I had a disturbingly perfect body clock. 

My sleeping pattern was in sync with the sun and the moon. At the first light of dawn, my eyes would open, and as the sun began to sink beneath the horizon, I never failed to find myself growing weak and weary.

Everyone I’d ever met was envious of my ability to fall into a slumber so deep it was like I’d been drugged as soon as my head hit the pillow, but the price was an inability to sleep in on weekends. Not to mention being the perpetual death of good vibes at parties.

My mother used to tell me that human beings were made with starlight, designed to recharge by sleeping through the dark hours and waking with the sun. As I lived the lifestyle she preached to me, I felt less human with every passing dream.

The daylight hours were so short.

For half the year, they were unbearably so. Even the summertime adjustment to the clock left me desperately wanting as time slipped away until there was nothing left of the day for me to grasp. Until there was nothing left of me.

If my mother had survived past my thirteenth birthday, I would have demanded answers from her. I would have asked all the questions stinging the edges of my tongue like ash and poison, starting with the most devastating of them all.

What does the darkness have on a haunted young psychic?

The spirits of the night had something on my family name—something they were using to tether me to their shadow hours. It had to be so. There was no other explanation for my behaviour when medication, therapy, drugs, alcohol, hypnotism, and a very good book all failed to keep me awake past dusk. 

Unfortunately, my mother jumped from a bridge and drowned in the river the day before my thirteenth birthday, so I couldn’t ask her. I was highly suspicious that the darkness had something to do with it, too.

She couldn’t stay awake at night, either.

We both heard the sounds while she was alive, though. The whispers seeping out of the forest mere footsteps away from our bedroom windows—gurgles and groans creeping through the foliage and catching on tree branches before echoing in our heads. The mysterious, persistent footsteps on the floorboards up and down the hallways, creaking on stairs that had been repaired so many times. The crack of thunder in the house at midnight, so intense it rattled the perfume bottles on my dresser and the mirror on my mother’s bedroom door while the stardusted sky remained clear and dry outside.

There were questions both unanswered and unanswerable in Kingsley Manor, and none of the distorted faces of long-lost souls would speak on the topic. I didn’t know why they had bothered to haul themselves from their coffins in the first place when all they did was dig new graves in my mind’s dark recesses.

But they lived with me, and I lived with it.

There were more than ghosts at Kingsley Manor. There were hauntings.

And it was the same for all of us.

By twilight, we retired to our bedrooms. The fatigue pulled and twisted the threads of our minds, fiercer the more we fought it, and the darkness always won.

Inevitably, we fell into the colourless abyss of sleep, where the dreams had claws and talons. Sharp teeth sinking into whatever remained of our souls, the creatures of nightmare left cuts and bruises for us to find when we woke up.

Some of the girls called them visions.

And that was the truth. 

The rest called them nightmares—an accurate, albeit cowardly description of our affliction.

Most children were taught that nightmares consisted of monsters, daemons, and the worst conjurings a human mind could contain, but that they were not real. None of the terrifying things in their heads really existed, and the children would open their eyes and find themselves transported back to a reality where the nightmares had ended.

Yet all of our bad dreams came true. 

Once we had witnessed the horrors through the consequences of our curse and our piercing screams marked them in the night, there was nothing else to be done. In the age of digital media, it was easy to locate most tragedies in the following hours as society ravenously consumed them. Then, we privately dealt with the aftermath in our own ways.

I found that living with the other girls helped. I wasn’t strong enough to leave the manor after my mother died, and I wouldn’t have been able to survive the outside world on my own.

For whatever reason, my friends owed a similar debt to the night spirits, and the darkness seemed pleased that we had congregated together like a coven of witches. After a while, it offered us each a reprieve from the dreams by doling out the tragedies in shifts instead of plaguing us all with the same terrors every night.

We were euphoric after a dreamless sleep, but there was an underlying tension brewing while some were inexplicably laden with more frequent nightmares than others.

I was one of them.

Arguably the worst.

It was the reason I preferred to sleep alone—at least, the reason I used to sleep alone.

That was before Samuel Parkerson arrived despite every single warning he’d ever been given, and he slowly wound his way back into my heart and mind. And then, at long last, into my bed.

The darkness loathed him for it.

I knew I would eventually be punished—but like the ghosts from the graveyard, he simply wouldn’t leave.

It was only a matter of time before something happened, and once it did, things would be irrevocably changed at Kingsley Manor.

The locals were watching us, waiting for us to do our worst. Every other day, they sent a police cruiser out to the manor with some fraudulent claim. Trips into town for supplies were always painfully awkward.

If Samuel disappeared or died while living in a house full of women the townsfolk swore were part of the occult, the mortal authorities would finally have the power they needed to tear my ancient home to the ground and burn the remains—with all twelve of us still trapped inside. 

The warm body beside me stirred, a feather-soft fingertip brushing the exposed skin on my hip. I tensed with the reflexive urge to flinch, but my sleep paralysis daemon had a firm hold on me, and I wasn’t convinced it was worth trying to break free. 

Sam moved closer.

“What time is it?” I whispered, staring at the patterns of light flashing against my eyelids. I felt weakness as deep as my bone marrow, pulling me further down with the effort of speaking, and I fought to keep a hold on my consciousness. “I can feel you looking at me. It’s creepy. Stop it.”

His quiet rumble of laughter sent a gentle tremor through the bed. “I am by far the least creepy thing inside this house,” he murmured. “It’s four-thirty.” Feeling my muscles tense, Sam squeezed my arm. “Hey. It might not happen tonight. You’ve been drifting in and out for hours.”

I rolled my eyes, the sensation unnerving with both of them still shut. “You are such a man.”

Warm-blooded lips caressed my forehead. “I’m so glad you noticed.”

“No.” I stifled a laugh. “You waltz into a haunted house and think just because the occupants are female, you can chase away their daemons with your big dick energy.”

He snorted. “I’m not throwing my big dick energy around in anyone else’s bedroom.”

There was a prolonged silence, and then—

“This was happening long before you,” I said softly. And it will continue to happen long after you.

His hand cupped my cheek and turned my face toward him—an action I would not have had the energy to complete on my own. I sighed against Sam’s mouth when his lips found mine, pressing into me with a patient and understanding pressure.

I knew we were being watched. There were eyes in the shadows and faces in the mirror I hadn’t covered before I collapsed on the bed. Any protest I might have made drowned in the back of my throat as he kissed me. Though there was a part of me that wanted to stop him, I could only concentrate on one thing at a time—and I had just enough strength to push my tongue against his and curl a fist around the waistband of his boxer shorts. 

With all the power of the moon and stars, I wanted the night hours to mean the same thing to me as they did to Sam and the rest of the world. I wanted to take late-night drives, pull all-nighters to watch the sun rising over the mountains, and tangle my limbs with his in the privacy of the moonlight. I wanted to sleep with him during the night, instead of simply beside him. I wanted to gaze at his features bathed in candlelight.

I wanted to open my fucking eyes. 

His hand slipped beneath the hem of my silk nightgown and found a warm, wet welcome waiting for him between my legs. A familiar tension coiled in my lower belly, brimming with pleasurable heat stoked by each of his tender touches.

But I also felt the weight of the darkness’s gaze. 

It had a hand around my soul—tightening, constricting me. It was inescapable, and something a man like Samuel Parkerson would never be able to understand unless the curse kissed him, too. 

And why would it?

I hoped it never did.

“Sam,” I breathed. 

His lips grazed the hollow of my throat, his pulse slamming into me where his chest pressed against my shoulder. “Let me fuck the pain away tonight, baby. I’ll make you see stars so bright there won’t be room for any visions.”

A rush of arousal dampened my underwear around his hand, but I managed to shake my head.

I wanted it. I wanted him.

And it was that desire stopping me as dark and heavy disapproval piled on my chest, crushing my lungs like concrete blocks. I was supposed to be asleep, and the dark spirits in the room with us were vexed by my persistent consciousness. It would be foolhardy to provoke them any further.

Sam nuzzled his nose against mine, then rolled onto his back, one arm still curled around me. He blew out a long, soft breath. “Okay.”

“You don’t have to be here,” I told him. “We have other rooms if you wanted to—”

“Don’t.” His voice was a soft growl, full of warning and affection. “Don’t you dare start this again. I’m here because I love you, and I’m not fucking leaving.”

I smiled. “Ever the hero.”

“Call me whatever you want, Terror.” He sighed. “I’m yours either way.”

There were words in my mouth, but I couldn’t spit them out. I moved my eyes around instead, the feeling strange, and thought twice about prying them open so I could steal a glimpse of him at night.

Since he had moved in with us, I was sometimes able to stay conscious long enough to have a conversation and even attain very limited movement on a good night. I still hadn’t mastered the art of opening my eyes while the sun was buried beneath the horizon, though.

“It’s been a week,” I reminded him, searching for his hand across the cool sheets and entwining my fingers with his when I found it. “I think you should sleep in the guest room tomorrow night.”

“Cathleen.”

“Samuel.”

We frequently engaged in the same argument.

And he stayed, no matter how many times I told him to go. 

“They’ve been getting worse.” I swallowed the tension building in my throat. “You don’t understand what it’s like.”

“No,” he agreed, his voice strained. “But I do know that you can’t keep doing this on your own. I’m here no matter what. Use me.”

Use me. 

And what happens when I use you up?

Sam was only partially correct in thinking that his presence made things easier for me. He had arrived at Kingsley Manor during a particularly bad month, so he saw the bruising under my eyes at its worst and the tremors in my hands at their most unsteady.

I did sleep better when he was with me. I couldn’t deny that. However, I felt worse when I woke up, and the guilt was carved straight into the cavity of my chest. The whispers from the forest grew louder. The hauntings in the hallway became more gruesome.

As the intruder, he might as well have seen nothing for all the impact it had on him. 

But I saw everything.

I saw glimpses of what was likely to happen to a powerful man who tethered himself to a situation where he was utterly powerless, and it was exhausting.

Being in love was utterly exhausting.

And yet I couldn’t bear to let him go a second time.

Sam brushed the hair back from my forehead and kissed my cheek softly as I drifted toward oblivion.

With only a few hours left before dawn, it was unlikely that I would see the night’s headlining tragedy in my sleep, but there was no guarantee—especially not when the manor had been so dark and silent. Even though there were those precious nights when ten or eleven of us were offered a reprieve together, there was never a night with twelve.

And then, right as I teetered on the brink of falling asleep, it happened again. 

Chelsey’s scream tore a hole through the veil of night—loud, blood-curdling, and foretelling that something truly awful would be on the morning news.

I curled into Sam’s embrace as his arms tightened around me, and then I rubbed my face against the pillow so the tears streaking down my cheeks wouldn’t fall onto his bare skin.

It was Chelsey’s third night in a row, and the leering presence sitting in the rocking chair in the corner of the room insisted that it was all my fault for letting a stranger through the gates of Kingsley Manor.

 

*****

 

Chapter 1

The Damned

I knew my mother was going to kill herself.

I had seen it. 

The night before my thirteenth birthday, I dreamed about her falling from the bridge and being pulled beneath the surface of the icy grey river at the base of a nearby waterfall. I watched helplessly as she allowed it to drag her under and hold her there, like the spirits were disguising their strong hands as the natural current.

For the preceding six months, we had lived alone in Kingsley Manor in a state of all-consuming terror. It banged on our doors and hissed against our windowpanes. The incessant bad dreams kept us paralysed overnight, and we feared waking up to a burning house… or perhaps not waking up at all.

My father’s corpse was freshly buried in the backyard after he had been shot in the woods by an individual never identified or caught by the authorities—and the entire town believed that my mother did it.

If it weren’t for the fact that he was rich and we loved him dearly, the small-town tragedy probably wouldn’t have made the headlines. But he was beloved, and it was a slow news day, so they printed our photographs in the local paper with a crude title and paragraphs of unapologetic slander.

SHOT TO THE HEART: The Gruesome History of CEO Wife Turned Murderess and Why Authorities Think She Did It

Before his death, my father was the public face of King’s Ley Media, the rapidly expanding security technology company he inherited from his father as part of an intricately worded clause in the old man’s will. His term as an active board member was short-lived, though.

Alex Kingsley met and married Mary Harrow within his first year as CEO, and the board subsequently voted to revoke his decision-making powers. It was punishment because my father went against their wishes and irrevocably tied himself to an unknown woman fifteen years his junior. She was both orphaned and widowed once already when they met, with no other living relatives, and the media had a feeding frenzy.

The board of directors claimed it was simply part of the contract—that my father voided any right to legitimate control of the company if he failed to meet all the conditions. My grandfather’s will included many of the stock standard requirements, but it also made some of the most ridiculous stipulations pertaining to who my father could marry, how many children he could sire, and which city he could reside in for the majority of the year.

Ironically, my grandfather’s dying wish was for the company to remain in our bloodline, so his lawyers worked in a clause that ensured Alex Kingsley would still feature on the company flyers even if the board of directors deemed him unfit to helm it.

Knowing this, my parents decided to have a loud, luxury wedding before promptly retreating from the public eye. They took up residence in the most remote property in the family’s real estate portfolio—Kingsley Manor, nestled against the sleepy mountainside town of Sassafras in the state of Victoria—and while my father still made regular public appearances in the city to fulfill his contractual obligations, my mother was never photographed again.

When I was born, they extended that curtain of privacy to me, too.

I grew up fully removed from the lifestyle they had almost left behind. For as long as I could remember, I played with the spirits in the manor, sat in the glasshouse with my mother while she painted and tended to her vegetable garden, and followed my nursemaid around as she completed various chores while humming foreign lullabies.

Her name was James. Just… James. The single name was strange yet entirely fitting for the peculiar woman with sharp, angular features, soft silver hair, and a large brown mole on one side of her slightly bent nose.

James appeared spindly, but I knew she was practically bulletproof, even though she ambled about with a permanent limp and a hunch in her back. She often caught me talking to the figures in the shadows and the faces in the mirrors, but she never told on me. Instead, she would simply grip me by the shoulders and usher me from the room, muttering warnings about engaging with unknown entities.

The grand, Tudor-style estate of Kingsley Manor was an enormous three-storey home spanning more than one thousand square metres and boasting an absurd ten bedrooms. It had glorious floor-to-ceiling windows, a bold combination of polished floorboards and black-and-white checkered tiling, multiple soot-stained fireplaces, an abandoned tennis court, small pond, and panoramic views straight down the side of the mountain range for those brave enough to crawl up to the single dusty attic window.

The tree line obscured the view on the second and third floors unless you stepped out onto the balcony, but it was easier to climb up to the attic than to try to force the sticky sliding doors open.

When I was three or four, I discovered the manor had a basement with a suspicious tunnel hidden behind a reinforced iron door. I was very young, so the dark forces and I agreed that I would promptly retreat, leaving it all well and truly alone.

As an adult, I still refused to enter and intrude upon the spirits and other beings residing down there. Even if they never bothered to show me the same courtesy.

Kingsley Manor was nestled inside a far corner of the Sherbrooke, a wet sclerophyll forest quite popular with bushwalkers. Dauntless mountain ash trees and ferns dominated the landscape, keeping the misty air cool and crisp yearlong and tainting the daylight with glaucous hues. Our closest neighbours were less than a kilometre away—far enough to give the illusion of privacy, but near enough to hear a scream.

That was the problem in the end: the proximity.

When I was born, my mother battled postpartum psychosis, and my father split his time between hiking in the surrounding woodlands and travelling into the city to get his picture taken on behalf of King’s Ley Media.

It was likely the screaming from my mother’s night terrors that sealed our fate with the locals. A neighbour heard her shrieking through the night, every night for weeks at the peak of her illness, and the rumour mill began to churn and glug back to life.

Why would the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company hide his wife and daughter out in the middle of nowhere?

They must be mad. There must be something wrong with them. They say they’re constantly screaming like they’re terrified of each other.

The mother or the daughter?

Both.

I can’t even blame the girl. I’d be screaming, too, if a madwoman left me in the care of that ugly nursemaid with the foreign accent while she streaked naked through the forest, chanting sacrilege.

With treatment, my mother recovered, but our reputation was forever tainted. Aptly so, the manor was henceforth renowned as the murder house—a place for things that went bump in the night—though they could never prove that anyone had died inside the property lines.

They could never prove that we were haunted, either.

But they were right.

There were more than dark spirits lurking in the basement and unsettling noises along the edge of the forest. Anyone paying attention would have seen the portrait paintings tracking my movements throughout the house, accompanying me from room to room. Frequently, the undefined and blurry figures crested the corners of my vision, and my reflection in the mirror sometimes blinked before I did.

Kingsley Manor was crowded, but my father’s death left us bitterly alone.

I would never know for sure why my mother committed suicide.

Maybe it was the loneliness, or perhaps the isolation.

She didn’t leave a note. She never said anything to me. All I had was the vision of her falling and drowning the night before they found her body, but that was enough. I saw the lack of hesitation—the grace with which her body fell, gliding through the air and greeting the water as if she were diving into a swimming pool, unflinching and resolute.

My mother willingly left me—an orphan in our haunted house—for twelve days until she returned in a brass urn, polished to the point of sparkling in the firelight with swirling pink and silver patterns etched into the sides that clashed with absolutely everything. 

I placed her on the mantle and glared at her often.

“Mother,” I would greet her in the early evenings once I’d returned from school. “I told the Markum child that his cousin died because he ate rat poison, but he didn’t believe me. He called me a witch, you know? They all think you were one, too.”

I’d fuss at her while I stoked the fire and steeped the tea James brought out on a tray.

“Anyway, can you imagine how I laughed today when the coroner’s report was published and the children couldn’t stop talking about it at school? They sent me to the principal, and I tried to explain that I didn’t think the death was funny, and—”

And then I’d frown up at her as a rush of cold, displeased air coasted over my back.

“Don’t look at me like that, Mother. I’m well aware that you disapprove of my actions, but if you really wanted to stop me from telling people I have psychic powers, perhaps you shouldn’t have thrown your body into the river in subzero temperatures on the dawn before my birthday.”

She never deigned to respond, of course.

***

A few weeks after that particular conversation, I was expelled from the only school in Sassafras for scaring the other children.

I hadn’t meant to terrorise anyone.

I had been plagued with prophetic dreams for so long that I was simply numb to the horrors.

As a child, I couldn’t understand why the other children didn’t want to know what I had seen if it concerned them or someone close to them.

In my six years of formal schooling, I’d glimpsed a tragedy close to home more than a dozen times. When it concerned someone at school, I always went against my mother’s advice and tried to help by offering insight into the event. The timing of my nightmares never allowed a proper warning to be given or the outcome to be altered, but I could usually pass on some of the finer, gory details.

Like the fact that it was fucking rat poison—and if they had listened instead of throwing rotten leaves and stones at me, their parents might have found the bait before it killed the dogs, too. 

As an adult, though, it made a lot more sense.

The truth was plain and boring. Nobody wanted to know unless it came to them, beautified in a video less than three minutes long by an influencer with a pristinely white kitchen in the background.

The townsfolk didn’t want to hear that my mother was a kind, warm soul before she died. She lit up the manor with her presence from dawn until dusk, singing sweetly as she painted, and dutifully tucked me into bed with a fairytale before sunset every single night.

Instead, they preferred to think of her hysterically. She was remembered as the madwoman who couldn’t handle childbirth, blamed her husband for her mental health problems, and shot him to death in the forest to appease the voices in her head. 

Some people said she decided to kill herself when the voices tried to turn her against me, too.

Obviously, they were wrong.

The spirits in our house didn’t speak. They merely hovered, watched, and emanated a presence that varied greatly depending on their moods.

Besides, there was already violence and hatred aplenty over the globe—so utterly inescapable in its handheld accessibility, which was ironically courtesy of the modern age and in no small part due to the efforts of my dead father’s technology company. 

Humans were greeted by trauma in the mornings—a notification on their phones, a front-page headline, a viral reel slipped between comedy skits, a breaking news update along the bottom of the screen, or a conversation in the comments of a thread buried somewhere unexpected.

It followed people to work and school in the form of small talk, lesson plans, break room whispers, posters, emails, and updates. The horrors stalked them into shopping centres, trailed them back home again, and tucked society into bed at night before beginning anew. 

The world was already like that. People died. People killed. Everyone bore witness to it through their screens, but I saw them first in my dreams.

Sometimes, I saw things the news never covered.

Those were the worst kinds of visions. I hated not knowing if the bodies were ever recovered, if the truth was ever learned.

There were therapists who diagnosed me—paranoid, anxious and avoidant, depressed, borderline personality, episodes of psychosis—as part of my ongoing struggle against my father’s company to allow me to remain living in Kingsley Manor. The company legally owned the property and leased it out to us, and King’s Ley Media had declined to sell it to me when my father’s life insurance policy was paid out.

But I refused to leave. I had been patient long enough. I waited them out until my twenty-fifth birthday, and I had every intention of trying again as soon as my inheritance was released.

They had no need of the manor. Not like I did. And I was certain that I could poke and prod them into submission once I became a legal adult who could double her original offer—even if it took me forever and a day to break them.

Besides, I was the last living Kingsley, and I couldn’t leave the manor even if I wanted to. I’d been isolated, slowly losing the ironclad grip I once had on my sanity, and it persisted for so many years that the real world would absolutely crush me if I dared to try to enter it again.

And there was that small matter of a soul-binding daemon bargain. 

But even without the daemons, I was trapped. A trip into town left me bereft for days—unable to eat, unable to shower, unable to lie down flat on a bed. The looks and whispers in Sassafras made me jumpy. I became susceptible to a false heart attack if someone touched me, and I was hardly coherent in conversation.

I could see the future, but then what?

I had long since stopped sharing information with others, and I’d given up on the idea that my torment could offer a reprieve to anyone involved in the tragedies.

Like the boy who ate rat poison. The girl who fell into the water. The woman with red hair and a scarf wrapped around her neck at the bottom of the ocean. The refugees who tried to swim in the wrong direction. The tourists underneath the construction wall. The window cleaner in the city. The factory workers who all spoke a language I did not. The woman who was pushed from the balcony at the beach. And my mother.

They were all dead, and there was nothing I could have done to save them.

The best I could do was purchase Kingsley Manor and ensure the dark forces and lost souls lingering in the hallways and on the other side of the mirrors remained safely tucked away inside their chosen haven.

If only they’d have let me succeed the second time, when the stakes were climbing so indubitably higher.

 

*****

 

Chapter 2

The Dreamer

I had always been a very dependable person.

I was well-educated, respectful, punctual, adept at navigating social conventions, cleanly presented, and generally neat. Whenever I did something, I liked to do it thoroughly—even if it took longer to complete the task for the sake of better quality outcomes.

There was a critical side to me, too. I sought out the faults in others, and it wasn’t always deliberate. I simply found them, and then I couldn’t forget about them. It usually became a constant battle not to bring them up. The same could be said in problematic situations when I saw a solution nobody else had considered yet.

Lockjaw was what my father called it.

An inability to let things go and leave well enough alone.

He berated me about it for years—right up until he realised it made me the prime candidate for the case against the tenant of Kingsley Manor. 

Unfortunately. 

“Samuel, I’m not fucking around on this.” My father steepled his wrinkled hands, elbows resting on the polished mahogany desk as I sat opposite him and stared at the city through the window over his shoulder. “We need to get this girl out of that godforsaken house.”

My eyes flickered to his—the same deep brown as mine. “The lawyers can’t find any other loophole in the will?”

The old man gave me a withering look. “No,” he assured me, his mouth twisting into a snarl. “I’ve had them on it for years. There is no other way out of this, Samuel. Either Cathleen Kingsley leaves, we find evidence proving that Alex killed himself and voided the contract, or I’m going to drive out there and shoot his bitch of a daughter dead myself.”

I grimaced. That was fucking cold, even for him. My father wasn’t the sort of man to get his hands dirty, or even to brag about the morally depraved things he sent his lackeys like me out to do for him.

“The woman has lived out there literally all her life,” I pointed out, crossing my ankle over my knee as I leaned back in the plush maroon armchair. An identical seat was beside me, empty as the decorative bookshelves lining the far wall, glinting golden in the afternoon sunlight. “Some people would argue she has squatter’s rights by now, even if nothing else in her grandfather’s will supports her claim to the property.”

My father barked out a laugh. “She’s in breach of the lease agreement every single way you look at it, son. She’s basically a criminal. Probably an addict and a whore by now, too.”

“How so?”

“The crazy bitch is turning the place into a frat house,” he replied, cheeks reddening with his palpable rage. “And the last time I checked, she didn’t even finish school. All these mentally disturbed young women are flocking to her, staying in the spare bedrooms, terrorising the townsfolk—”

“Has anyone contacted Channel Nine?” I queried, arching a brow. “Because this sounds like something they’d be interested in putting on air.”

My father dragged a hand across his face and sighed brusquely. “Samuel, this isn’t a fucking joke. The people in town are complaining to their local minister, and their local minister brings those concerns to me. King’s Ley Media owns that house, and I own King’s Ley Media, so it’s my responsibility to make the problem go away.”

God, I hated it when he talked like that. I was so fucking tired of making his problems go away. 

He hesitated, studying the blank page of an open notebook as I held perfectly still and levelled my patient gaze on the space between his eyes. His other henchman might not have asked any questions, but I certainly expected answers.

“There’s a deal on the table with the local government,” my father admitted after a long stretch of silent resistance. “I’d very much like to see it through until we’ve signed on the dotted line.” He gave me a meaningful look. “Evicting that little bitch from the estate is the top priority.”

I pursed my lips. “Uh-huh.” Leaning forward, I placed both feet on the ground and rested my elbows on my knees, squinting as I looked up at him. “What deal?”

“It’s about the land.” Waving his hand in the air like it was inconsequential when it very clearly was not, he braced the other on the armrest and shifted in his seat. The leather creaked beneath his weight. “The government owns the surrounding forest and wants to buy the estate, demolish the house, and build a new prison. Low risk, remote sort of thing, you know? If we sell the manor, they’re willing to guarantee the statewide contract to us, and the return will be astronomical.”

“They want to build a prison in the Sherbrooke Forest?” I frowned. “Doesn’t Kingsley Manor have neighbours?”

“They’ve all agreed to sell up and move as long as Kingsley Manor goes with them,” he said with a nonchalant shrug. “It’s a done deal, Samuel.”

A done deal. 

Oh, how I hated those too.

Suddenly, my throat felt tight, so I reached up to adjust the tie on my custom-made suit until it was no longer threatening to strangle me. At the same time, my father snatched up a ballpoint pen from his desk and began clicking it repetitively. It was a nervous habit he’d developed since quitting cigars.

Truly, I found it fascinating to witness how agitated the girl made him. I almost liked her simply for getting so deeply wedged under his skin. My father was a greedy old man, so the deep investment he had in the prospective contract with the state prison network didn’t surprise me, but I was having a wondrous time trying to figure out what he had against Alex Kingsley’s daughter.

Click, click. Click, click.

There was something else in it for him that he didn’t want to talk about yet.

A debt, maybe. Or a favour owed.

Click, click. Click, click.

I stared at him, keeping my composure wholly blank as I counted the clicks of the pen, and waited to see if my patience would yield any kind of elaboration on his part. 

The two of us were ironically similar in appearance, although he displayed clear signs of wear and tear caused by the stress of running a multi-billion-dollar corporation for more than two decades. My father gladly took over behind the scenes when Alex Kingsley married and relinquished control, and quite frankly… it showed.

In all fairness, however, he was the only one of the duo still alive.

The creases on his forehead deepened as his heavy gaze speared into me. “It’s this or the supermarket, son.”

I scoffed lightly, but I didn’t let my ire break the surface of my careful composure.

My father possessed enough sway to render the five years I’d spent studying to earn my postgraduate degrees useless, and he wouldn’t care at all to lose everything he paid for me to get it. That kind of money meant nothing to him—especially not when he had another government contract at stake. The private sector paid well, but the public sector came with better opportunities and connections long-term.

I stared at the grey sprinkled across the black hair on his temple, my hands balling into fists in my lap, right below his eyeline. “I understand,” I said quietly.

His phone beeped with an incoming call, and he held a finger up to signal for me to wait while he took it. Nodding in acquiescence, I rose from the chair and sauntered over to the pristine window, slipping the flask out of the pocket inside my suit jacket.

I took a swig, relishing the burn down my throat.

My father’s office was gloriously high up with a view of the city’s botanic gardens from the twelfth storey. At a certain angle, the viewer could pretend the shabby government housing apartment blocks didn’t exist where they sat crookedly between dank coffee shops, marvelling at the artificial landscape and rich gardens instead.

That’s what I always did whenever I was called into his office; I looked at the things I wanted to see, and pretended the rest of it didn’t exist.

And that’s how I knew I would do it. 

I really didn’t have a choice, and it wouldn’t be the first time my own father sent me out to solve a problem that was a little too personal for his usual lackeys. Though I wanted to play ball in the corporate space, I’d earned my keep for the past decade by walking the line between the gritty underworld and the glamorous lifestyles of the one percent.

That was my cross to bear; the payment my father demanded for being a bastard child related to him in name only, slipping through undetected courtesy of the careful lies spun by my late mother.

 My true parentage was the best-kept secret in the city. It was so heavily guarded that even I didn’t know who my real father was, and I didn’t particularly care. With three half-sisters who were already married and living completely different lives, I was the only heir left.

So, I’d do it.

Whatever it was he wanted me to do.

For the Kingsley girl, I’d most likely wine and dine her. Once I got close enough to gain her trust, I’d assess my options based on her personality.

If she was stubborn, I’d blackmail her.

If she was selfish, I’d make her an offer she couldn’t refuse and buy her out of the estate. She could take her sorority parties and gladly burn through the money all the way across Europe.

“I’m going to have to cut this short,” my father announced, groaning softly as he pushed away from his desk. 

I tucked my flask back into my pocket before his hand came down on my shoulder.

Standing together at the floor-length window encompassing the entire length of the wall, we watched as the afternoon sunlight thinned into dusky hues. Birds swooped across the horizon, darting back and forth, and I feigned interest in them as I studied my father’s reflection in the glass.

“I’ve got some fires to put out around here,” he told me after a moment. “And you’ve got a real one to go and start.”

One of my eyebrows twitched. “I do?”

He lowered his voice, bending to speak into my ear in a grave tone. “I want an end to this nightmare, and I want it quickly. There’s no use for the manor once the sale goes through, Samuel. Ask her nicely once if you must, but then you burn the fucking thing to the ground, and I don’t give a damn if she’s still inside. In fact, I’d be real pleased if she was. You hear me? Put an end to this insanity and burn it all down, son.”

Fuck. 

He was really serious about this goddamn estate.

Blackmail was one thing. To be perfectly honest, so was corporate espionage. But arson? He’d asked me to do things that ended with broken noses and bloody hands over the years; however, that was normally the full extent of the matter. Or my part in it, at least. 

I caught the slight twitch of his head in the window.

“Fine.” I gnashed my teeth together and made to turn away, but he grabbed me by the elbow and held me in place. With narrow eyes, I glared up at him, wondering what in the hell had gotten into the man since his phone call ended.

“Do you need anything from me?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Like what?”

“A reference photo? Social media? It’s been a while since you last saw her or the manor, hasn’t it?”

In truth, I didn’t remember Alex Kingsley’s daughter at all.

I knew we had met once before, about twelve years earlier. My parents had travelled to Sassafras the day her mother’s body was found washed up on the riverbank. I was freshly eighteen, still in school but shadowing my father as I endeavoured to learn the ropes of the business world.

Based on things I’d overheard, I surmised that Alex’s daughter had barely been a teenager herself when she was officially orphaned, but we hadn’t really spoken to each other while I was there, and my parents never talked about them.

In fact, if I recalled correctly, the entire visit was oddly short-lived. Her maid had walked into the room and started cussing my father out in Russian, and we returned to the city soon after.

“I don’t think I need a photo,” I told him, straightening the collar of my shirt as the damn tie pulled tight around my neck again. “How hard can it possibly be to find one girl in her twenties, living in a massive house out in the middle of nowhere?”

He grunted, dropping his hand from my elbow with a nod. “Fair enough,” he agreed. “Julie will send through all of the details—book you some accommodation nearby, that sort of thing—and I’ll have one of the boys drop some cash and supplies at your apartment before you leave in case you need it.”

For the whole arson side of things. Yeah, no worries. Whatever. 

“Sure.” I swallowed, brushing it off like it was nothing. “Though I highly doubt I’m going to have to kill her to get her to move out.” It was a joke, but there was a dark glint in my father’s eyes as I said it, and a chill raced down my spine in response. “Never mind,” I muttered. Fucking hell. “I’ll leave in the morning. Have your man swing by before nine.”

“Consider it done,” he called after me as I strode for the double doors to his office. “And Samuel?”

I paused, one hand on a doorknob.

“You do this one for me, and I won’t ask anything like it from you again. We’ll get lunch when you come back and have a real good talk about what this company can do for you and that shiny degree you’ve been sitting on.”

The words were music to my ears after such a long time, but I never imagined it would sound so much like the death march.

 

*****

 

Chapter 3

The Dreamer

I was wrong.

As it so happened, it was extremely difficult to find one girl in her twenties, living in a massive house out in the middle of nowhere.

I stood frozen on the precipice of the driveway, caught in the moon-eyed stares of half a dozen women standing on the other side of the wrought-iron gates. Like a deer caught in headlights, I was immobile, helpless while the closest figure drifted toward me with a sceptical, fascinated gleam in her frosty blue eyes. 

The sounds of chirruping bugs and distant birds roared in my ears as the scents of damp wood and smoke filled my nose.

In every direction, the forest stood proud and menacing. It towered over us, casting uneven cuts of shade onto the ground as the sun ducked in and out from behind fast-moving clouds.

The gates were nearly twice my height. Solid blue stonework spanned for miles around the perimeter, interrupted once by the thick, cobweb-laced iron bars that twisted into the vague shape of a heart, split down the middle by the separation of the two gates and their rusted padlock.

“Who are you?” the girl with eyes like icicles enquired.

At a glance, she couldn’t have been much older than I was, but the way her gaze pierced mine like a set of drills threw me off, and I had to search for my voice.

“Parkerson,” I answered at last, the name practically tripping over my tongue and careening out of my mouth. “Uh… Samuel Parkerson,” I amended. “I’m here to see Cathleen Kingsley.”

The woman stepped forward, prompting whispers to spill from the group, huddled behind her and glaring at me as if I were a wild dog looking for a way to get through their fortress-like fence. I suppressed the desire to take offence, considering it was very likely I’d arrived at the wrong fucking house, which would have given them every right to distrust the man who was, in fact, trying to ascertain the best way to break through the front gates.

“Does Cathleen Kingsley know that you are Samuel Parkerson here to see her?”

I blinked at her. Is that a riddle?

“Am I… Uh…”

Shaking my head like that would clear it, I replayed the question in my mind twice before I found my bearings again. A rush of relief sliced through me when I worked out her anomalous language and put the words back in the correct order.

“I don’t believe she’s expecting me, but she will know who I am,” I stated, my tone boasting a confidence I couldn’t sincerely claim to possess.

I could only hope she would remember who I was, because the longer I stood ensnared in the gaze of the blue-eyed figure behind the fence, the less I felt like I could remember myself.

The woman took another step forward, humming softly. “I suppose we ought to let you in, then.”

“Jordan!” one of the figures behind her reprimanded.

“What are you doing?” another voice hissed.

The young woman—Jordan—turned around and offered her companions a dramatic shrug, holding both hands out to her sides in the universally recognised signal of a person who didn’t know what else to do at the time. Jordan was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt, but she moved with the air of someone who belonged in a long, flowing ballgown with her dark hair pinned up in pearl clasps, instead of the messy braid I spied when she turned her back to me.

Honestly, she’d have looked fitting beneath a black parasol on the poster of a movie, giving the cameraman the stink eye.

They all would have. 

I waited patiently while the group discussed something in hushed tones. Whether or not they were going to let me in, I imagined.

Eventually, Jordan spun on her heels and retraced her steps to me. In her hand was a large key, which she used to open the padlock despite all the rust. She heaved one side of the reluctant gates open.

Instinctively, I moved forward to help her, but I stopped short when she glanced up and I met her eyes without any barriers for the first time.

Jordan was standing right in front of me, and while her eyes were indeed blue, it was not the colour of her irises that was startling—but the colour of the sclera.

I had never seen eyes so bloodshot and red-rimmed before, even when I was in school and more than half of my friends were abusing illegal substances. There was practically no white left in them, which served to emphasise the lightness of the blue around her pupils from a distance, and gave them the effect of icebergs.

Her skin was pale, offsetting the dark, bruise-like shadows encircling her eyes. The poor girl looked as if she had a broken nose, though the delicate, aquiline shape of it in the middle of an otherwise perfectly symmetrical, conventionally attractive face suggested otherwise.

I was being incredibly rude, staring at her as if she were an oddity, and Jordan realised before I did.

Immediately, she dropped her gaze and stepped away with the heavy gate in her hands. She pulled it back far enough for me to slip through with my briefcase, leaving my car parked in the middle of the driveway.

An apology rose in my throat, but I swallowed it down in fear of making things worse.

She was obviously unwell, and nothing I said or did was going to help her.

Jordan secured the lock again, carefully shielding her face from me. When she turned, she kept her head lowered but gestured for me to begin making my way down the long stretch of pavement in the direction of the manor. I moved obediently to do exactly that, but I was startled to find the other women had already given me their backs.

They were walking down the driveway in a line, holding each other’s hands. Their steps were slow and measured, perfectly synced to one another as if they were rehearsing the most graceful, gloomy version of a dainty march, and I found my feet stuck to the concrete as if the soles of my shoes had melted into it.

Who the fuck are these women, and what the fuck have I just walked into?

I was not usually unnerved by the opposite sex, but there was something foreboding in the air when I unstuck my feet from the driveway and followed their group toward the house—something that felt both electrified and decayed, forbidden yet utterly wretched for attention. It swept between us on the breeze with the scents of sulphur, ashes, and lavender.

As dusk descended upon us in the distance, I stared at my polished black dress shoes and focused on breathing in and out.

With more difficulty than I cared to admit, I repressed the burning urge to tilt my head and ogle at the inscrutable group of women.  There was just something so—

“I think she’s in the house,” Jordan offered quietly.

At the sound of her voice, I glanced up and found the girls disappearing into a house that positively dwarfed them—and me.

Kingsley Manor.

A memory tugged at the corner of my mind, prompting me to think back to the last time I’d visited the estate. I had no solid, tangible picture of it in my head, but for a fleeting moment, as I hesitated along the cusp, I could’ve sworn the looming manor had been part of my childhood.

Did we visit more often than I can recall?

I’d once climbed onto rooftops and played guessing games with friends where we scanned the horizon for landmark buildings, trying to convince each other that we could spot our own homes, schools, or the places where our parents worked.

Did I do it on that roof?

I squinted up at it—and then, with a shake of my head, the thought dissipated.

My memory was perfectly intact, and I had only ever visited the estate once before in my life. At the time, I hadn’t bothered to commit the layout to memory, but I would remember climbing to the apex of that rooftop. It would’ve been a feat for the history books in my childhood. 

Glancing around the courtyard, I assessed the general condition of the property. The pavement circled an old water feature that was well and truly out of commission. The stains of moss and mould hadn’t been scrubbed from the empty bowl, and cracks splintered through the stone statue depicting the worn and weathered figure of Cupid with a missing bow.

The tenant clearly hadn’t bothered to employ anyone to maintain the grounds, but I didn’t spy any signs of obvious neglect. While the gardens were dead and the veranda was dusty, the grass around the perimeter was mowed to council standards, and I couldn’t see any trash lying about or skeletons of burned cars piling up in the corners. 

There were dozens of empty pot plants and patches of crumbling flowers surrounding the manor, which leered above me like something out of a twisted fairy tale. The design took modern elements like floor-length windows and combined them with vintage features, such as the black-painted wooden beams slanting across the once-white exterior of the building.

Even looking at it gave me chills. 

If houses were made conscious, Kingsley Manor was undoubtedly the prototype because I felt pinned to the spot beneath its awning, unable to look away from the lace curtains billowing in an upstairs window.

A shadow moved in a room on the second floor, catching my attention. The figure was dark and unidentified, but something cold leaked down my spine as I stared back at it, as if it were warning me not to look too closely. 

I blinked, and it had vanished again, but there was another shadow in a room four windows down, and nobody moved that fast—

“Mr. Parkerson.” Jordan’s voice pulled me out of the trance, and I forced my rigid limbs to respond to the call.

Elegantly, she held the front door open, ushering me inside as the clouds drifting across the sky slowed over the setting sun and the last warmth in the daylight was ripped from the courtyard. 

Inside the manor, a burst of warmth greeted me, and I was momentarily stunned to find my fingertips were almost completely numb from the unseasonable drop in temperature outside.

“There’s a fire going in the parlour. You can wait for her in there,” Jordan suggested, pointing to a room with an open, sliding oak door straight off the entryway.

Understandably, she didn’t turn around to look me in the eyes again, and a pit of guilt gnawed at the base of my stomach. I was such a dick.

“I’ll send Catty in to see you.”

Catty.

Short for Cathleen, I supposed, but such an odd name regardless. I didn’t remember hearing that nickname before, even when she was a child.

I opened my mouth to offer my thanks to Jordan for her hospitality, but she was gone.

The interior of the manor was slightly better kept than the outside. If someone truly was throwing raging parties, they were not doing it anywhere near the front of the house. 

Kingsley Manor’s colour scheme was predominantly rich maroon and timbre, offset by the large, modern windows, and the dense curtains gathered across them. I moved into the parlour, which was immaculate, and settled into an armchair by the roaring fireplace.

The chair reeked of dust and embalming oil, but the faintest trace of roses floated about the room, and the atmosphere was stifling. A raging fire crackled and sparked in the hearth. After only a few minutes of sitting by it, I felt my arms and face burning, so I abandoned the chair in favour of pacing about the room.

As I moved from place to place, studying the different vintage ornaments and faded photographs in their ancient brass frames, I felt a set of eyes upon me. They were heavy as a hand on my shoulder, but when I turned to meet the intruding gaze, there was no one else in the room.

The only face belonged to a portrait of Girl with a Pearl Earring hanging on the opposite wall, and it was absurd for me to feel so violently perceived by an inanimate picture.

Someone had hung a dirty mirror over the fireplace, but it was half concealed by a thick white sheet. I stepped to the side, ducking my head to catch my reflection, and I—

Fuck. 

I was barely able to suppress a cowardly flinch when the figure standing behind me came into focus.

Whirling as the breath was stolen from my lungs, I found Cathleen Kingsley had appeared as if she had quite literally materialised out of thin air.

I blinked at her, hopelessly torn into two pieces.

On the one hand, she was devastation in the flesh. 

Her hair was wickedly dark, almost as black as my own, with natural waves cascading over one shoulder. It was a stark contrast to her porcelain skin. I’d rarely seen a complexion so far removed from colour and warmth, but she was immaculate—entirely devoid of blemishes, even down to the most innocent sun spots and freckles. The most scandalous hints of blood were displayed across her skin from the faint lilac lines running like spiderwebs around her elbows and wrists, and her lips were coloured with a sensual blush. Her eyes stabbed me like a knife to the heart, however, when I dared to take a step toward her and found the same bloody red rimming her dark brown irises as the first girl.

I couldn’t explain how I knew her eyes would look like that, but I did.

And yet, on the other hand, she was terror made manifest.

The mirror over the fireplace faced the bay windows at the front of the house. Logic insisted she should have crossed my line of sight when she used the one and only entrance into the room, but I hadn’t so much as glimpsed a shadow or heard a rustle of her long, white cotton skirt.

I blinked, feeling an unexpected spark of tight heat graze the base of my spine as I realised she was wearing a nightgown. For modesty, she had wrapped a loose shawl around her shoulders, but I didn’t miss the way the fabric clung to her hips before cascading to the ground around her feet like she was trampling all over the moon.

“Mr. Parkerson,” she said coldly. Her lilting voice was as sweet as masked poison. “I was given no warning that you were planning to visit.”

My chest pulled.

Even in the world we both orbited in some way or another, it wasn’t customary to pay unexpected visits to old friends or acquaintances—and especially not when you had rarely ever spoken to them, and hardly even knew them. Her frigid reception was perfectly understandable, and yet I still felt that I was missing something important.

It was the way she was looking at me. Like there was a hatchet buried in the soil between us, and I’d forgotten about it.

Had I forgotten her, too?

I wasn’t looking at her quite like a stranger would, but we hadn’t seen each other since we were kids, and she was definitely not one anymore. She was fully grown, almost twenty-five… and I had to stop staring like some kind of goddamned pervert and say something or she was going to kick me out of her house.

“Catty,” I whispered hoarsely.

Her eyes narrowed as she moved toward the painting on the wall and covered it with another white cloth. “What are you doing here?” she hissed at me. “Are you lost? What is it you want?”

I managed to kill the intrusive thought before it became a confession, but my eyes still scanned her body in that sultry nightgown before I cleared my throat and met her accusatory gaze again.

For a moment, my head swam, and I honestly wasn’t sure. But then I remembered standing in my father’s office, staring out at the city as I mentally compared the luscious green of the botanical gardens to the viridescent landscape of Sassafras, and it all came rushing back to me.

“I’m sorry for showing up unannounced,” I lied. It would’ve been so much weirder if I’d tried to call her or track her down on social media first. “It was a long drive out of the city, and then I couldn’t remember how to get in, and I…”

The sensation of being watched prickled the back of my neck, and I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to find that Jordan had returned.

But nobody was there.

“I didn’t…” I closed my eyes, swallowed the tight ball of babbling idiocy in my throat, and shook my head once before trying again. “If I knew you had friends over, I would have waited to come at a better time.”

Catty pressed her lips together firmly and nodded. “I think that would be wise.”

Jesus. She was going to give me frostbite, but two could play at that.

“I really hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” I began, knowing full well that I was about to dig my own grave and let her bury me in it, “but have you slept at all since the last time we saw each other?”

Her bloodshot eyes flashed—less intense than Jordan’s crimson, but still deeply troubling—and she took a single step forward, glaring at me. “That was twelve years ago.”

I feigned guilt, pulling one corner of my mouth back into a twisted smile. “I know.”

Catty’s face pinched, and for a moment, I really thought she was going to poke her tongue out at me, but then she relaxed. A picture of calm composure, she folded her hands at her waist, though I noticed the way she squeezed them together until her knuckles turned bone-white.

“I think you should leave,” she decided. “I can’t imagine what I could possibly do for you, and I will provide your father with a response in writing.”

My brows pushed together. “My father?”

The look she gave me could have been weaponised. “Yes,” she snapped, speaking through her teeth. “Your father—and the other board members.”

We were in a deadlock, but something about my expression must have convinced her of my utter lack of understanding.

A few heartbeats later, she glided over to a long side table and retrieved an envelope from the drawer. Keeping me at arm’s length, she extended it to me, and I practically snatched it out of her hand.

The letter was folded neatly in three places, smelling faintly of tobacco, and it had the trademarked King’s Ley Media logo in the corner, right above the date—which was one week prior. I opened it, and ice sloshed around in my stomach as I read the first paragraph.

Dear Miss Cathleen Kingsley, 

On behalf of the King’s Ley Media Board of Directors, it is my honour to offer you our sincere congratulations on obtaining this most recent milestone birthday. It is an exciting time, and we are pleased to inform you that the trust fund held in your name until such a time as you are married or turn twenty-five years of age will now be released to you in full.

Pertaining to the outstanding matter of real estate, I can confirm we have received your correspondence, and I regret to inform you the decision has been made not to endorse the deed transfer of Kingsley Manor into your name. The latest property evaluation surmised the total value of Kingsley Manor has increased in line with the current market value in Sassafras, and your offer falls short of this amount.

Furthermore, there have been concerns raised by members of the board that it would be unethical for King’s Ley Media to exchange the property for the entire sum of your inheritance and company shares. The board of directors is of the opinion the transaction would not uphold the ethics and practices that King’s Ley Media prides itself upon, and it may result in further damage to your reputation.

As the matter of Kingsley Manor is now officially settled, you will soon receive a follow-up letter containing the details of your impending vacancy.

Should you have any questions or require assistance to vacate the property, please get in touch as soon as possible, and we will gladly arrange a packing and removals specialist to attend the property at no expense to yourself.

Regards,

Mr. Samuel Parkerson (Senior)

CEO of King’s Ley Media Pty. Ltd.

I tossed the letter onto a nearby coffee table and dragged both hands down my face.

The fucking bastard. 

Was he trying to sabotage me?

What was he thinking, sending her a letter like that days before he sent me to deal with the problem?

He should have left it up to me to deliver her the news, or at the very least, he should have waited until I’d arrived and had a chance to reacquaint myself with the property and its woeful tenant before he dropped a bomb like that on top of us both.

“I assume this profane scripture is what brought you here,” she stated, her tone dripping with derision. Catty retrieved the letter, carefully replaced it in the envelope, and returned it to the drawer with a slam. “You may know that I am consulting with my lawyer on the matter, and I do not wish to discuss it with you at this time.”

I shook my head despairingly. She had no reason to believe me, but still, I insisted, “I had no idea he wrote that, let alone sent it.”

Catty scoffed. “Okay.” With one end of her shawl in each hand, she crossed her arms over her chest and pinned me with the most crippling look a woman’s eyes could harbour. “So, pray tell, why are you here?”

Well, that was a great question.

“Have dinner with me,” I blurted.

She blinked at me.

Everything was falling apart in my mind, but her lashes fluttered like fucking butterfly wings, and I knew that my usual manipulation tactics wouldn’t work. Catty had disarmed me the moment I whirled around and her face enveloped my gaze.

I looked at her and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that blackmail was off the table. A dozen ideas of things I could force her to do flashed through my mind, all of them serving no other purpose than to intertwine her mind, body, and soul with mine. I would learn all her secrets—but they would be unearthed for my eyes only.

Europe was out of the question, too. Fuck.

She was staying with me, but I had to get her out of Kingsley Manor first.

“No,” she replied. “Anything else?”

Fuck.

She elevated an impatient brow at me, and I choked. 

Mercifully, there was a thunderous echo on one of the upper levels, like a stampede of small elephants racing up and down the halls, and our eyes broke apart at the same time, drawn to the ceiling, where the scurrying footsteps could be tracked across the house.

“Mr. Parkerson.” Catty placed a palm against her forehead as if to check for a fever. “I’m afraid I’ve just been called away for something urgent.”

Oh, so we’re lying now?

“I must insist you leave.”

At that exact moment, a door slammed, followed by a squawk of laughter. The high-pitched sound floated down a staircase, hidden somewhere deeper inside the house, and sought me out as Catty pushed me away from the parlour and back into the foyer.

Her touch was gentle but firm.

It seared my shoulder like a brand.

I was being forcefully removed from Kingsley Manor by the angry little porcelain doll who lived there, and I found I didn’t have a leg to stand on. It was nearly dark outside, and I hadn’t seen her in so long, and my father had sent her that goddamned letter, and I—

“Who is he?”

A strong wave of lavender perfume came over me, and I turned in time to lay eyes upon the woman wearing it. Or rather… the women wearing it.

Because there were eleven of them.

I counted nearly a dozen women, standing together in the walkway and staring at us as if we had broken in through the window. Some of them craned their necks like they were trying to get a better glimpse of me, but Catty pulled the front door open and tugged on my sleeve to force me through it before I could fully process the sight. She hadn’t bothered to respond to the question, and neither had I—for the simple fact that my mouth was hanging wide open, and I couldn’t seem to remember how to close it by myself.

Stumbling after her, my head was positively spinning, and I’d scarcely managed to clear the threshold with all my limbs intact before the door slammed shut in my face.

I was silent as Catty escorted me to the gates, her steps light on the pavement while my feet dragged with an obnoxious grating sound. She did not offer me any form of goodbye. I simply slipped out through a tight space she made for me in between the two pieces of wrought iron, and then I stood on the other side like I’d been petrified. 

The sky was gilded and bathed in clouds of magenta and teal when my frigid escort at last finished securing the lock. We shared a mutual beat of loaded hesitation until she lifted her head, reluctantly meeting my widened and entreating eyes.

In the shadows of the encroaching night, she was quite harsh to look at—carved into so many unforgiving angles, with chasms of fatigue around her eyes, nose, and collarbone, and clenched teeth—but I didn’t look away first, even though something made me want to.

“There are twelve of you,” I whispered.

Still, she said nothing.

I watched her through the gates as she turned and hurried back down the driveway. I was left standing there—my hands wrapped around two frozen iron bars and my nose pressed miserably between them—until long after the sun set and a subastral blanket of darkness descended upon Kingsley Manor’s estate.

Three problems immediately struck me.

The first was that the tenant of Kingsley Manor was not at all who I’d been expecting to find. The second was that I found myself wildly attracted to her. And the third was that she didn’t live alone.

Catty Kingsley does not live alone.

The thought orbited my mind, stuck on a loop.

I’d only seen them for a moment, but I’d counted and then double-checked to be perfectly sure.

And I was perfectly sure.

There were twelve bodies sleeping in that house.