Chapter 94: No safe haven
MARGAUX
The footage flickered across the tablet screen.
"I hate to say it," Laurent said as it played. "But there is nothing to see here."
I tore my gaze from the screen. Laurent was not the kind of person to wear a mask, but there was no way he could not see that a naked, blue-eyed man had materialized out of thin air. Next to him, Étienne also watched me with a look I sensed through our bond before I even saw it. It was not cold or calculating. It was worry, thinly disguised by composure that threatened to crack.
He thought I had lost my mind.
They both did if I was being frank.
"There is no way." I looked back at the screen. Then back at them. Their expressions had not changed. "You are fucking with me. Right?"
Neither of them answered.
I turned back to the tablet. I could not understand why they were looking at me that way and not immediately scrambling to find out who this freak was. He was right there in the feed. I saw him. He stood exactly where I remembered, arms relaxed at his sides, blue eyes reflecting the bracket light with an unsettling intelligence that felt almost too sharp.
He was right there.
But they still looked lost.
So I had to ask, "Are you really telling me you do not see the bastard?"
Laurent spoke. "No, there is literally no one there."
"I don’t know why you can’t see him," I said, as I pointed. "But he is standing there. In the middle of the corridor."
Étienne opened his mouth.
"No." Laurent cut across whatever he was about to say, his voice firm and quiet. "I don’t think we should dismiss this yet."
He swiped the tablet, pulling up a new feed. The timestamp registered before the room did, and then both crashed over me together. My first night here. The bedroom Étienne had given me after revealing himself fully. I could see the stupid crimson bridal dress torn and strewn across the floor, and even the bathroom door just barely ajar in the background.
My chest tightened, but I held it together.
"Do you see anything?" Laurent asked.
I scanned the frame. The room looked empty. I was about to say so when my eyes snagged on something in the peripheral corner of the shot, and I stopped breathing for a second.
"There is someone." The words came out strange in my own mouth. "He just walked in. It... Fuck... it is him." I pointed to the center of the room. "He is naked. Same as before."
Laurent paused the feed.
"Where exactly?"
I pointed again. He looked at the space I was indicating, and I watched his face show nothing, no flicker of recognition, no adjustment of focus. He could not see it.
"Tell us what he does," Laurent said. "Everything. Don’t leave anything out."
He then pressed play.
I watched the figure glide through the room with the practiced ease of someone who had done this many times and expected nothing to stop him. He moved toward the bathroom, paused in the doorway, and leaned in.
"He is checking on me in the bathroom," I said. My voice came out flat. "He is looking in at me."
My throat constricted with the memory of what had been done to me in that bathroom. What had happened in that water... The sensation of invisible hands tightening around my neck refused to leave the foreground of my mind.
I kept watching.
He turned from the bathroom and strode toward the camera, every movement unhurried and sure. He lifted a hand, and something unfurled from his fingers, not quite a hand, not quite smoke. It was translucent and shifting. It touched the camera housing with a motion so subtle and precise I would have missed it if I had not been able to see what the fucker was doing.
The angle shifted. Barely perceptible, but enough.
I turned to Laurent.
"He moved the camera," I said. "That is why the angle changed. He did it himself. You can see the shift if you know where to look."
Laurent and Étienne looked at each other.
Their glance lasted only a second, but it held an entire conversation, and whatever decision they made, they made it as one.
"We cannot see whoever this is," Laurent said slowly. "But you can." He paused and then attempted to say something else, but he stopped himself before the words came out. No, that was it. The words hung in his throat. He swallowed and then tried again. "Just like you could see—"
He still did not finish, but I knew what he wanted to say. Theodore.
"This is so fucked up," I said.
I turned away from the desk.
Suddenly, the room felt crowded with sharp edges. I needed to move, to put distance between myself and the footage, and the memory of that translucent hand shifting the camera with a practiced indifference that suggested it had done this countless times and never been seen.
But as soon as I turned from the screen, the memory surged up, unbidden.
The water. Its temperature, warm at first, then suddenly wrong the instant the pressure closed in. The way I had clawed at emptiness. The way my lungs dragged in what they never should have, the burning, that terrible burning, and the cold certainty that I would die in a bathtub in a house I barely knew.
My breathing changed.
I noticed it distantly. My chest had gone tight and shallow, each inhale arriving too short and leaving too fast. The study walls pressed inward. The air felt wrong, thickened somehow, and my body had stopped trusting that it was actually air.
My legs went from under me.
The floor came up. I caught myself on one knee, but the other gave way, and then I was down, and the room had gone dark at the edges, and the darkness was water, and the water was everywhere, and it was in my throat again, and my lungs and I could not find the surface no matter how hard I reached.
I was going to drown again.
Hands.
Not the hands from the bathtub. These were warm. Solid. Real in a way that owed nothing to magic or whatever haunted the walls of this estate.
One hand cradled the back of my head. The other pressed firm and steady against my back, unmoving, and a voice broke through the water.
"Margotine."
I couldn’t surface. The darkness still had weight.
"Margotine." The voice came again, and it felt so much closer than before. It was in a lower register, too. Stripped of everything except the direct, immediate fact of it. "You are not in the water. You are on the floor of my study. Feel the floor."
The hand on my back pressed harder. Grounding me and ensuring that I was present.
"It is marble. Cold too. You can feel it."
I could feel it. The cold of it seeping through my dress where my knee pressed against it. The texture of it, uneven and solid, and not watery.
"Breathe out first." His voice was very close now. "Out before you go in. Let it go."
I breathed out.
It trembled as it left me, tasting wrong, but it left all the same.
"Again."
I breathed out again. And then in, slowly, without forcing it.
The darkness at the edge of my vision began to ebb, like a tide pulling away. The walls eased back. The air felt normal again.
He was crouched in front of me, and when my vision cleared, his face was the first thing I saw. Bare, close enough to see where the scarring ended and smooth skin began, his eyes locked on mine with a focus that shut out the rest of the world.
"There you are," he said quietly.
Something inside my chest broke open, and it had nothing to do with fear.
I closed the space between us before I could reconsider and wrapped my arms around him. My face pressed to his shoulder, and he went still for a heartbeat—not in rejection, but in the startled adjustment of someone recalibrating for the unexpected.
Then his arms came around me.
He was not careful with it. Neither did the gesture seem measured. He held me tightly, and I stayed there and let him, and neither of us said a word.
Laurent, somewhere behind us, said nothing at all.