“Where have you been staying? With him? You’ve been running around behind my back since the start, haven’t you?”
Antony moved fully into the room and slapped on the light switch. The sudden burst of illumination made Merritt wince and blink hard. But she backed away from him anyway, trying to keep herself out of grabbing distance for as long as possible.
She was aware it was futile. But it was all she had. Somehow she thought he’d probably graduated from wine over the head and a little “accidental” shoving to make his point.
“How long have you been in Louisiana?” she asked him, fighting to keep her voice calm, no matter what he did. Because it was the only thing that had ever managed to get under his skin. “And exactly how long have you been in this house?”
Because he had to have been staying here. He’d been lying in wait. Had he been in her father’s room? The guest bedroom? Had he been watching her when she’d gone into the bathroom? Merritt repressed a shudder at the thought.
She skirted the edge of the narrow twin bed when he took another jerky step into the room, putting herself on the other side of it. She distinctly remembered making it up before she left, but it was rumpled now. Had he been sleeping in here? She took her eyes off Antony for a moment to glance at the bed as if it could report back his movements, but all she saw were the dried, yellowish stains all over the magenta bedspread, almost as if…
She refused to allow herself to identify them.
But her stomach flipped over and she got a whole lot colder.
“This is how you repay me,” Antony was saying in that vacant-eyed, crazy way that made her tremble, his voice that nauseatingly fake friendly and murder all over his narrow face. “This is how you act, after everything I’ve done for you. Like a nasty, low-rent slut.”
And she knew it was stupid to say anything. There was no point engaging with his madness. He hadn’t listened all that well to begin with, and that was before he’d failed to notice that she’d dumped him. He isn’t sane, she snapped at herself. And besides all that, it only made him angrier when she challenged him. Or, you know, spoke to him without all that hero-worship in her voice.
She knew all that. And yet somehow, it didn’t stop her.
“What, exactly, have you done for me? Except threaten me?”
Antony smiled at her. The same bright, empty smile that was on the firm’s website right next to a list of all his achievements. The one that failed entirely to hide the sick gleam in his too-bright eyes.
“You should be on your knees and fucking grateful,” he said quietly. Softly. He swayed closer to the bed, his lean body vibrating with the force of the fury in his gaze even as he kept it out of his voice. “That a man like me even noticed you. That I elevated you from your humble beginnings.”
“Oh, do you mean Brown?” she asked, digging her own grave. “Or Columbia? Which Ivy League school do you think is more humble?”
His hands bunched into fists and she knew without a shred of doubt that if she’d been any closer to him, he would have taken the game up a notch and hit her. Hard.
“Instead you humiliate me.” Now he was doing that bizarre, creepy thing where it was like he was yelling but he was actually whispering, and his lips were too shiny while he did it. She thought that the fact she’d ever kissed him might make her dry heave when she had a little space and time to reflect on it. “You lie about meeting me in Maine and then you disappear. Do you know how that looked? Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was for me to be sitting there in that place, waiting for you? I told them you were coming. I looked like a fucking idiot.”
Merritt thought that right there was what he was really pissed about. Because in order to really care what she did, he’d have to care about her. Antony only cared about himself.
“If you’d listened to a single thing I said in the past few months you would have known that I was never meeting you anywhere. Like that time I very distinctly said, ‘This is over.’ ”
“I keep making excuses for you. I keep telling myself you don’t know any better. You’re young. Unsophisticated. You don’t realize what I’m offering. What you’re turning down to whore yourself out to god only knows who.”
“We’re not together.” She didn’t know why she bothered. “You were there when I broke up with you, Antony. I know you heard me.”
“Look where you’re from,” he whisper-yelled in that creepy way of his, still smiling at her. “This putrid swamp. Why would you come here? It smells here, Merritt.”
Like a New York City summer in full, fragrant swelter was anything to wax rhapsodic about. But Merritt didn’t say that. She inched closer to the window. She’d left it wide open when she’d slept here that first night, so what little breeze there might be could come in the screen. She didn’t like sleeping with AC blowing on her face. She’d thought the scant air from the bayou might be better.
There was no breeze now. She knew from her extremely minor and rare teenage rebellions that it didn’t take much to push the screen off its track. But could she do it fast enough? Would it pop out on its own if she threw herself at the screen? She thought it probably would. What she didn’t know was if she threw herself through the window fast enough, would that mean she hurled herself right over the side of the porch roof outside her window and into the backyard? Because that would end in broken bones.
And there would be no outrunning Antony on a broken leg.
“Who answered your phone?” Antony was asking, so politely that if she hadn’t been staring at him she might have imagined it was a mild sort of question. Friendly and courteous. But she was looking right at him and he didn’t shift his creepy, skin-crawlingly flat gaze from her for even a second. She wasn’t sure he blinked. “Were you there? Were you laughing at me?”
And then he reached out and swiped at the lamp beside the bed. He slapped it across the room. It shattered against the wall over her desk, a loud and gaudy sort of sound that she felt like a punch, hard and hot against her solar plexus. Merritt decided in that instant that breaking every bone in her body was preferable to staying in this room and letting him get his hands on her.
When he turned back to face her, his brown eyes were bright with a certain malicious glee. Nothing the least bit friendly or courteous about them. They were vicious all the way through, and lit with a kind of promise that made her stomach lurch.
That she’d been in love with Greeley five years ago had nothing to do with why she’d gotten tangled up with Antony, she understood then. Antony had pretended to be something he wasn’t. Greeley didn’t pretend anything. He didn’t lie. He wore a cut to proclaim exactly who he was at a glance, so there could be no mistake.
It wasn’t her fault this had happened. Antony had made this happen. This was all on him. His mess, not hers.
Not that reaching this understanding helped her much.
“You want that light to be your head, Merritt?” he asked conversationally. Like maybe he was discussing the weather instead of the things he planned to break. “You can’t possibly imagine that there won’t be consequences. Not after the way you’ve treated me.” He laughed when she only stared back at him, a horrible sort of rasping sound that made her entire body clench. She made herself stand still, trying hard not to tip him off with any body language. “Oh, now you have nothing to say?”
“We’ve already been over all of this a thousand times. Including tonight.”
“You’re a liar,” he seethed at her, his voice taking on a singsong quality that made her feel greasy with foreboding all the way through. “A liar and a fucking whore.”
“Then you shouldn’t want anything to do with me,” she snapped—which wasn’t smart.
But Antony smiled, almost angelically, which was the most chilling thing yet.
“I’m going to fuck you,” he told her pleasantly. So pleasantly. “You don’t have the right to decide when I can fuck you or when I can’t. You don’t have that right, Merritt. I decide, not you. Becau
se you’re not the sweet little girl I met, are you? You’re dirty. You’re as disgusting as this swamp and you’ll pay for that. And after I fuck you, the way I deserve after chasing you all over the goddamned country, you better believe I’ll make you pay.”
And Merritt believed him.
Everything crystallized for her in that moment.
She’d known this was coming. That Antony would catch up with her eventually and that it would be horrible. Check and check. More than that, she’d known everything with Greeley was temporary, maybe because it was so easy. So dreamlike. She hadn’t taken a single moment with him, or any of those long afternoons marinating in her old, good friendship with Lanie, for granted.
Maybe she’d known all along that she’d come home to say goodbye.
But she realized as Antony seethed at her from across her pink, childhood bed with the come stains he’d left all over the bedspread her grandmother had made for her tenth birthday, murder in his eyes and more insulting threats in his mouth, that she didn’t want to say goodbye.
That she wanted this. All of this.
Merritt wanted to come home. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to leave so much as she’d wanted to be her father’s bright and shining girl. But the truth was, she might have been good at going through the motions of those shiny things, yet they’d never captured her heart. Not the schools she’d worked so hard to get into and graduate from. Not New York itself. She liked the brown bayous and the tangled, off-putting trees sunk deep in the muck. She liked Louisiana dirt and the rich, close scent of the earth.
She liked her home.
Merritt wanted Greeley again. She wanted her best friend back. She wanted this fucked-up town and all the compromises that went with it, because they came hand in hand with the only safety she’d ever known. She wanted the painful ghosts that haunted the bayou and hung like moss from the cypress trees, the smell of a good roux complicating an evening breeze, and that peculiar swamp magic with the hint of Cajun music always rolling out across the muddy water like mist.
She wanted to live.
“Tell me who you’ve been spreading your legs for,” Antony said, his gaze intent and his voice a quiet, courteous horror. “And I might let you breathe while I fuck the shit out of you.”
Merritt was shaking then, but this time it was adrenaline. It made her think she heard motorcycles in the distance, but that was wishful thinking. Even if it wasn’t, Antony was closer. He was right there on the other side of the bed and he was about done with the speeches. She could see the way his hands flexed at his sides, a fist and then flat, over and over. Angry and jerky and dangerous. As if he was about to break.
She didn’t stop to think, to plan. There was no time. This would either work or it wouldn’t.
“Time’s up, Merritt,” he whispered. “I’m going to—”
She hurled her bag at him, loaded down with beauty products and all the usual crap she hauled around with her. She aimed for his face, but she didn’t watch it land.
Merritt heard his little grunt of surprise as she dove for the window. She held her arms in front of her head and she just threw herself at the screen. She felt a tearing and a scrape, then there was a sickening lurch before she slammed down on the roof outside, face-first.
If it hurt, it didn’t matter. It was still better than what he’d do to her and she knew it.
She skidded, but she didn’t roll off the side of the porch roof and that was all that mattered. When she stopped moving she scrambled up to her knees, listening to Antony roaring behind her, all pretense of pleasantness finally gone. It was almost a relief.
“You fucking bitch, you better hope you can outrun me!”
He was coming after her. There was a crash from inside, like he’d thrown something else against the wall, and then he was at the window with all the veins in his neck popping out as he caught sight of her.
“Cunt cunt cunt,” he was breathing, like it was a mantra.
You need to move, a very sure and matter-of-fact voice told her from somewhere deep inside. Or he will kill you. Do it now.
The roof was pitched and she had vague memories of inching along it so as not to slide off back in her adventurous days, but there was no time for careful now. She half-crawled, half-threw herself toward the low front slope so she could jump down before he was on her and hopefully not break an ankle when she—
But Antony went silent. Abruptly. There was a loud slam, then a thud.
Then an impossible quiet—or what would have been quiet if she hadn’t been breathing so hard. And if there hadn’t been that ringing in her head.
If she’d been scared before, she hadn’t had time to process it. It hit her now, sweeping over her, making her freeze there on the unsafe corner of the roof, teetering out on the edge.
She heard the sound of heavy boots inside her bedroom, then a figure appeared in the window.
Not Antony.
For a moment that was all she knew, sharp like it cut straight through her.
The man in the window who was not Antony, thank god, looked at her and something flashed over his face, making it hard and tight. But his voice was gentle when he spoke. “Are you okay?”
It took her a moment to recognize him, as if it took a while to filter its way through all that noise in her head. She saw the cut he wore first, and that allowed her to take a breath. He was one of the Devil’s Keepers. One she’d met before, she thought, though her brain couldn’t quite process that.
“I’m fine,” she said. She was aware, on some level, that she didn’t sound like herself. Or much like a person, really. She sounded like a chipper robot, but she couldn’t seem to stop it. “Really. Totally fine.”
He shifted, then smiled. It was a nice smile. It made him look friendly, but he still had that too-intent look in his dark eyes.
“I remember meeting you at the clubhouse,” he said conversationally, as if it was totally normal that he should be leaning out of her busted out bedroom window to chat with her while she cringed on the roof of the porch. “My name is Pony. I’m a prospect with the club.”
She tried to say something, but her lips felt weird, or maybe her throat was too tight. Or maybe that numb part of her face was the problem, but when she reached up to touch it, it hurt, and her fingers came away dark. She didn’t want to think about why. So she only nodded, and that seemed to be fine.
“You want to come on inside?” he asked. “I promise it’s safe.”
But Merritt could only blink at him as if she didn’t understand the question. And her body seemed locked in place. She thought that all things considered, she could stay right where she was. Maybe forever.
“That’s okay.” Pony leaned his forearms on the windowsill. “You stay right there, Merritt. You’re good right there.”
And then he talked. She had no idea what he was saying. Something about fishing maybe. Or his grandma’s cooking. He had a Georgia accent and it was mellow and warm and soothing, rolling into the night. Into the air and into her. Weaving all around her.
Merritt tried to make herself breathe. In. Out. The more she managed it, the more she felt the bright, searing licks of pain in her hands and on her knees. And a hotter press of it on her face. She flipped her hands over in the light that spilled out from her bedroom and inspected her palms. They were ripped up and bloody, and stung more with every second, but she was only aware of that from what felt like a distance.
It seemed years dragged by like that, but she thought it was likely no more than a few moments. The last of the light was still in the sky. The crickets were still shouting at the bullfrogs in the bayou. Pony was talking about vanilla ice cream on pecan pie and she was the one who was frozen.
“Baby.”
Greeley’s voice cut through all of that.
Merritt’s heart kicked at her, hard. She shifted around, very carefully, and looked down. He was standing right there beneath her, one hand on the corner of the porch as he gazed up at her. He looked a little misty, she
thought, and then she realized her eyes were…weird. She swiped at them, and he was still there, an oddly frigid look on his face. Or maybe it was only there when he looked her over, his gray gaze lingering on her cheek while a muscle clenched tight in his jaw. She thought maybe she didn’t want to know what he saw.
“I didn’t think I was going to see you again,” she whispered without meaning to speak. “I’m glad I was wrong.”
Something dark and hard and kind of scary moved over him then, settling in his gray gaze and turning it to steel. He aimed it past her, to the window where Pony had stopped talking, and when his eyes moved back to hers again she couldn’t read them.
“You having fun up there?” he asked, low and quiet. Gentle, maybe. The same way Pony had sounded. It made something funny wind its way through her.
“No, actually. Not really.”
“You ready to come down?”
He was so big. Tough and tall, rough and dangerous and so damned beautiful. He was wearing a T-shirt and his cut and those same old jeans and boots, and she thought he was the most incredible thing she’d ever seen in her life.
When his mouth kicked up in one corner, she realized she’d said that out loud. His head was tipped back and his eyes were still that sort of dark that usually meant he was pissed, but he wasn’t. There was something else emanating from him. She couldn’t read it.
He raised his arms, extending his hands toward her.
“Swing over the side. I’ll catch you.”
It didn’t occur to her to disobey him. She saw him look past her and his gaze went flinty and dangerous again, but when he shifted back to her, there was nothing but warmth and command.
Merritt ignored the fact that everything hurt, and more with each passing second. That she was already getting stiff. She twisted around to get her hands on the roof and then she rolled onto her belly, muttering curse words as her palms stung at their contact with the roof. She wiggled her way down toward the edge until she felt Greeley’s hands on her legs.
She felt better instantly.