His gaze lifted.
“No,” he said softly. “You are more like me than you wanted to be.”
I turned away first and walked back toward the living room, because I could not stand inside that secret room another second without feeling my own secrets rearrange themselves around his.
The dining area was still destroyed. Broken glass glittered beneath the table. The candle lay on its side, wax hardening against the wood. Pasta had begun to congeal on the floor. MissAstoria perched on the far chair, watching the wreckage with feline judgment but no intention of helping.
I laughed once. It was not a happy sound, but it was real.
Vincent came up behind me, not close enough to touch.
“What?” he asked.
“I tried to kill you, and now I have to clean pasta off your floor.”
“I can call someone.”
I turned to look at him.
“Absolutely not.”
“It is only a floor.”
“It is my attempted murder scene. I’ll clean it myself.”
His expression shifted.
Myattempted murder scene. Mine. Not his. Not Katherine’s.Mine.
A terrible, absurd intimacy.
I crouched and began gathering the larger shards. Vincent crouched beside me.
I glanced at him. “I can do it.”
“You’ll cut yourself.”
“I have done chores before.”
“Yes,” he said, picking up a piece of glass with insulting competence. “You mentioned. Now we can do them together.”
We cleaned together without speaking for several minutes. There was something obscene about it—domesticity right after such an insane confession. A sponge dragged through wine and cream while Katherine’s blood sat folded in my drawer. Vincent rinsing a cloth at the sink while I swept glass into a dustpan.
When the table was clear and the floor no longer looked like evidence of a crime, I poured two glasses of water and handed Vincent one.
He looked at it.
“From the tap,” I said.
“Comforting, but I did watch you pour it.”
“You watched me try to drug you too, and that did not stop anything.”
His mouth curved faintly. .
Then his phone rang.
The sound sliced through the apartment. We both looked at it on the counter.
