Page 11 of Cracked Doll

He presses closer instead, caging me fully against the wall, and dips his head until I feel him studying the shape of my veiled face like it personally offends him. "Why do you wear this," he says, quieter now, almost thoughtful, one finger catching the edge of the black lace. "Why won't you look at me?"

I go still, tears spilling hot and fast beneath the veil. "Please," I whisper. "Let me go. Whatever my father owes you — I'll pay it. However much. Please, just—"

He laughs, low and genuinely amused, and the sound of it is somehow worse than anger would have been. "I'm not a bloody debt collector, love." His thumb drags slow along my jaw, over the veil, deliberate. "I saw you once. Just once. So beautiful. So fucking sexy. So hot. And now I want you. That's the whole of it. There's no ledger to settle, no favor owed — just me, and the fact that I haven't thought about anything else since." His voice drops lower still, rough at the edges. "You can scream all you like. No one's coming to save you from wanting something you don't understand yet."

"Ophelia Sorrell, is that you?"

The voice cracks through the quiet like a slap — an old woman, shawl pulled tight over her nightclothes, standing a few doors down with a look of pure scandal on her face. "What on earth do you think you're doing, carrying on like that in the open street? Children walk this way to school, you know!"

The man goes still for exactly one heartbeat. Then, unhurried, he steps back, releasing me so smoothly it's as though he'd never touched me at all.

"My apologies," he says to the old woman, perfectly pleasant, and turns and walks away down the cobbles without so much as a glance back at me.

The woman turns her disapproval on me instead, tutting under her breath about decency, about how a girl my age ought to know better than to behave like that in public — and I don't answer, can't answer, my whole body still shaking as I stumble back toward the shop door.

It opens at my touch. Not broken. Not forced. Simply — unlocked, though I know, I know I locked it yesterday and didn't unlock it behind me when I first ran up those stairs.

He let himself out this way. Which means he let himself in this way, too.

I stagger inside and press my back to the door, gasping, trying to force air into lungs that don't want to cooperate. I lock the door. It takes a long moment before I notice it — something small and white, sitting face-down on the counter where nothing was sitting before.

I cross to it slowly, my whole body still trembling. A photograph. Turned over, the blank back facing up, and across it, in a narrow, elegant, unmistakably confident hand, someone has written:

I made you mine the moment you weren't looking.

My fingers won't stop shaking as I turn it over.

It's me. Walking down the high street, autumn leaves caught mid-fall around me, one small red leaf resting in my open palm like I'd summoned it there myself. My birthday. My dress, my hair, my face turned just slightly toward the camera —

My eyes.

My own eyes, ice blue, caught in perfect, undeniable focus, staring back at me from the glossy paper.

The scream tears out of me before I even register I'm making a sound. The photograph drops from my fingers like it's scalded me, fluttering face-up to the floorboards, and I stand there in the middle of the shop, shaking, staring down at my own reflected gaze staring back up at me, and I cannot, for the life of me, look away.

Chapter 4

I cry until crying stops being a choice and becomes something my body is simply doing to me.

I let it. There's no version of tonight where I don't — I've learned that fighting it only makes it last longer, so instead I sink down onto the shop floor, my back against the counter, and I let every part of me shake loose at once. My hands claw at my own arms. My breath comes in these awful, hitching gulps that don't sound like breathing at all. I rock, slow, mindless, the way I've done since I was twelve years old, and somewhere in the middle of it I hear myself making a sound I don't recognize as my own voice — something low and wounded, an animal noise, nothing like language.

Cordelia. Rosalind. Their faces rise up behind my closed eyes, twelve years old forever, and mine rises with them — the same face, the same eyes, staring out at me from that photograph like proof that none of us ever really left that night.

The man who did it is in prison. That's what Papa always says, on the rare occasions he says anything about it at all — locked away, rotting where he belongs, for the rest of his miserable life — and I've never once had reason to doubt it, not until tonight, not until a stranger's photograph made every certainty in my life feel suddenly, sickeningly thin.

I don't remember deciding to stop crying. I simply run out of whatever it is that fuels it, my body wrung completely empty, and somewhere in that emptiness sleep takes me, right there on the cold floorboards, curled small against the counter like something that's forgotten how to be anything but small.

I wake to silence and an empty shop.

For one disoriented moment I don't know where I am, or what hour it might be, or why my whole body aches like I've been beaten. Then I feel it — something small and hard clutched in my right hand, fingers cramped tight around it in my sleep.

The music box. The same dark lacquered thing that first held the rose.

I sit up slowly, my back protesting, and check the door out of pure animal instinct. Locked. From the inside. Exactly as I left it. No one's been in. No one's gotten out.

My hands shake as I turn the box, careful, angling it so the little hidden mirror faces my shoulder rather than my eyes, and wind the small brass lever until the lid springs free with its familiar, chiming note.

Inside, nestled where the rose had been, sits a necklace. A pendant, black as tar, worked into the shape of a small grinning skull, ringed all around with tiny black roses in exquisite, cruel detail.