Page 100 of Mortdale

“I’m not angry at you.”

“You should be.”

“I just feel sick.” A tear slid down her cheek as she turned her face away from me. “I can hear the echoes of their screams. The smell of burning flesh is still stuck to my hair, my skin, my tongue, my eyes. No matter how much I wash. I can’t stop thinking. There’s too much to think about. But I just want to stop thinking. Just for one moment, so I can sleep. I’ve lost your tie. I think Piper took it with her to her grandmother's.” She lifted a shaking hand to wipe it away. “I’d hex a ninety-nine year old grandma with violent diarrhoea for a bath right now. I’ll blow to pieces if I have to stand under a shower again.”

Against my better judgement, against any judgement, against any reasoning, I lifted her up in my arms and brought her up the stairs to the second floor.

She said nothing as I walked towards my bedroom. But her wide eyes flew in my direction when I opened the door and brought her to my bathroom, lowering her down on the corner of my bed before running her a bath.

She walked to the tub and dropped to her knees, putting her hands under the running water. “No other room has a tub.”

“We had them removed from the mansion some years ago.”

“Why?”

“My mother tried to drown herself in one of them.” An agonising, slow way to go, but she’d always been in pursuit of pain her whole entire existence. Maybe it was why she’d loved my father so much.

She froze, slowly pulling her hands out of the shallow water as she slowly stood. “Is that why the curtains—”

“She tried to hang herself first,” I said, taking a few towels from the cupboard. I’m sure my mother had tried many other ways. Many times. But even though my father had wanted to let her go, I hadn’t. Even if it meant chaining her to the bottom of an empty room and forcing her to eat, drink, breathe. For my selfish reasons, I’d kept her alive for far longer than she’d wanted to be. I’d thought maybe if she saw how much I needed her to live, she’d want to live, too. I’d thought wrong.

“How did she die?”

“She set herself on fire seven years ago.” In her state of delirium, she’d found her way back to who she’d been before being Agatha Duncan. To who she’d been before she’d been my father’s. We’d all thought she’d gotten better. Until she’d remembered me. The first and last face she’d seen since she’d lost her sanity had been me. And it was the biggest regret of my life—for coming back to this house when I did. Maybe…maybe she’d still be alive. Suffering, but alive.

I felt Willow take just the slightest step towards me. The tips of her gentle fingers briefly grazed my back before she pulled them to her side. “I am sorry.”

“Don’t be. She didn’t want to be here. She was very happy to go.” My mother made sure I knew that by letting me watch as she burned alive. I’d never seen her smile like that in my entire life. And I might have never been able to see her happy at least once if she had not died the way she had.

Her gentle hand laid flat against my chest, carefully, gently, as if she could hurt me. “I’m still sorry.”

I took my tie off, wrapping it around her neck. “You should have asked Christof for one of them.”

Her fingers skimmed my necklace, holding it as she leaned forward to press a kiss to it. “I need it to smell like you.”

Why were the Saints testing me like this?

Forcing myself to push away from her, I took a seat in the corner.

Her words were small, “You’re staying?”

“I am staying.”

“Logan, I wouldn’t—”

“I’m staying.”

Bringing a cigarette to my lips, I watched her slowly undress herself. She unbound the braid, and long, grey hair cascaded down, almost reaching the middle of her thigh. Her nightgown followed, slipping down her shoulders and pooling on the floor around her feet.

The patches of lighter skin snaked down her lean legs, hugging her hips and her arms.

She was beautiful. Painfully so. And I was even more painfully aware of it.

As she relaxed back in the water, her attention turned to me. Her fingers grazed the water’s surface back and forth, stirring it gently. Blood trickled down her nose, tinting the water red, and I lowered my head to shield my amusement.

“It’s driving me insane,” I muttered to myself, taking a drag of my cigarette until I felt the back of my throat burn.

“Where have you been?” she quietly asked. “You didn't come home four nights in a row.” She swiped her wet hand over her nose, smearing blood almost to the other side of her cheek. “I wasn’t counting at all, by the way. It was just a rough guess.”