Page 22 of Taken Away

“Mabel got jumpy toward the end,” he said quietly. “Checking locks before bed. Asked me twice if I’d seen strange trucks near the ridge road.”

Aubrey thought of the man by the maintenance truck, the way he’d slipped between the vines the moment she noticed him.

Aubrey’s stomach tightened.

Bennett gave a short shrug.

“I think she’d lived on this mountain long enough to know when something felt off.”

Then, as if he regretted saying even that much, he reached down and scratched Moose once behind the ears.

“Be good,” he muttered to the dog.

Moose whined softly, his gaze flicking from Bennett to the empty space on Mabel’s side of the bed.

Bennett straightened.

“Funeral’s at two,” he said quietly. “First Baptist on Main.”

Moose lifted his head again at the sound of his voice, watching him like he might follow.

Bennett glanced once around the room—at the photographs, the balcony doors, the untouched side of the bed.

He walked out, leaving Aubrey alone in the enormous house with a grieving dog and a stranger's life.

She stood there a long moment after he left, staring at the bed. At Mabel’s pillow. At the dent Moose’s body made in the rug beside it.

There was no universe in which she was sleeping in that room tonight.

Somewhere down the hall, there had to be a guest room. A neutral room. A room that didn’t feel like a deathbed.

A room where she could lock the door, close the blinds, and pretend that she was anywhere else but here.

FOUR

Blackwood Estate

The Guest Room

The guest bedroom at the far end of the eastern wing was beautiful, minimalist, and blessedly devoid of ghosts.

Pale gray walls. A crisp white linen duvet. An antique vanity that didn’t hold a single framed photograph. No smiling relatives. No laughing versions of herself trapped behind glass.

Most importantly, it was not the master. Not the room with the four-poster bed and the invisible outline of a body she couldn’t stop seeing.

It was a blank canvas—exactly what Aubrey’s brain demanded.

She had dragged her designer suitcase down the hall, her heels scuffing the polished wood, painfully aware of the massive white shadow tracking her every step. Moose didn’t crowd her. He kept a precise five-foot perimeter, his massive head lowered, his dark eyes watching her with a heavy, judgmental stillness.

He’d trotted after her when she walked away from Mabel’s room like he knew she was retreating—but he hadn’t tried to stop her.

When she finally shut the guest room door, she expected him to wander back to the master and its Mabel-shaped absence.

Instead, a heavy, bone-deep sigh sounded from the hallway, followed by the dull thud of one-hundred-and-twenty-pounds of fur collapsing directly against the outside of her door.

He was guarding her.

Or keeping her under house arrest.