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"He was asleep on your sofa," Laszlo says. "He'd left the front door unlocked."

"You just walked into my house."

"He didn’t lock the door. You live alone. He was careless."

"How long has this been going on?"

He puts his glass down. He straightens his cuff then lines the glass up with the edge of the dresser, quite meticulously. Now I wonder about those days when I arrived home after work and found things to be neater in my house than when I left them. My skin crawls and burns at the same time.

"Seven years," he says.

Seven years. I was around twenty-six. I was nobody, just an exhausted resident who could barely keep her head above water, and this man was already watching me. Why?

My legs go weak and I sit down on the bed because I don't think I can keep standing. My legs are still sore from this morning. But now, after marrying this man because I have to, I find out he has been inside my life for seven years, and he has been studying me for longer than I've been a trauma surgeon post-residency.

"You're upset," he says, sounding genuinely confused. Is he serious? "I've just told you that nothing in your recent life has ever been broken longer than a day. Most women would consider that romantic."

It’s the hardest thing in the world to keep my hands to myself because right now, I’d love to beat him senseless. Like he did to Charles. Only I’d bury him myself after. In a swamp—if we had any. After setting him on fire.

I am so confused, my head is reeling and I feel a little sick.

"Most women would consider that a documentary with a hotline number at the end," I say.

He laughs, delighted, the bastard. Crouching in front of me, he presses a kiss to my knuckles. His mouth is warm and I feel it between my legs, instant, like a wire pulled tight from his lips straight down through my center. I want to knee him in the face. I want to grab his shirt and pull him onto this bed and ride him until neither of us can walk.

I shouldn’t let him touch me. Why am I not angrier, hysterical even?

"There she is," he says against my skin.

"Get out."

His mouth stops moving against my hand. "Manon."

"Get out of this room, and close the door behind you. If you come back up here before I come down we will find out exactly how much damage a woman can do to an undertaker with the heel of a wedding shoe."

His eyes travel over my face, slow and thorough. I hold his stare. I am still Henri Valmont's daughter and don't look away from anyone.

Then he stands, grabs his glass and walks to the door.

"There's cake," he says from the doorway. "I had them make the lemon one."

After he leaves, I sit there for a long time, telling myself to breathe, but my chest feels tight.

Then I get up because a box by the wall is open and something in it has caught my eye. I lift out the photo magnet from my fridge, the selfie of Charles and me in the middle of Times Square three years ago, both of us laughing, him planting a kiss against my cheek. Someone has packed it carefully, but I can see through the bubble wrap. We’re both younger, I’m so sure of my life. I wonder what the blurred strangers milling behind us in the gray afternoon were thinking and doing then. I had it all planned out. Now here I am.

I put the photo face down in the box.

I sit back down but the tears do not come. My heart is heavy, everything’s black, but I cannot give more. What can I do? For now I have to go back down to my wedding reception, to my husband, to the lemon cake and pretend that I haven’t just gotten married to a psychopath.

CHAPTER 17

Laszlo

"You're going to be late, love," I say to Manon, watching her eat the avocado toast that Dolores had made for breakfast. I'm so blissfully happy that I might burst, because now I have her, Manon, as my wife.

"No, I won't. I'm never late, and I have another three minutes," she replies, avoiding my gaze. She slept in that bedroom last night, surrounded by her books, and refused to come to mine. Yes, I wanted her to feel at home yet not pressured, so I’d given her a separate room because I never planned on us having sex near a corpse before the wedding. If I’d known, I would have made sure she’d move into my room right away.

But since we spoke, she made it a point that she didn't want to be anywhere near me. I did not want the staff to start gossiping, but everyone here was paid handsomely to keep their mouth shut. If they didn’t, there’d be consequences.