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EMERY
Every time I blink, I see red.
I know there’s nothing on me. I was standing too far away to be in the bloody spray. But I feel dirty.
“We have to clean this up,” I whisper to myself. “Before Isabella sees.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
I turn around. Adrik is standing in the threshold between the rooms. There’s blood on his shirt and speckled across his face. The gun in his hand is dripping more of it onto the tile.
“‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him’?” I whisper-quote like I’m dreaming. Then I shake my head. “I was in Macbeth in high school. Not a lead or anything. Just a gentlewoman. I wasn’t a great actress.”
Adrik watches me quietly, not saying a word.
I let my eyes flutter closed, so that just for a moment, I can stop seeing crimson blood everywhere. “Are there buckets? I can mop and—”
Suddenly, I feel his hands on my arms. “Emery.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not,” he says, his voice firm in my ear. “But I’m going to take care of this. I’m going to take care of you.”
I shake my head. “I can help. Let me—”
“No. You disobeyed me once by coming out of the room at all. Don’t do it a second time.”
His words are harsh, but his tone is soft. I can’t deny that there’s a cold kind of pragmatism to what he’s saying. And I know with absolute confidence that Adrik knows how to handle this.
He knows what he’s doing. I’ll only get in the way.
I turn in the circle of his arms and open my eyes as I face him. There’s still blood smeared on his face, but underneath it, he looks the same as ever. Dark stubble covers his cheeks and chin where he hasn’t shaved in a few days. There’s a dash of glitter in his hair where Isabella dusted him with sparkly eyeshadow during her makeover. And underneath the tang of iron, I smell him. Dark leather and icy mint and musk, unchanged from the moment I met him. It’s seared into my senses now. It’s part of me. He’s part of me.
I stretch onto my toes and press my lips to his. We kiss briefly, teasingly.
Then I nod. “Okay.”
I don’t look at the body as I pass. Only when I’m right outside the bedroom door do I hear Isabella.
“Mama?”
My heart lurches. How much did she hear? What does she know? What will I tell her?
I swallow down my fears and walk to her room, pressing the door open.
Isabella is awake in bed, her eyes catching the moonlight that passes through the blinds. Travis is sitting at attention on the floor next to her. His nose is quivering in the air.
“Travis heard something,” she mumbles. “He woke me up.”
I kneel next to the bed and pet Travis’s neck. “It’s okay, sweetheart. Everything is fine.”
“Where’s Adrik?”
“He’s… he’s working,” I tell her. “He had to handle an emergency. That’s probably what Travis heard.”
“An emergency?”
I lift my other hand to smooth back her hair. “A work emergency. Everything is fine. I promise.”
She studies my face. I can tell she’s trying to decide if I’m lying to her. Pulling the wool over Isabella’s eyes is hard at six. I can’t imagine what it will be like when she’s sixteen.
I push that thought out of my mind almost as quickly as it arises. One day at a time.
“Okay.” She relaxes back into the bed, her eyelids already growing heavy again. “When are we going to go to the park again?”
“The park? What made you think of that?”
She shrugs. She has no more of an idea than I do. Kids’ brains are like soup. Everything is dumped in and, occasionally, random bits bob to the surface. “We never go there anymore.”
“Because we don’t live at that apartment anymore,” I tell her. “We live at Adrik’s house now.”
“Is this Adrik’s house?” she asks.
“One of them.”
Her eyes widen. “How many does he have?”
I open my mouth to answer and then stop. “Well… I don’t actually know.”
“Wow,” she breathes. “That’s a lot.”
I laugh. Isabella giggles, too. “I like his yard at the big house,” she informs me. “The last one we were at. There were sidewalks for me. Just like at the park. There aren’t sidewalks out here.”
“Yeah, it’s harder for you to get around, isn’t it?”
She nods, her smile fading slightly.
I know for a fact if Adrik saw her face right now, he’d have a slew of workers and a cement truck out here by sunrise. He'd pour pavement through every square foot of forest in the state if he needed to.
“When can we go back to the big house?” she asks. “And when can we go back to our old house?”
“Do you want to go back to our old house?”
She yawns. Her blinking is slowing down, her eyes staying closed a little longer each time they touch. "No. I like living with Adrik. He’s nice.”
Distantly, I hear a shuffling noise coming from the main part of the house. Adrik disposing of the body. How many bodies are hidden out here? I wonder.
Then I decide I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know.
I kiss my daughter’s cheek. “Goodnight, honey.”
She’s asleep before I step into the hallway and close her door.
There’s still no blood on me as far as I can tell, but I walk straight to the master bathroom and turn on the shower. The water washes over me. A little too hot, but I like the harsh, clean tingle it leaves behind.
I’ve seen death before. I saw men on Adrik's compound die. I saw Malcolm die.
But this feels different. Rurik wasn't killed in the heat of battle. I wasn't filled with adrenaline, operating in fight-or-flight mode.
Standing there, watching Adrik kill him, I felt… calm. The reason for that is blindingly obvious.
Because I knew Adrik would protect me.
That’s the thought that comforts me. As I climb out of the shower and dry off, as I brush my hair, as I slip into pajamas and slide back into our bed, I know Adrik will always protect me.
I can't sleep, though. My body is heavy with exhaustion and I want nothing more than to skip off into unconsciousness for a few hours. But without Adrik beside me, I can't relax.
So when the door to our room opens, I sit up immediately. Adrik comes in, moving slowly, obviously trying to be quiet. But when he sees me sitting up, he stands tall and sighs. "You should be asleep."
"I couldn't."
He nods. "I didn't mean for you to see that."
He steps into the lamplight. I see patches of dirt on the knees of his jeans, black soil under his fingernails. The back of his shirt is sweaty and clinging to him.
He was digging a grave.
"It's not that," I say. "I just couldn't sleep. Not when you weren't in bed with me."
He stops and turns to me, eyebrow raised. "I just bashed a man's head in, and you want me next to you in bed?"
"You were right before."
