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The empty bedrooms upstairs. The kitchen. The living room.
I settle on my office. Daphne spent time with me there, but it also has the most distractions.
It’s only a few steps. My hand meets the closed door. I spend more time in my house than most people. The lack of light isn’t a problem.
Except there is light.
It sketches the outline of the office door in its frame. Light, coming from the other side. I feel a moment of sheer, tumbling panic, followed by relieved acceptance. I’ve lost it. Finally. I have broken with reality, and now I can leave it behind.
The knob turns easily in my hand. The door swings open.
Daphne’s brother sits at my desk in a pool of lamplight.
He is a shadow separated from the rest of the space only by that veil of illumination. Black clothes. Black eyes. Silver knife.
Leo Morelli turns his head, and the shift in angle reveals that his eyes are not black but a deep brown with gold sunbursts. They’re Daphne’s eyes. My mind overlays everything I know about her, all of her expressions, over his, searching for a match.
One blink and I find it. Frost fills my lungs. I’ve never seen this particular expression on Daphne’s face, only suggestions of it. She has some of the same skill at hiding her feelings, but her brother—this brother—made it possible for her to be more expressive, and in different ways.
Like his sister, however, he can’t hide his eyes. That’s where the match is. This is the way her eyes looked when she realized I wouldn’t let her go. Rage shot through with helplessness. On him, it’s combined with certainty.
He came here to kill me.
The complexity slots itself into a frame and hangs itself up on a wall. If I wasn’t going to be dead soon, I’d wonder what happened to him. His emotions cycle through his eyes, hardly showing on his face, but there are too many, and too varied, to be a result of Daphne’s disappearance alone. It’s something else.
I’ll never know.
Leo waits, turning the knife over in his hands. He’s deft with it. Familiar. Perhaps he’s chosen a number of breaths he’ll let me take before he carves my heart out. Impossible to say. He sits slightly forward in his seat, back straight, though he gives the impression of being relaxed by bracing one elbow on the arm of the chair.
I’m used to silences, but this one is so charged that it’s uncomfortable in a matter of moments. I ignore it in favor of information gathering. His posture is not usual. An injury, maybe, but it won’t prevent him from doing what he came here to do. The bristling anger in the room is paired with a focused curiosity that makes it hard to breathe. A person like this could see any number of things about me, but more importantly, curiosity means this won’t be over quickly.
Unfortunate.
I’m not going to see her again. That’s what his presence here guarantees.
Better to get it over with before my brain rebels. I don’t want to die in the middle of a panic attack, if it can be helped.
“I thought you’d send the police,” I say, putting the silence out of its misery.
“No point. Without an accusation from Daphne, I can’t press charges.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Less so for you.” He tests the tip of his knife with the pad of his finger. “I learned some things about you before I arrived.”
“Like what?”
“I started with property records. You didn’t bother to hide them. Not even a shell company.” Leo’s mildly scolding, as if I should have known better. “That took all of ten minutes. And then I found everything else.”
“I can’t imagine there was much to find.”
“Oh, but there was. I found, Emerson, that you’re a recluse. You hardly ever leave this house. That’s the story people tell about you. That it’s difficult to get you to attend showings. They say it’s because your time is valuable, but that’s not what it is.”
Despite my imminent death, my mind works the way it always does. I cannot help looking at him like I would any piece of art. I can see so much of Daphne in his face. My stomach sinks at the realization that this is all I’ll ever see of her—echoes in the man who’s going to kill me. Her eyes are as complicated as his. They’re mirrors of each other.
This is the person who sheltered her all those years. Who had a plan for everything.
He’s her favorite brother.
