It looks like you, Adam.
Simple, elegant—the couch modular, low profile. The tables, the benches, all have the look of materials that have been repurposed, rescued. The walls are a soft dove gray. In the kitchen—marble countertops and a restaurant-grade stove and oven. A giant gleaming stainless-steel refrigerator. There’s a simple white card near the sink. It reads: This is where we’ll make our meals.
The lamplight is dim, casting everything in a soft rose. In the living room, a coffee table is stacked high with books—big, cloth-bound books about art, architecture, furniture. By the stone hearth, another card. This is where we’ll spend our evenings.
All my nerve endings are screaming.
Sane voices in my head—mine, Jax, Miranda—are a siren, trying to wake me from this dream, urging me to get out. Unarmed, no phone. What are you thinking? But I keep walking, down the long hallway that glows from lighting in the baseboards, and push into the first room.
It’s a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves, lined with volumes and volumes of books. A lifetime’s collection of literature and poetry, textbooks, journals. The bindings are smooth and soft—some leather, some cloth, some paper. I don’t look at the titles, the authors—there are too many. A single window acts as a mirror in the darkness behind it. I watch myself approach a simple pale wood desk and ergonomic chair standing in the middle of the space.
This is where you’ll write, reads the note card there. I imagine myself sitting there with my laptop open among all these words, in all this quiet. Yes, I see it.
At the end of the hall, I push through the farthest door.
Here, there’s a simple platform bed in the bedroom that, like the rest of the house, has one wall made completely of glass. A white oak floor. An Eames chair in the corner, a simple three-legged table beside it. On the downy comforter, yet another card reads: This is where we’ll make love.
Your handwriting is precise, perfectly inked black letters on the thick paper. The card stock is heavy in my hand. The bed soft as clouds as I sink onto the mattress. I imagine your hands roaming my body, your flesh against mine, the tender power of your desire.
That’s when the front door opens and closes with a final thud. Its sound moves through me like a wave. My senses come alive with a jolt.
And in this moment I realize far too late, that this has been your plan all along.
Mia, Bonnie, Melissa. You didn’t take them, didn’t wrest them from their lives. You lured them here. And they followed, willing. Just like this. You didn’t take their money; they gave it to you. Just as I would have.
Just as I have, they followed all their own darkest impulses.
I am not the hunter after all.
I’m the doe.
forty-four
You.
You almost don’t seem real. Over the last few days—few days?—you have been lover, leaver, mystery, demon. You have been a wraith slipping away, back through whatever shadowy doorway you used to enter my life.
And now, here you are, just a man standing before me. Breath and flushed skin, hands open at your side, eyes—hopeful.
“Wren,” you say in the doorway to the bedroom. The syllable of the name I gave myself vibrates.
I know your face—or thought I did. How it looks when you are thinking hard—a little furrow between your eyebrows makes its debut. When you are sleeping—the muscles around your eyes and mouth release, leaving your expression as soft and open as a child’s. When you are hungry with desire, those black eyes sear into me—searching, searching. I haven’t ever seen you angry; you are cool, placid as slack tide. Though, yes, I know there is rage in you. I see it now. It was always just beneath the mask you wore. I don’t want to think that your darkness, your disease, was the thing that attracted me most of all.
“Or should I call you Robin?”
I haven’t moved an inch since I heard the door open and close. I am wise enough to know that I am trapped. There’s no back door. The windows don’t open. I freeze, a prey animal assessing the environment.
I don’t say anything.
“Or—do you prefer Dear Birdie?”
My phone. My gun. My car. I left it all behind. Why?
“I’m not the only one who lied, am I?” he continues on into the silence, voice deep, a growl. “I’m not the only one with secrets.”
I feel my breath in my chest, my lungs fill and expand, blood rushing in my ears.
You offer me a gentle smile. “Are you wondering about these things?”
From your jacket pocket you retrieve my phone—in pieces. “I told you to leave it. These things are like little spies, aren’t they? They know everything about us.”