“Maybe even in the car with you right now,” Mara says, throwing me another quick look, this time with a hint of mischief in it.
“Are you talking about me or about yourself?” I ask her. “You’ve gotten me in more trouble than I’ve caused for you.”
“You think I’m a threat to you?” Mara says, her fingertips lightly caressing the wheel as she turns, already knowing the way to my house.
“You threaten everything I thought I knew, and everything I believed.”
We’ve left all the other cars behind us, alone on the long, winding drive up to Seacliff. She’s speeding up, taking the curves with confidence. She looks sexy behind the wheel of my car, wearing the suede moto jacket I bought for her. Her skin and hair glows with health. Even her nails look less ragged—she hasn’t been biting them as much.
Mara is flourishing under my care. Becoming more beautiful, more powerful by the day.
I’m doing this. I’m changing her.
“You like it,” Mara says. “You can’t get enough of it.”
I seize her face and force her to kiss me, pulling her eyes away while the car flies along the road.
She gasps as I let go of her, gripping the wheel tight once more.
“At first it was against my will,” I tell her. “But now I’m all in. I have to have you. Even if it blows up my life.”
Mara pulls into my driveway, the towering facade of Seacliff looming over us. The weathered dark stone is cave-like, as if the house is just more of the cliff, jutting up against the sky.
“Do you like this house?” I ask Mara.
She tilts her head to the side, examining it anew.
“It suits you,” she says. “On the outside: stark and intimidating. On the inside … surprisingly beautiful.”
“You haven’t even seen all of it yet.”
“I know,” she says, looking at me, not the house.
I take her hand.
“Come this way.”
I lead her around the side of the house, on the stone path that winds through thick hedges of wisteria long past their bloom. The private entrance is sheltered from all sides, so no one but my father could see who was coming and going.
I open his office door.
Mara steps inside first, looking all around her.
I follow her in.
The office has been destroyed. Books torn down from the shelves, their pages ripped out and scattered all around. The desk hacked to pieces with a hatchet. The artwork smashed where it hung on the wall. Even the sofa and chairs slashed open, stuffing hanging out like entrails.
Mara stares, mouth open.
Hesitantly, she approaches the desk, drawing her fingertip across its scarred and broken top, leaving a trail in the dust.
“Did you do this?” she asks.
“Yes. The night my father died.”
“Did you … were you the one who killed him?”
“No. That’s why I was angry. He was gone, with too many things left unsaid and unanswered.”
“What happened to him?”
“He had a degenerative kidney disease. I knew it was coming, but it happened sooner than I expected. Then I was angry at myself. There’s no closure from the dead.”
Mara gazes at the photographs hung on the wall, the images distorted by the shattered glass in each frame.
Unerringly, she finds the one of my father. He’s standing on a windswept hilltop in New Zealand, wearing his hunting jacket, his rifle over his shoulder. His black hair and beard immaculately groomed despite the rustic setting.
Mara is drawn to the figure next to him. A man with hair and eyes as dark as my father’s, but a much more youthful face.
“Is that …” Mara squints through the spiderweb of glass. “Do you have a brother?”
“That’s my uncle. He was twelve years younger than my father. Almost as close to me in age.”
Mara turns, understanding that this photograph is the reason I brought her in here.
“He looks just like you.”
“That’s not the only thing we had in common.”
She crosses the detritus blanketing the floor, her boots crunching on splinters of wood and glass. Sinking down onto the slashed sofa, she says, “Tell me everything.”
I sit next to her, my weight causing her to slide closer until her thigh rests against mine.
“My uncle Ruben was the only person my father ever loved. My grandparents had him accidentally, late in life. He was wild and unruly, and they didn’t know what to do with him. My father was the only person he would listen to, at least some of the time.”