Arthur bends toward it and pauses, seeing that streak of cinder on the page. He laughs, harshly, and for the first time a shard of pain pierces his weird elation. “Give it up,” he says. “She’s not coming back, this time.”
It is at precisely this moment, as if the House itself arranged it so, that he hears the distant thud of a fist on his front door.
When someone crosses onto Starling land, Arthur knows it. It’s simply a part of being Warden, a melding of land and house and body that leaves none of those things entirely distinct from the other. But he hadn’t felt the draft of the gates opening, the faint tick of a foreign heartbeat.
Perhaps the House hid her from him; perhaps she’s been here so many times, sweating and bleeding and breathing, that the land no longer greets her as a trespasser, but as a part of itself.
Arthur stumbles twice on the stairs. He pauses before the front door, panting, feeling desperate and helpless and hungry and profoundly annoyed, the way he always does around her.
She knocks again. He is aware that he shouldn’t answer it, that it will only make everything harder.
He answers it.
Opal is standing on his threshold, looking up at him with the same wary, weary expression she wore the first time he found her outside his gates. He has a maudlin impulse to memorize her: the canny silver of her eyes and the crooked front teeth, the lunar white of her skin and the startling black of her freckles, like constellations in negative. There are swollen red rings around each of her wrists, and two of the knuckles on her right hand are split.
Arthur shouldn’t reach for that hand. He shouldn’t turn it in his and run his thumb over the crusted ruin of her knuckles, thinking of Elizabeth Baine’s busted lip and feeling a swell of strange, possessive pride. He certainly shouldn’t bring the knuckles to his lips.
He hears a quick inhalation. Opal’s eyes are dark, uncertain. “Are you sober?”
“Yes.” He wonders if that’s true. He hasn’t had a drop of actual alcohol since the day Jasper broke in, but he feels weightless, unmoored from himself, and the lights have a fevered, splintered look he associates with cheap whiskey. The entire House feels alive around him, a presence that pulses beneath his bare feet.
Opal doesn’t look convinced. Her eyes flick to her hand, still held in his, then back to his face. Her chin lifts. “Are you going to kick me out again?”
It’s supposed to sound like a challenge, a mocking gauntlet, but there’s a roughness to her voice that Arthur doesn’t understand.
“I should,” he says, honestly, but he doesn’t let go of her hand. He reminds himself firmly that there’s no room for wishes or wants in his life, that every time he’s caved to his own childish desires it’s come at a terrible cost. That he has what he needs, and it’s enough.
It’s just that, sometimes, God help him, he wants more.
A tremor moves through Opal. He follows it down her arm, up to her face. In the split second before she looks away, he sees her unmasked. He sees her terror and desire and bitter disappointment, the particular desolation of a lonely person who thought, briefly, that they might not be. Already she is steeling herself against him, like a girl bracing against the cold.
This, Arthur finds, he cannot tolerate. His life so far has been nothing but a wound on hers. She wears the scars well—she’s made her life into an act of defiance, a laugh in the dark, a smile with bloodied teeth—but he refuses to add even one more.
He opens the door wide and pulls her inside.
I shouldn’t have come here, but I did. I shouldn’t go inside, but I do. The house is quiet tonight, and darker than I’ve ever seen it. No candles or lamps sit on the sills, no lights flicker to life overhead. Even the moonlight falling through the windows seems muted and obscure, a gaze averted.
Arthur reaches around me to shut the door and a last rush of perfume slides into the hallway. The vines on the house are blooming—I saw them when I climbed the steps, lavish cascades of flowers that turn the night thick and sweet. I always thought wisteria grew best on the riverbank, but maybe Starling House makes its own rules.
Arthur doesn’t step away when the door latches. We stand facing each other, unspeaking, letting everything between us—the confessions and recriminations, the lies and betrayals—slip away into the dark, until all that’s left is what comes next.
It’s not something I need. It’s something from that second, more dangerous list, the one I thought I burned eleven years ago. It’s something I want, and the knowledge makes me feel reckless and raw, a soft-bodied animal running too fast through the woods. It’s not cold, but I’m shivering.