“I have?”
“You were knackered, girl. Your body needed time to rest after what you’ve been through.” She rolled back the sheets and pulled them from the bed. “Are you strong enough to sit on this chair if I help you up? I need to change the sheets.”
I moved my feet and, despite the pain in my side, was able to move them off the side of the bed. The woman held my arm and helped me stand. I gasped a little as the pain sliced through my stab wound. When it faded, I let her help me to the chair. It was the chair Arthur had sat in when he came to see me. At least I thought he had been to see me. Maybe I had imagined that too.
“I’m Betsy.” The woman gave me a devastatingly beautiful smile. “Betsy Adley.” My eyebrows must have risen as she spoke her last name, because she winked and said, “Arthur’s cousin.”
“Oh.” I shook her offered hand. “Cheska.”
“Oh, I know who you are.” I wasn’t sure what that meant or how to read the tone of her words. My head was pounding and I could barely focus. “Here,” Betsy said. I looked up to see two tablets and a glass of water in her hand. “Your medicine from the doctor. For the pain.” I numbly took them from her, swallowing them down and praying they kicked in quickly.
Betsy stripped the bed and re-dressed it. She kept glancing my way as she did. When she was done, she helped me back to the bed, plumping pillows to place at my back so I could sit upright. I felt as if I was in some kind of awful dream. High waves of emotions kept hitting me like boulders. Sadness, anger, then numbness … numbness … I treasured the numbness. I reached out as hard as I could, and I held on to that numbness. Then I thought of Arthur. I glanced down at my hand and thought I could feel his palm against mine. His phantom touch.
My gaze drifted to the door.
“He’s not here,” she said. I looked at her. “Everyone’s out.” Betsy handed me a tray that I hadn’t noticed on a small coffee table near a grand fireplace. Tomato soup and buttered bread. “I was letting it cool a bit.” She laid the tray on my lap. “Try and eat a little. You must be starving.”
But my stomach rolled as my mind forced me back to my friends in the spa, to the video of my dad and Hugo. My body jerked and I gasped for breath. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I couldn’t breathe!
The bed dipped, and Betsy met my eyes. “Breathe.” Betsy took a deep breath, and I followed her action. My racing pulse started to slow and the vice that held my lungs in a grip began to loosen. I breathed in and out, mirroring Betsy until the panic subsided and left only rawness in my chest. “Eat, Cheska. You need your strength.”
I stared down at the tomato soup, and all I saw was blood. The crimson blood of Freya, the blood of Arabella … Dad and Hugo slumped on chairs. “I can’t get them all out of my head,” I whispered, my eyes glazing and my mind taking me back to that place again. But the deeper I fell into the memories, the more I felt something within me building. Walls. Walls that were stacking on each other at breakneck speed, trying to block the memories out, trying to prevent me from splintering apart.
“I know,” Betsy said with understanding. “I’ve been in a similar position myself.” She shrugged. “I mean being there when someone you loved was killed. Right in front of you.”
“You have?” I asked, at the same time as feeling was as though I were being anaesthetised. Every breath in my lungs and every pump of blood through my heart took away the sting of the emotions that had been wrecking me, devouring me, slowly killing me.
Shock. It had to be shock. I didn’t care. I just didn’t want to feel anything right now.
“My step-mum,” Betsy said, bringing my focus back to her. She got up and poured me another glass of water from the decanter on the bedside table. I drained the glass again. “Killed a while back by an Adley enemy.”
“In front of you?”
“Right in front of me.” Betsy barely flinched as she said that. She pushed back my hair, then gathered it in her hand and tied it back into a bun to keep it from my face. “It’s all fresh for you. And this kind of event isn’t the norm in your life. But, from someone who sees this kind of thing more often, it gets easier. Not what happened to them, but the loss. The ability to move on.”
“It does?” I asked. But I was already starting to feel very little. As though the pain was being caged away into a deep part of me for safekeeping. Secured with a padlock until I was ready to set it free.
But when I thought of Arthur’s face, I felt it all. I felt every emotion I had ever experienced with him—love, and happiness and frustration and pain. But mostly need. A burning, consuming, all-encompassing need. Everything inside me was numb, safe behind high walls … except him.
He was the gatekeeper protecting their door.
Betsy sat down on Arthur’s chair and I held onto that need for Arthur. To his safe harbour.
“Eat, darling.” I robotically dipped the spoon into the soup and ate. I barely tasted it. The whole time, I felt Betsy watching me. I wasn’t sure if it was with suspicion or concern.
When I was finished, she took the tray away, leaving me alone for only a few minutes before she came back in. I heard her talking to someone in the hallway. My heart immediately kicked into a sprint at the thought of it being Arthur. I wanted to see him. I needed to see him. He made me feel safe. Strangely, he had always made me feel safe.
But when Betsy came back in, she was alone. She had a glass of wine in her hand. She sat on Arthur’s seat and studied me. “So,” she said, after a few strained minutes. “You’re her.” It wasn’t a question, rather a statement of fact.
“Her?” I asked, swallowing the shiver of unease that stirred inside me at the strange comment.
Betsy’s lip kicked up at the side. “The one who keeps a morsel of red in Arthur’s constant shroud of darkness. At least that’s how Vinnie puts it. As out-there as it is, I thought it was pretty fucking poetic.”
“I … I don’t understand.”
Betsy sipped her red wine. “I know you don’t. Because he would never tell you. Because my stubborn, self-sacrificing cousin would never take what he needed or wanted. Instead, he’d allow himself to be consumed by evil, day by day, to spare you, until there’s nothing left of him but a soulless ghost of who he once was, filled with only sin and murder and death.”
“Arthur?” I asked, trying to decipher the riddles she was speaking in.
The door opened, cutting me off, and I held my breath. But a blond-haired woman came through, closely followed by a stunning Afro-Caribbean woman holding her hand. They were both dressed in black three-piece suits, both wearing high heels. Even through my disappointment, I couldn’t help but think how striking they were together.
They stopped at the end of the bed. “Vera,” Betsy said, indicating the blonde. “And her girlfriend, Ronnie.”
“Hello,” I said, wondering who they were and why they had come in to see me.
“Well, you’re even prettier in person, and that’s with your face being in this sorry state,” Vera said.
Ronnie shrugged. “I get why he’s so hung up on her,” she said to Vera, placing her chin on Vera’s shoulder to study me some more.