The Love He Killed

CHAPTER_4:The Untouched Bridal Bed

The baby isn’t Adrian’s.

The sentence lay on the back of the photograph like a blade left clean.

I read it one time.

The little boy in the picture had Adrian's dark eyes, angry mouth, and quiet, serious voice, but it had been tamed by childhood. The story would have been believed before it even began.

But someone had spoken the truth before the lie could be told.

Adrian’s child wasn’t the child.

Nathan's watch was in the space behind the mantel clock, cold and heavy, the gold face broken in the middle. The hands pointed to twelve seventeen. A strange time to be kept. Too precise to mean nothing.

The folded letter lay beside it, sealed with black wax.

I should have tidied everything up and waited till morning.

So I broke the seal.

The paper made a dry rustling sound. The handwriting was hurried, uneven in parts, but strong enough to carry fear. Not for Adrian. It was not for Vivienne.

It was for my dad, Elias.

The first line stuck in my throat.

My father had known Nathan. Not as an adversary. Not as a man who'd ruined him. He had written to him like a man running to the last honest man he could find.

At first, I read only parts. My eyes moved faster than my mind could keep up with.

Valiant Holdings.

Sterling accounts of

Vivienne.”

The child

A clandestine transfer.

A meeting that should not have been.

My father was not the monster of Adrian’s tale.

He had been the man Nathan ran to when the real monster grinned too sweetly to be suspected.

My legs gave way and I sank down on the bridal bed.

The mattress barely sagged under me. Cold, untouched, smooth sheets. Earlier, there had been roses strewn across the coverlet. Some were already bruised at the edges. Their sweetness seemed unnatural now. Too soft for a room of traps.

The wedding bed hurt as I looked at it.

It had been dressed for a wedding night that would not be. Two pillows, two glasses, two folded towels, two names linked by a lie. All was coupled but the marriage.

Adrian hadn’t been coming to me, because he’d never meant to.

The bed had not waited for love.

It had been waiting for me to get it.

I laid Nathan’s letter on my lap and turned to the next page. There was a folded smaller note, thinner and older. The ink looked worn, but the word still hurts deeply.

Vivienne, Nathan wrote, wasn’t afraid of scandal. She was scared of blood. The child had a truth she couldn't pay for Adrian to know.

My pulse beat so hard that I could see my chest rising and falling.

The boy,

Not Adrian's.

Nathan's.

I looked again at the picture. The face I mistook for Adrian's was the brothers who hid behind the forbidden room. The eyes were Sterling, yes, but not necessarily Adrian's. The city wouldn't care about the distinction. Grief wouldn’t either, if it had already decided what it wanted to believe.

That was Vivienne's power. She didn't need to come up with a perfect lie. All she had to do was to put it in Adrian's wound.

A soft sound from the corridor.I stopped dead. The papers quivered in my hand.

There were no footsteps. No handle was turned. The house settled around me like a creature feigning sleep.

I moved fast then.

I gathered Nathan's letter, the photograph, the watch, the strip of paper, the brass key, and I looked around the suite for a hiding place. The wardrobe was an obvious choice. The drawers would be ransacked. The fireplace would leave ashes. Women who were frightened hid letters in penny dreadful in the pillow, and this house had too many people trained to find weakness.

I looked back at the bed. Unblemished." Too perfect. Too staged. I put my hand under the mattress.

At first, there was nothing to begin with except cool sheets, and the hard edge of the bed. Then my fingers touched something rough that didn't belong with the wedding roses and silk sheets. I got on my knees and pulled. It wasn't clothes or ribbon but a strip of black material came off.

Something hidden under the mattress frame, that only someone desperate enough to search the bed would see it. A tiny silver tag dangled on one side of the bed.

My skin turned cold.

The ribbon had been cut, not ripped. The edges were revealed. Below it was a narrow envelope, flattened against the wooden frame, and wrapped in waxed cloth.

My breath left my lungs.

Nathan had had one stashed away. Not in the library clock. Not in the forbidden chamber. Here. In the bridal chamber. The bed of my choice. The bed that Adrian refused to lie on. The thought made the room go round.

Did Adrian know? Vivienne had? Did my father? Or had the mansion itself been guarding Nathan's secret until the wrong bride became the right witness?

I pulled the envelope loose and sat back on my heels.

It was smaller than the first. Sealed, no name, no mark, nothing to show to whom it belonged. Inside was one document folded around a thin metal key and a hospital bracelet yellowed with age.

It was a little band. Not enough for a man. A bracelet for kids. It had the name, but all the letters had faded except for the last name. Sterling.

My hands began to shake.

Beneath was a paper. A record of birth.

Not all of them. Not official enough to prove anything on its own. A copy, perhaps stolen before it could vanish. The mother’s name was partly smudged, but the first letter was still readable.

V. The father's line had been so violently scored that the paper had torn.

Beneath the damage, however, one letter remained.

I put my hand to my mouth. N.

Adrian.

Nathan.

The room seemed to throb around me. The unmade bed, the watch in hiding, the child's photograph, my father's warning. Parts of a story Adrian had never read correctly. Parts of a trap set long before I ever stepped foot in the Sterling mansion.

Then I dawdled over the last thing in the packet. A little black button. No. No button. Listening device.

It hurt right in my stomach.

I glanced under the bed again, this time around more quickly. My fingers found another wire hidden beneath the frame, then a second device pressed into the carved wood near the headboard. New. Not ancient.

This one Nathan had not made. So had someone else. Someone had wired the bridal bed.

Someone had been listening while I found the key, while I opened the clock, while I touched Nathan's watch, while I read the truth that could ruin them all.

The roses on the bed suddenly seemed obscene.

I went to the fireplace, to hide the papers, but the lamp at the side of the bed flared once.

Then again,

The thing in my hand had a little glass eye, and it was red.

(Living) 0prttty &/Listening.

I gasped as a soft click sounded from inside the wall.

And somewhere outside the room my own breathing began to play itself back to me.