MARRIED TO MY SISTER'S KILLER

The first time her husband touched her throat, Elise Morgan watched her sister die. It lasted a heartbeat. A white flash behind her eyes, the wet scrape of a breath that wouldn’t come, two hands clawing at empty air, and then a dark so complete it felt like falling down a well. She wrenched away so hard her hip cracked against the dressing table. Crystal bottles chimed like nervous guests. “Careful.” Adrian Vale caught her arm, his grip warm and absolutely steady. “Elise.” He had only been unfastening the pearls. The Vale pearls, heavy as a debt, worn because the contract said she would. His fingers had brushed her pulse, and the world had split open like a rotten board. “Let go of me.” He did, at once. That unsettled her more than a fight would have. The bedroom of Vale House was a vast, hushed thing of dark wood and old silk. Rain ticked at the tall windows. Roses scented the air, and under them something colder, like a coin held on the tongue. Adrian studied her with the same unnerving patience he’d shown through the ceremony, while she promised to love, honor and cherish the man she had spent three years trying to prove a murderer. His collar was open, his tie hanging loose. In the lamplight he looked like sin that had learned to read. “You’re shaking.” “I’m tired.” “It’s been a long day.” A long day. Elise nearly laughed. Three years ago, Hannah Morgan had walked out of a bookshop in the rain and never come home. Two years ago, the police found her blood in a derelict building, declared her dead, and shut the file. No body. No arrest. Only Adrian Vale’s fingerprints on a broken window, and a witness who had seen Hannah climb into a car with him. The Vales did not get charged. The Vales got lawyers, and doors that stayed closed. So Elise had knocked on the one door left: eighteen months as Mrs. Adrian Vale, with his archives and his servants and his secrets laid out like a banquet. In return he got a wife for appearances, and a reason for needing one he had never explained. She had made a deal with the devil. She just hadn’t counted on his eyes, the gray of river ice just before it breaks. “Get some sleep,” he said. “Is that an order?” “A suggestion.” “Do people usually follow your suggestions?” One corner of his mouth lifted. It was a very good mouth, and she resented noticing. “Only when I know what’s best for them.” Elise turned her back, because it was that or slap him, and tore at her earrings. The second post snagged and dragged across her palm. She hissed. “You’re bleeding.” “It’s nothing.” He was already behind her. She felt the heat of him along her spine, cedar and rain and something darker, and her body, the traitor, had clearly not been told she hated him. His gaze dropped to the red line on her palm, and his face changed. His breath caught. For one strange moment, Adrian Vale looked afraid. “Don’t.” She snatched her hand to her chest. “I don’t need your help.” She could not tell him why. She could not say she had known the place where Hannah died: glass overhead, rain drumming, broken clay pots, the green rot of the burned-out Vale greenhouse upriver that no one had entered in decades. She had never told anyone about it. It lived only in Hannah’s last voicemail, eleven seconds long. Lise, I found it. Glass and roses. The old greenhouse. Don’t tell— Then static. Adrian looked at her a long moment. “Very well.” He walked into the bathroom, and the shower came on. Elise braced both hands on the dressing table. Beside her earring and a drop of her own blood lay something that hadn’t been there a minute ago. A small black envelope, heavy paper, smelling faintly of roses. Inside was a photograph. Hannah, laughing in front of a greenhouse in the yellow cardigan she’d worn the week she vanished. She looked so alive that Elise’s throat ached. On the back, in a slanted hand: HE REMEMBERS EVERYTHING. In the corner, small orange digits. A date. Four days after the one the police had given for Hannah’s death. A floorboard creaked behind her. Adrian stood in the bathroom doorway, shirt unbuttoned, hair damp, steam curling at his back. He did not ask where she had found it. He looked at Hannah’s laughing face, and something in his own cracked open, raw as a wound. “Where did you get that?” “She’s my sister.” “I know who she is.” “This was taken four days after she died.” “Your sister,” Adrian said, “was not dead four days after that photograph was taken.” The room tilted. He took a small braided ring from his pocket, and Elise’s heart stopped. Their mother’s gift for Hannah’s eighteenth birthday. Hannah had never taken it off. “Where did you get that?” “From the last place I saw her.” She caught his wrist, bleeding hand and all. His pulse hammered under her fingers. His palm turned slowly upward, and in its center lay a smear of her blood. “Elise.” His voice had gone rough. “Let go.” Too late. His other hand closed over hers, and the room fell away. Rain hammered a glass roof. Hannah was on her knees among shattered pots, one hand pressed to her stomach, something dark welling between her fingers. A man stood behind her, tall, his face lost in shadow. “Hannah, please,” Elise heard herself whisper, and it was not her voice. It was Adrian’s, scraped raw with terror. Hannah lifted her head. “Don’t let him find her.” A hand reached down. A sharp crack split the air. Then Hannah looked straight through Adrian’s eyes and into Elise’s, as if she had always known someone would be watching. Her lips shaped three words. He is not the only one. The vision shattered. Elise fell forward into heat and linen and the frantic thud of a heart that was not her own. For one second his arms closed around her, hard and sheltering, and she breathed him in. Then he set her away as though she’d burned him. He was white to the lips. Not confused. Terrified. “You were there when she died.” He didn’t deny it. “Did you kill her?” “I don’t remember.” His hand opened. The ring was gone. “I remember finding her. I remember the blood. I remember someone screaming. After that, nothing.” “You’re lying.” “Perhaps.” “You’re a monster.” He took one step toward her, and she flinched, and he stopped as if she had struck him. “When I touch the blood of someone who has died, I see their last moments. Sometimes the truth. Sometimes only what someone needed me to believe.” “You’re insane.” “Wouldn’t that be easier?” He looked away. “Hannah’s is the only death I’ve never seen clearly. Every time I try, I lose something.” “What?” “Memories. I remember her laugh. I remember the last time she said my name. I no longer remember whether I was trying to save her or kill her.” He crossed to the door. “Get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.” “You don’t get to walk out after that.” Her pulse still beat where his fingers had been, and not entirely, God help her, from fear. He looked back over his shoulder. “Then ask yourself why I married you.” “I married you for answers.” “No.” A faint, grim shadow of a smile. “You married me because I allowed it.” The door closed. His footsteps faded. Alone, Elise tilted the photograph toward the chandelier. The women in her family had always had a touch of the knowing, Gran called it, a shiver before the phone rang. Small things. Nothing had ever dragged her into another person’s death. Blood called to blood. Beneath the orange date, a line of faint writing swam into view. ELISE, IF YOU’RE READING THIS, HE HAS ALREADY FOUND YOU. Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. You need to get out of that house. Then a second. Your husband isn’t the man who killed Hannah. Then a third, white on black. He’s the reason she’s still alive.