Swim Deep - Page 114

I used the garage entrance to access the house. In the kitchen, I came to a halt. Sunlight streamed through the terrace windows. Outside, the cerulean blue lake flashed and winked at me. The aspens were beginning to turn in the cooler weather. A breeze gusted through the trees. The leaves rustled and glinted like thousands of fluttering gold coins against the backdrop of the blue lake and dark green pines.

Inside the house, that soft, watchful silence cloaked everything.

(Les Jumeaux isn’t a hell. It’s your home, Anna. We carry the hell inside us.)

I walked farther into the room. In the sink, I saw Evan’s and my coffee cups. It was like finding artifacts that had survived a catastrophe… like the perfectly preserved loaf of bread I’d seen once at a museum exhibition of excavated objects that had survived the volcanic disaster of Pompeii.

It hit me then. The grief. I braced my hands on the sink and wept.

But I’d set some kind of internal limit on my pain. I had a lifetime to cry.

And only hours to exact revenge.

The truth had come to me gradually, in snippets. It hadn’t really coalesced entirely in my head until I stood in front of the bathroom mirror in Evan’s and my old bedroom, gripping a pair of sharp scissors in my hand.

Maybe the truth had formed incompletely at first because of my denial of it: my refusal to face the ugly truth, my determined rejection of Elizabeth’s nightmare message or her voice in my head.

Somehow, I knew that I would never be able to be rid of her, nor would I ever accept her, if I didn’t do this thing.

I wore a dive suit without the hood, my long, blonde hair spilling around the black neoprene. My face looked pale, but calm in the mirror as I grabbed a handful of hair. I lopped it off at my shoulder.

When the last long strands fell to the floor and I’d donned a dive hood, I examined myself closely in the mirror.

I looked at the result of centuries of interbreeding. No wonder Elizabeth and I looked so much alike. For a split second, my smooth, flesh and blood face disappeared, only to be replaced by a skull in a dive hood. I started in shock, and my own face resolved over the bones and bleached white teeth.

Somehow, I knew I’d seen an exact replica of her skull. Not only that, I’d seen through my own flesh, like an X-ray. It would be how I appeared one day, when my body lay moldering in the ground. I’d seen her skeleton, the very foundation of the living, breathing, vibrant, flesh and blood woman she’d once been.

(Light from my darkness.

Swim deep, darling.)

Tears filled my eyes. She’d been so alone in that cold, wet world for so long.

“It’ll be over soon, Elizabeth,” I whispered.

It had all settled in my head now.

I had realized, at some point in my dazed consciousness in the past few days, that Madaster had said something revealing in that tortured, bewildering conversation we’d held in his tower retreat. He’d asked me if Evan knew about the tunnel between the Twins.

Tunnel. Not hallway. Not corridor, as Evan had called it.

He’d seemed smug when I said that Evan had mentioned sealing the corridor between the two mansions. He’d been satisfied to hear that Evan didn’t know about the other passageway that joined the Twins.

Because now I understood, there had been not one, but two passages between the houses.

I was very careful to remain hidden on my trek across the beach to the boathouse. I didn’t want Noah to spy me from his tower, so I stayed behind the giant granite boulders along the beach until I reached the dock.

Noah might have spotted me as I hurried down the dock a moment later, hauling my dive equipment. But I was exposed for only half a minute. And I couldn’t be anxious about that now. Not when I’d decided what needed to be done.

Besides, given his condition, Noah no longer could visit the scene of his worst crimes. I realized how it must have been a festering thorn in his side for the past few years, the knowledge of that deep, secret place beneath Les Jumeaux, and his inability to access it.

Excellent job, Lorraine.

Grandmother. Cousin. Ancestor.

It’s dangerous to dive alone, especially for someone of my limited expertise. But it’s crazy to cavern dive alone. Some people might have said I was acting suicidal. I was positive I wasn’t, though. I knew, because I’d thought about ending it all in the past few days, when I’d looked into Evan’s eyes, and wondered what I would do if I found out I’d married my own biological father.

Slept with him.

Tags: Beth Kery Romance
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