AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I had no idea who was on the phone and I had no idea what bargain they struck, but I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
Then the boxes began to arrive.
First it was one.
Then two.
All from a kosher deli in Chicago. ARussiankosher deli.
I only saw the cardboard boxes, never the contents or any packing slips. There certainly wasn’t any pastrami in the fridge and the only bagels I could find came from the local grocery store. Delivered day or night by a portly man in a white, unmarked box truck, there was no pattern to their arrival. Sometimes it would only be one box. Sometimes a couple.
I asked, of course. Leander refused to answer. After that, he didn’t let me get within five feet of any box before he whisked it away to a different part of the house. He made sure I couldn’t follow him by locking one or more doors behind him, as if he thought I would stoop to picking the locks… which, I totally would have if he ever left the house and gave me the opportunity.
Failing to get an answer from my husband, I called Misha with my inquiry. He was as clueless as I was, or claimed to be. I knew better than to try to ask Sergei. Even if he knew what was going on, he’d never say and I didn’t want to weaken my standing in his eyes by not knowing something going on with my own “partner.”
So, I did what any suspicious spouse would do — I told Leander I was working late and then snuck into the house like a burglar to catch him in the act.
The first thing that hit me was the smell — woodsmoke and meat. Normally, those types of smells would have been fine if Leander was the backyard barbecue kind of a guy. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t even close.
Not to mention, the smell was coming from the library, which was even more disconcerting.
Creeping around the corner, I found him sitting on the floor in front of a roaring fire. There were half a dozen open boxes scattered around him. Beyond the scent of something odd roasting, the next thing I smelled was blood. Alotof blood. That copper smell was absolutely unmistakable.
I didn’t bother hiding my presence anymore or waste time trying to ask questions. Marching over to one of the boxes, I ripped the lid off of the styrofoam cooler inside, putting an end to the secrecy bullshit he claimed to hate so much.
Inside the cooler lay a pair of hearts.
I wanted to believe they were bison hearts for some new bizarre recipe, or pig hearts for God knew what. But the size, the shape, even the number of pulmonary veins all stared back at me, indisputable proof.
They were human hearts.
“Leander.” I carried the box over to him, about to ask more when I saw he was already holding something. At first, I thought it was a plum. But there was no mistaking the shape.
It was another heart, only it wasmuchsmaller than the ones in my box.
The cooler dropped to the floor a moment before I sank to my knees next to him. The smoke curling out of the fireplace seemed to have a stranglehold on me; I could barely force out my next words. “Leander, what did you do?”
He was staring at the flames, but his fingers curled instinctively around the little heart, as if I was going to snatch it away. His dark lashes fluttered and I thought he might say something, but he didn’t. In fact, he did the opposite by pressing his lips together even harder.
“Children?” I breathed the word, still struggling to believe it myself.
He didn’t blink or turn his head. Other than that one protective gesture, he didn’t acknowledge my presence at all. His silence was infuriating.
“Leander!” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard, hoping to jar him out of whatever Hell his mind was trapped in.
His gaze dropped to his hand. Uncurling his fingers, he stared at the heart for a minute before flinging it into the fire. It landed amongst the charred logs, popping and hissing.
“It had to be done,” he said, so quietly I almost missed it.
I shook my head, refusing to believe what was in front of me despite a literal pile of evidence. “This isn’t you.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is.”
“It can’t be, becauseyou’renot you. You’re not thinking clearly.”
