Page 45 of Mortdale

Walk? Walk? What was I, his dog?

“Say please.”

“Willow. Walk,” he firmly yet quietly said, standing so close I could feel the cigarette smoke on my tongue.

He followed closely behind me, putting a hand to my lower back every time my shaking legs threatened to take a tumble and just roll my way to the Beyond. The touch was brief, careful. But sturdy enough that I felt the safest I’d felt in a long, long while.

“Where were you trying to go?” he asked.

“Home.”

“Darkheim is the other way around.”

“Your house is not my home.”

Truth was, I had no home. But his smart reply annoyed me. And how could I tell him his sister had just tried to kill me in simple terms? And oh, because she thinks I’m going to kill you, by the way.

“Why didn’t you turn when I called you?” he asked after a long while.

“Because I didn’t hear you calling.”

I heard him take a deep breath before he said, “Several times, Willow. Unless you’re deaf—”

“Yes, in fact I am.” Spinning around, I said, “Partially, at least. I started losing part of my hearing in my late adolescence. I can’t really hear things from too far of a distance.”

His gilded eyes paced between mine, and he slid just the smallest step closer to me. “Why haven’t you told me?”

“We haven’t exactly taken great leaps of trust in this partnership, have we?”

He took just half a step closer to me. “I need to know everything concerning you, Willow.”

Every breath suddenly scalded my trachea. “So you can find all the perfect ways to hurt me?”

He straightened to his full height, and I’d just noticed that since we’d met, he’d made himself look smaller in front of me. “So I can protect my wife.”

I hated the way he said it. Like it meant something. “Why? If I am out of the way, you can marry whoever you want.”

“With how things are going,” he said, coming to stand nearly chest to chest with me, “I’m sure you will clear the hurdle for me all on your own.”

“Then maybe you should have just let that thing kill me.”

“Maybe.” He pointed his head towards the edge of the woodland where the mansion was starting to peek through. “Walk.”

I glanced over his shoulder, and he slowly shook his head. “Don’t even try it.”

One second, both my feet were on the ground and the next, I was flying up on his shoulder. “I wasn’t going to do it!” I said, smacking my hands against his hard back. “This is really unnecessary.”

“I enjoy being excessive and outrageous,” he flatly said, continuing to carry me over his shoulder despite my long, lanky limbs poking him in all places.

He was all hard muscle under me, and his strong hand was firmly planted at the back of my thigh like it was just something we casually did. And I was acutely aware of the way he had flexed against me.

“How bad is it?” he gruffly asked.

“Not so bad. You’re kind of nice to lay on.”

“I meant your hearing.”

Right. “Most things just sound softer to me, muffled. More so with high-pitched sounds. Birds and little people especially—Piper’s on top of that list. If she’s not facing me, I miss some of her words. I also tend to get dizzy very quickly. Vitiligo, vertigo. They were really trying to do something there.”