Page 83 of Haunted

“I would have asked you to come get me.”

“I would have. You know I would have, baby,” I say.

“I know. That’s why I couldn’t ask you.” He turns to me. His eyes are bright but steady. He lifts his hand to my face and traces my jaw with the back of his fingers, his gaze modestly lowered, and something about the gesture is so deliberate and practiced that I understand he’s giving me something he’s been preparing. “Main tumse pyar kartha hoon,” he says.

“What was that?”

“It’s Hindi for I love you. I’ve always wanted to say that, and I’ve been saving it up for you.”

Holy shit.

He’s been saving it up for me. For me. Every inch of my skin aches with longing. I pick him up in a full-on bridal carry and even though he’s heavy as fuck, I don’t care. He’s been saving that up for me. I deposit him on the bed and kiss him until neither of us can breathe.

When we surface, he’s laughing and wiping his eyes. “I want to take you out,” I say. “On a proper date. Celestina’s. I’ll make a reservation.”

“Celestina’s?” He raises an eyebrow. “That’s the nice Italian place on Magnolia, isn’t it? With the candles and the tablecloths?”

“You deserve candles and tablecloths.”

“Lance Broussard, are you courting me?”

“I am courting the hell out of you.”

We shower. We dress. He puts on a blue shirt he’s borrowed from me and rolls the sleeves to his elbows, and the sight of him in my clothes—chosen this time, not borrowed out of necessity—makes me feel like I’ve swallowed the sun. I put on a clean button-down and check my hair three times, and he catches me and teases me, and I don’t care.

Somewhere in the middle of checking my hair, I catch a sound in the stairwell—a scuff, a footstep, a pause. The back of my neck prickles. I go still and listen for a second before I dismiss it. Just the building settling, or a neighbor. I tell myself I’m being paranoid. I fix my collar, and I don’t think about it again.

He opens the front door first and stops.

I see it over his shoulder. Someone has taped a printout to the outside of our door. It’s the Excelsior photograph—the one of us on the gymnasium cot—but someone has drawn vivid red X’s over our eyes in something heavy and waxy, like lipstick. There’s a slash across Jonny’s neck in the same red, like someone’s taken a virtual knife to it. I’ve got a matching slit throat. Underneath, in letters cut from magazines: YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO WARNINGS.

I stare at the words. YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO WARNINGS. I have heard those exact words before. Not on a printout. In person, in Nash’s voice, late at night in our kitchen, when he’d had too much to drink and wanted me to understand that my disobedience was going to have consequences.

Jonny reaches for it. I grab his hand before he can touch it. “Don’t. Fingerprints.”

“What the fuck!” he says. “What kind of—”

“I’m calling the police,” I say.

“Is this—do you think this is about Alice?” Jonny asks. “About Rex? Someone warning us to stop digging?”

He’s thinking about the murder. Of course he is. That’s the most recent threat in his life. But I know exactly who wrote that, and it has nothing to do with Alice Cadwalader or Rex Harlow or the fires.

“We’ll talk about it inside,” I say. “Come back in. Don’t touch the door.”

Inside, I lock the door and throw the deadbolt and go window to window, checking the latches. I hear myself doing it out loud. Front approach covered. No line of sight from the street. Secondary exit through the kitchen fire escape. It is the flat, clipped inventory of a man securing a position, and I can’t make myself stop. It’s a studio apartment. There’s no place for a hard cover position unless I move the fridge enough for him to wedge himself on the far side of it from the door.

I turn to him. “The gun safe’s in the closet, behind the winter coats,” I say. “Combination’s one-one-zero-four. You need it, you rack the slide, you point center mass, you don’t hesitate. If anyone breaches that door who isn’t me, you don’t ask questions, you don’t negotiate—”

“Wait.” He stops me with a hand on my chest. “Eleven-oh-four. That’s my birthday. Since when do you have a gun?”

“Every Marine is a rifleman.” I say it the way you’d say every car has an engine. “Doesn’t matter what your job is. I enlisted at seventeen and I have requalified with a rifle every single year since, whether I was in a firefight or doing payroll in an air-conditioned office in San Diego.”

“And you keep one. In the apartment. Where we live.”

“In a safe, with a lock on it, unloaded, magazine stored separate.” I go back to the window. “It comes out twice a year at the range on Corliss Road and the rest of the time it sits in the dark and does nothing at all.”

He is quiet for a moment.