Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(93)

“I loved you,” I whisper.

“I know. But take it from me, love alone can’t save you in the end.”

Abruptly I feel more shifting in the dark corridors of my mind. Memories I swear I didn’t stir up, and yet . . . I look up sharply. Vero is watching me, her look cunning.

“Stop,” I tell her.

“Can’t. I’m you, remember?”

“I’m not ready for this.”

“For what? The smell of smoke? The heat of flames. Fire, fire, everywhere. Why’d your husband burn your house, Nicky? Why? And better yet, when did Thomas get so good with flames?”

“Shut up!”

But she won’t. Vero shoves away from the table. She marches across the room. Her dress is gone. Her skin is gone. Now she is nothing but decaying flesh, marching closer and closer, reaching out with her bony hands.

“Thomas,” she singsongs. “Handsome Thomas. Caring Thomas. Thomas who’s always been there. Is it your past you’re trying to escape, Nicky? Or is it the man you married?”

Her skeletal hands reach my neck, scrape across my collarbone.

Abruptly, the door to the tower bedroom crashes open behind me. But I don’t turn. I keep my eyes on Vero’s grinning skull. Because I already know I don’t want to see who’s standing there.

“What have you done, Nicky?” Vero whispers to me. “Who else do you have to fear?”


* * *



I JERK AWAKE with a gasp. My head is on fire; my entire body aches. For a second, instinctively, reflexively, I lock down each muscle. Willing myself not to move. Old habits, back from the days when you never knew who else might be present. Waiting to hurt you next.

A first careful inhale. Followed by a long, slow exhale. I listen, registering voices, coming through the wall, from the room next door. I search closer, for the sound of another person’s presence nearby. Only when I’m absolutely, completely convinced that I’m alone do I finally open my eyes, allow my muscles to relax.

The room is dark. I can see a thin streak of light on the far wall, coming from the cracked doorway between the two hotel rooms. Bits and pieces return to me. My current hideaway in the form of a nondescript New Hampshire hotel room. The disastrous meeting with Marlene Bilek, who turned out to not be my mom, because of course, my real mom died of an overdose years ago, before I even escaped from the dollhouse. Someone I once looked up to, only to forget again, because what was the point? I was never the princess with a magical queen. My entire life, I’ve only ever been in the service of an evil witch.

My eyes burn. Stupid tears, I think as I roll over, eye the second bed. It’s empty, as I’d suspected. Tessa must be in the adjacent room, talking to Wyatt.

They are probably rehashing the case. Trying to understand why I went to the trouble to track down Marlene Bilek, when she isn’t my mother. Why I cling to a quilt handcrafted by a woman I’d never met.

How I ended up with Vero’s fingerprints in my Audi.

I don’t know the answer to the last question. It confuses me as much as it does them. As for the first two issues . . . I guess I was just trying to keep Vero alive, shore up her memory. Our imaginary visits weren’t enough to ease my pain, so I went to the next step of establishing a tangible connection in the form of her mother.

Maybe, if I could make Vero real enough, her family real enough, then she wouldn’t be gone and I wouldn’t have to feel so guilty.

Because twenty-two years later, I still haven’t figured out the business of living. I survive, I suppose. I exist. I even got married and moved all around the country. But was that truly living or just another form of running? All those nights I woke up screaming. All those memories I suppressed time and time again, until my mind was a mixed-up mess way before the concussions began.

I got out of the dollhouse but never escaped the past. The weight of my own guilt, a skill set I never learned? I don’t know. I feel like I want to be something more. I want to do something more. But I don’t know how to get there.

I could run again, I contemplate now, curled up on the hotel room bed. Pick out a new state, new town, new identity. It’s what I’ve done before. Especially the first two years after my escape. Dragging Thomas from place to place, name to name, often on a weekly basis. Less a strategic bid for freedom than a clear case of hysteria. Thomas had begged me to slow down. At least try out a new location before casting it into the wind. At least pick one name, one identity, so we had some shot at building a normal life.

Under his guidance, we’d done one last professional do-over, paying good money for proper IDs, vetted history. We’d become Thomas and Nicole Frank, identities he swore would keep us safe. And yet still, every two years I’d had to move again. Because the weight of November still became too much.

Maybe I can take up drinking seriously this time, I ponder now. Brain trauma be damned. I’ll throw back scotch, burn out these terrible memories once and for all. I’ll tell myself I’m free and happy and independent. Fuck Thomas; f*ck Vero. I will escape both of them. I will be a woman who has it all.

A woman who is no one at all.

Except that’s not completely true, I find myself thinking. More shadows, shifting and lurching in the back of my head. The taste of dirt. The feel of earth giving way beneath my fingertips. And that moment, that one savage moment when I realized I had done it. I was out; I was alive. I was free of the dollhouse.