Shameful by May Dawson
33
Legacy
The following weeks passed strangely.Killian and I trained together every morning, and I teased West and Rhett to join us, but despite my best trash-talking, they never agreed.
One day after training, I took my usual walk around the island to pick flowers and be alone. It was one of the safe times when Lucas never seemed to start anything. The memory of the pain lancing through my body that one night, when he seemed to be trying to kill me, hauntedme.
How badly had he hurt another woman to get tome?
I’d found a basket and a pair of pruning shears in a gardening shed out back. When I’d tried to open it, West had come over, grumbling, and kicked the lock until it disintegrated. He’d swung the door open for me then tried to disappear again.
“Are you always watching over me, stalker?” I called after him, teasing, but he didn’t answer.
As soon as I said the words, I regretted them. I’d called Lucas stalkeronce.
And I had to wonder if the vampire would find me again, sooner or later.
I stopped on the dock to watch one of the Guard boats bouncing by to drop off food to the different packs. Then I continued on into the woods. The basket was heavier because I’d found a wildflower guide in the library and tucked the ancient book into the basket.
Filling the castle with flowers was silliness, maybe. I’d forced the guys to help me clean the place, because apparently they’d been comfortable sleeping in decades of old dust. But my flower-picking made me feel a little happier. I was going to take my happiness where I could find it. I’d always worried what people thought, but there was no one here to judge me. There were some bright spots to exile.
I knelt and clipped some queen anne’s lace. “I could’ve sworn there was flowering rush outhere.”
Maybe it had already wilted. The thought made me sad. I left my basket and moved away, searching for wildflowers hidden in the tall grass.
When I scooped up my basket, I realized it was full of small white flowers with red stamens. Flowering rush. I frowned, looking around. “West?”
But even if my grouch was lurking in the shadows, I doubted he’d clipped the blooms for me. The man definitely did not know his flowers.
A creeping sense of unease swept up my spine, and I shivered. I looked up, expecting to find the sky overcast because it had turned so cold but the sky was still sunny and bright.
I threw the basket over my arm and headed for the castle.
Then I saw her, standing at the edge of the forest, watching me. A little girl in old-fashioned clothes. Her white bow fluttered in the breeze above her yellow hair. She still clutched one flower in her hand, and she held it up and offered it to me solemnly.
Fear spiked in my stomach.
“Thank you,” I managed to say politely.
But I made my way back toward the castle, my legs almost shaky with adrenaline. I couldn’t stop feeling as if she might attack me from behind, suffocate me the way she had Killian.
But nothing happened.
I walked into the kitchen and set the basket on the table with shaking hands. Rhett was leafing through a cookbook, even though from what I could tell, we ate the same meals over andover.
“Let me know if you find any wild mushrooms out there,” Rhettsaid.
“You’d probably poison yourself,” West walked into theroom.
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
West’s gaze jumped to me, then his eyes widened. “You all right?”
“Do I look like I’ve seen a ghost? I have.” My voice trembled a little.
“Then I suppose we can look forward to another murder attempt tonight. Pancakes? If I die, I want to die with pancakes as my last meal.” Rhett jumped up and went to get apan.
I closed myeyes.
“I guess I should’ve stalked you,” West grumbled.
“It was a little girl,” I said. “The one from the portrait in thehall.”
“That’s our poltergeist?” Rhett propped his chin on his hand curiously. “Well, children are terrifying.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “You’ve really been here all these years and you’ve never seenher?”
“What do you mean, maybenot?”
“I’m not convinced she’s alone,” I said. “And I’m not convinced these ghosts areevil.”
“If they’re not evil, why are they so dedicated to killing us? Maybe I’m oversensitive, but that makes me thinkevil.”
“We can talk about it tonight,” I said, my voice cool even though my body still hummed with nervous energy. “Over dinner. Make enough for Killian, willyou?”
“I’ve told you before,” Rhett brandished the spatula at me. “Sulkers get cereal.”
“He’s not sulking. You two excludehim.”
“You’re right,” Rhett said. “We don’t like him. And you have notoriously bad taste in men, so you might want to listen tous.”
I pulled a face. “I sleep in your bed, Rhett. Don’t talk to me about bad taste.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but he grinned.
“You love me, Legs,” he said, then hummed to himself as he started whipping up dinner.
Later that week, Killian brought articles from the main island that he’d printed out, about the murdershere.
He read them out loud to me by candlelight in the library, and I shivered, expecting the ghosts to appear. West and Rhett lingered too, Rhett idly fingering through a book and pretending not to listen.
I wanted to make sense of the ghosts who lived withus.
I read passages of Teresa Kate’s diary. She wrote about her husband’s protectiveness tipping over into possessiveness. He’d been attacked on the street by a man whose business he’d driven to bankruptcy. Not even trusting the servants, he’d sent Teresa Kate and their children, Nathan and Lucy, to the island for their safety. It was supposed to be temporary.
But she’d been exiled here with them for two years.
He’d come to visit, ranting about their enemies, bringing expensive gifts, toys and books and art materials. She’d taught Nathan and Lucy to play that piano in the empty ballroom that never held a true party. She’d decorated for their birthdayshere.
The journal ended abruptly.
That was where the articles picked up. The photographs of their family were grainy black-and-white images. Nathan was ten in the last photograph, with sandy hair, and Lucy was a little girl with one of those big bows in her curls that seem to transcendtime.
Teresa Kate stood behind them, beautiful and unsmiling. They’d found her drowned in thepool.
Nathan had been almost to the door of the pool room. They’d found him lying in a pool of blood. With a start, I remembered a cracked tile in the pool room, close to the doors. Was that the exact spot where he had been murdered?
Lucy had been found upstairs, wrapped in a blanket, almost tenderly.
That night, when I went to bed, I looked out the window, almost expecting to see Lucy and Teresa Kate and Nathan walking in the garden. But all I could see was the overgrown grass and the waves pounding on the rocky beach below.
“What really happened to you?” I asked outloud.
And it was probably my imagination, but I could’ve sworn the darkness was listening.