He doesn’t look up. “What fucking time do you call this?”
“You’re lucky I’m here at all.” In grey corners of my mind, the email flashes, its margins hazy crimson. I slip my coat and bag off in slow motion, dropping them neatly on the floor before leaning back against the wall. Then I unzip my boots—it suddenly seems rude to still be wearing them. The casual nature of each movement calms my pulse a little; such a gulf lies between us. Three feet feels like three hundred miles.
All I could be bothered to pull on after my epic shower was a knitted, long-sleeved dress and a pair of panties, with long boots to keep out the winter chill. But it’s still cold in here, colder than Aeron looks in his nervous heat, and a flurry of goose bumps fight their way toward my nipples before pebbling the buds solid.
He picks up another box of papers and shakes them out on to the bed. Some of the photos are all too familiar; me wearing my old school uniform from England, caught in a variety of silly poses with Amy and Sinead from choir. I lean toward them in shock.
“Where did you get those?”
“You’re just in time to help me go through your old background check.” He thrusts a brown folder in my direction. “Here.”
I step forward, my heart rough in my chest, and take the folder. Flick through. More photos. More…um, what? “Are these…are these files from my gynecologist?”
“Uh-huh.” He manages a weak smile at that. “And even then, I wasn’t thorough enough. Funny.” His tone drops. “Ha ha.”
“This isn’t a background check. It’s a gross invasion of my privacy.”
“A little like what you’ve arranged for Gwen, no doubt.”
“I didn’t go as far analyzing her pap smears!”
“No. Just tapped her phones.” He rubs a big finger into one eye; dark circles, almost bruised purple, shudder with each stroke. “Good job you’re such a beautiful hypocrite, isn’t it?”
I throw the folder down and watch its contents, disemboweled, splay across the floor. “What are you doing?”
He stills. Straightens up, looks right at me for the first time since I got here. “I need to know who sent that email.”
“You have a whole forensics department for that.”
He nods once. “It was sent from a library in St. Petersburg.”
“So it’s some troll in Russia messing with you.”
“No, Leo.” His voice cracks. “It’s not a troll. It’s some wiseass who thought to look for that hospital report. They know things.”
Silence.
I swallow a world of acid and grief. “Tell me you didn’t do those things to her.”
His eyes darken, and then he looks away.
I knew.
Not because Rachel told me. She didn’t. Oh, I witnessed the scars on her inner thighs many times; kissed them; anointed them with tears as she explained their Aeron-shaped origins. But she never wanted to be touched inside. She was the first girl I’d been with and such a broken thing at that; I didn’t know any different.
But why else would Aeron have been so defensive about Blood Honey? All those similarities I’d suggested, so vague at their paranoid roots…they were bigger than I ever knew.
“Well?” Aeron throws down another heap of paper. “You going to tell me what a cunt I am, so we can get that over with?”
“No.”
“Leaning more toward one of your fancy British insults?”
“I’m not sure there’s one that covers this.”
“But you’re here.” He straightens up again, sits back on his hands to watch me with those unsettling eyes. His usual brand of sordid amusement is gone, his pupils hollow in its absence. “You’re not leaving me.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I choke out. “I spent the past few hours trying to figure out whether I should come here at all.”
“But here you are. Lucky me.”