Birds of Paradise

by Anne Malcom

  Was that what stopped him from completing it? That painful gaze?

  He inspected the creature beyond the glass.

  Or was it because he’d found something to add to his collection? Something rare? Something that likely didn’t exist in high numbers in this world?

  He didn’t quite know what she was, but she was somehow unique.

  He might yet kill her. It would be the sensible thing to do, before word got around to the right ears.

  It would be smart to do so.

  He sauntered to the leather chair in the middle of the room.

  “Yes, it would be smart,” he muttered to himself, glancing at the dead things on his wall, imagining her completing the room with her frozen and trapped beauty.

  He wasn’t done with her, that was for sure. He couldn’t be, even if he wanted to be. She was a complication. A loose end. He didn’t do loose ends. Or complications.

  Her death would be simpler.

  Elizabeth

  After he untied me, I didn’t move. For hours, I didn’t move. The sun came up. Set again. And I stayed frozen in my spot, swallowed by the weight of my terror, of the reality that he left in his absence.

  I twitched at some point after darkness blanketed the room. My muscles locked up, screamed in protest. As did my full bladder and empty stomach. My body screamed at me for my lack of care, for my neglect. But I had to neglect my body; otherwise, on the inside, I might’ve fallen apart. Someone had come into my home, my space, the one thing left on this planet that was safe. That was mine.

  And in reality, I was never safe.

  In that time, I thought about a lot of things.

  About those eyes, and how many people saw them right before the end. Wondered if they were as empty as they seemed. A lot of people thought things were more than they seemed, that there were reasons for things that seemed senseless, evil.

  But that was what we all clung to because the option that someone could be evil, remorseless, empty—well, that just wouldn’t work. Because that would mean monsters weren’t what we created to scare ourselves, reassure ourselves that humans would save us from the monsters.

  No, we were monsters.

  I knew this because I knew monsters.

  I had yet to meet many humans.

  And while my stomach cried and my bladder almost burst, I thought of the one, my monster, who had made me like this.

  No, you made you like this, a voice said. You are in control of how you respond to other people’s actions.

  But who I had to blame for who I was now wasn’t important. I was who I was now because of that experience.

  My marriage.

  It wasn’t happy, even at the start. Not like the stories of abused women who were treated like princesses at the start and then battered like trash after.

  No, it was always trash.

  From the beginning.

  And I had no choice.

  “You know what he’ll do if you don’t go through with this,” Mom said, straightening my veil with a businesslike efficiency that curdled my stomach. She’d never shown me real affection, never betrayed that she cared about her youngest daughter, but I thought now, just before she shooed me off to hell in a white dress, maybe she would show something.

  But her face betrayed nothing.

  She stood back, her silver-flecked gown trailing around her.

  It was expensive. Flashy.

  Fitting for a wedding of this magnitude.

  This status.

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to, Mom,” I said, my voice meek, unused. It was the first time I’d spoken all day.

  My entire wedding day.

  I’d been woken up by my sister, grim-faced, and trying to smile with dread. Though I wasn’t even sure if that dread was for me. She was one of the only people in my family who betrayed some sense of humanity, and it was only a sliver, fleeting. And not enough to do anything about this. Like help me escape, or at least hand me a razor blade.

  No, instead she woke me, waited for me to get out of bed, watched over me the whole day. Not out of love, I was sure; most likely to make sure I didn’t find or use any razor blades. My stomach had been roiling as various people fluffed, yanked and pinned my hair. Others painted beauty on my face. Piled me into a dress full of lace, constricted my ribs with the fabric. I’d been silent, compliant through the whole thing. I hadn’t cried. Screamed. Run. Pleaded.

  No, I’d been a participant. A silent one, perhaps. But I didn’t betray any kind of spine.

  I didn’t have one.

  The dress was the thing holding me up, not a backbone.

  “Your eyes did,” my mother said, narrowing her own at me.

  “Well I can’t control what my eyes say,” I snapped, surprising myself with the anger in my tone.

  My mother flinched slightly, obviously surprised too. Then she composed herself, fluffing at her own hairsprayed updo. “You can control everything,” she corrected. “Your life depends on it.” She turned. “Your family’s lives depend on this. Remember that.”

  The family that had never shown me anything but barely concealed contempt now relied on me for their continued survival. “How could I forget?” I said, my voice back to little more than a whisper.

  And I didn’t. As I walked down that aisle, watched by the crowds of people who were the most dignified of our society. The most depraved. Ones who stressed over which napkins would be used at a dinner party while on the phone organizing the death of someone without hesitation.

  And then to the worst of them all, the man who watched me with a predator’s intensity as I stood next to him.

  My husband.

  He didn’t let me forget what I was doing. Why I was doing it. Because my family were selfish, power-hungry and utterly brutal.

  Blood meant nothing.

  Least of all mine. Especially when it was spilled on the expensive marble floors of my marriage home.

  Or the Egyptian cotton sheets of my marriage bed.

  Blood—my blood—that was their currency.

  And they paid in full.

  My body didn’t let me remember the rest.

  Wouldn’t.

  Maybe because of the pain it was in at present, or the past pain. I didn’t know which.

  But instead of going through past pain, my body commanded my mind’s attention, forced me off the chair and to crawl to my shaky feet. To grit my teeth against the pain of my muscles, my bones.

  I went to the bathroom.

  I ate.

  Then I slunk into my bed and slept.

  For a long time.

  But eventually, I woke up.

  I didn’t call the police. Maybe I should’ve. Most people would’ve. But something told me not to. My upbringing, for one. I was a sheep raised in a wolf’s den. And my weakness was highlighted early on. It wasn’t nurtured, or protected. It was ignored.

  The family shame.

  I was left to my devices—my books, my computer—as long as I kept out of sight.

  But that didn’t mean I didn’t see.

  Didn’t learn some things.

  I knew what a killer looked like. I’d woken up to one standing in my bedroom one week ago. He was hired. And he did not do his job. Going to the police would be the same as sending his employers—Christopher—a big flashing letter telling him that I was still alive.

  Still inconvenient.

  I didn’t do that.

  Instead, I didn’t get out of my bed for five days. Lapsed back into the behavior when I first got out, when I was finally freed.

  Freed.

  Such a stupid word for what I was.

  Yes, I was free after my daughter died in my stomach because of a beating from my husband. Free after I carried her two more weeks, knowing she was dead inside me. Free after I battled in hours of labor, just to have a silent and unblinking infant cut out of me.

  Free once the doctors told my blank-faced and emotionless husband—it had only been a girl, after all—th
at I was no longer able to have babies.

  Which was, after being somewhat of a plaything and punching bag, a woman’s only job. I outgrew my usefulness, me and my barren womb. And I thought he’d kill me. Prayed for it, actually.

  But he was cruel.

  And cruel men do not give their victims what they pray for, even if it’s death.

  Instead, he gave me freedom.

  Freedom to run into the yawning and open chasm of a world where I didn’t belong. The open air of the real world stifling and too big after years inside mansions and cars and airplanes. It was like a prisoner being let out after the world has passed by, and the one that they get put into, freed into, is nothing like the one they left behind. And they long for their bars, even though they knew they might kill them.

  Especially because they knew it would kill them.

  But I didn’t run back. To him at least. It was certain death, and not a quick one.

  I rustled up whatever strength was left in me, got on a bus—five of them, actually—utilized the things I’d organized when I’d found out I was pregnant. The secret bank account, new identities, though I was only using one. I took them and my pain and got myself a little farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. An escape.

  Or just another prison.

  Where I’d been rambling around for over a year.

  And where I’d been almost killed by a hit man.

  The sixth day, I got up.

  The covers were lead as I wrenched them off my body and settled my sock-covered feet on the floor. The air smelled foul and close—but not the stale scent that came from never opening a window. No, I was used to that. It came from foreign invaders tearing through the thin film I had stupidly thought was my iron shield.

  I lumbered over to my windows that faced the front porch and the driveway beyond. The cold seeped out of them, creeping into the bones of my feet despite wearing two pairs of socks. In my bed and on quick trips to the bathroom, the air wasn’t that crisp, wasn’t that invading. But now I was reminded, by pulling back my curtains to reveal the white of the world outside, that I hadn’t turned on the radiator, nor lit the fire.

  And it was January in Washington.

  I rubbed at my arms, glancing back at the pile of blankets on my bed. I’d thought I’d used them to stave off the demons, the outside world. Of course, that didn’t work. They did help me from getting hypothermia though.

  My bones protested as I squeaked over my wooden floors, legs jelly, stomach painfully empty. I needed to eat or I’d faint, I knew that. And if I fainted, I most likely wouldn’t wake up, because despite my layers, the cold would creep in through the bottom of the house and swallow me.

  I paused, my hand on the radiator.

  Wouldn’t that be nice?

  Better?

  Just drift off to sleep and never come back to this cruel and ugly world?

  Christopher would eventually realize I was alive. If it took weeks. Months. Less likely to be years. But he’d find out. And I’d die then.

  Better now, with whatever peace I had left, whatever power.

  My shaking hand hovered over the dial.

  “Pathetic.”

  The cold, flat and deeply masculine voice was so clear I jumped, certain he was behind me. Of course, all I got was a thin and visible puff of air from my mouth, courtesy of my gasp.

  The hall was empty and lonely.

  Like always.

  But it wasn’t like always.

  Not now.

  He’d walked down there. While I slept. His shoes tracking in all the pain and suffering and ugliness of the outside, yanking it in here.

  He watched me sleep.

  For how long?

  He brought death to this house. If it wasn’t here already. Because maybe that’s what I was: a ghost haunting the farmhouse she’d come to end her days in. Jumping at shadows and memories, confined not by the four walls but what was inside her head.

  I turned the dial, the low thump of the machine coming to life a clattering sound of my decision to survive. Exist. If that’s what this was.

  And then I lit the fire.

  Made myself a hot and sugary tea, dry toast on the side.

  Then a bath. Which I refilled three times. I was a prune when I got out.

  But I was alive.

  If that’s what this was.

  3

  On the seventh day, he came.

  Not in the night this time. Not wearing a mask either.

  I’d been expecting the delivery man—Carl, I think this one was—so I opened the door when the knock came.

  I could do that. Most of the time. Sometimes my hands weren’t even shaking on the doorknob, my heart not racing, or my breathing shallow. But this was not sometimes, and all three things were happening. It was a miracle I was able to open my door at all. But I needed to. The supplies were dwindling, and the weather was looking to pack it in in the coming days, which meant I might be isolated out here for weeks.

  No one would look for me. No one would care.

  Which would’ve been preferable, if not for the ice blue eyes that met my trembling gaze.

  I didn’t scream, slam the door in his face or run.

  I didn’t scream because there would’ve been no point. My nearest neighbor was about seven miles away and likely didn’t know I existed. Plus screaming wouldn’t help. It never did.

  Didn’t slam the door in his face for the same reason I didn’t run. I was frozen in place. With fear or shock, I didn’t know, but my brain knew that even if I wasn’t, such things were stupid. Where would I run to? My house chained me in; there was nowhere to go. He knew that. I knew that. So I stayed rooted to the spot.

  He blinked as if he expected a cocktail of these three things.

  His eyelashes were long up close, dark frames to his piercing eyes. He didn’t have the mask on, and he was as hauntingly beautiful as I expected. But a bad kind of beautiful—like Christopher.

  His jaw was clean-shaven, angular, strong. His nose perfectly symmetrical, which meant he either hadn’t been in many fights or hadn’t lost any.

  His hair was almost as white as the snow behind him, slicked back like ice to a small bun at the small of his neck.

  He wore an expensive suit and wool overcoat, melding over the muscled body that inhabited my entire doorway. It was a surprise he could even step in. But he could.

  He did.

  I scuttled back as his scent once more assaulted my nostrils with its allure.

  He politely shuffled the snow off his shoes before he stepped into the house, closing the door quietly behind him, all the time watching me.

  “Are you back to kill me now?” I asked, voice flat yet shaking.

  He looked at me a beat more, then brushed past me into my bedroom.

  I followed him on wooden legs, my slippers scuffing behind his Italian loafers.

  He bypassed my bed and went straight for my closet, a small walk-in, near empty. I left with just the clothes on my back and hadn’t acquired many more. One didn’t exactly need cocktail dresses when she was staying inside all day. Unless she was Miss Havisham, of course.

  My style lent directly toward thick black leggings, thermals, soft and oversized wool cardigans, and Ugg boots. The layers were for warmth, but also for protection. I was never without them, even in the middle of summer when my ancient air conditioner labored against the heat. I had the house, but I could feel the pressure of the outside swelling against the roof, seeping through the cracks. The layers were just more protection.

  So the walk-in was near empty, but the man—my assassin—found the one duffel I owned and threw it on the bed.

  I looked at the bag.

  As did he.

  Then I looked at him.

  His gaze found mine.

  “Pack a bag,” he ordered.

  I blinked. Didn’t move.

  Neither did he, until almost a minute passed.

  I counted. Forty-eight seconds of silence, yawning on through th
e room.

  “Pack a bag,” he repeated, voice hard.

  I swallowed sandpaper. “What are you talking about?”

  He sighed, long and purposeful. “I’m talking about what I said. Pack a bag.”

  “Why?”

  “So you can have more than moth-eaten sweaters and saggy leggings to wear in the snow,” he snapped. “Though it seems that’s all you’ve got.” He glanced at the woeful excuse for a closet. “We’ll rectify that, once we get out of here.” He looked to the duffel. “Pack.”

  I blinked at him again, this time rapidly. “Once we get out of here?” I repeated.

  He nodded once, tersely. “Quickly.”

  I swallowed, crossed my arms. “I don’t get out of here, just in case you hadn’t noticed,” I said quietly. “And if I did, it wouldn’t be with the man who might kill me.”

  “Might is better than certain,” he said, not bothering to reassure me. “And certain is what the men who come here will be about your death. You can trust that, solnyshko.”

  The endearment jolted me for a moment. Harsh and cold, it didn’t sound like it belonged in the sentence, or to the man gazing at me with mildly hostile indifference.

  Russian, if I wasn’t mistaken. I’d taken some in high school. My parents made sure I was fluent in two foreign languages—Mandarin and Spanish—and had at least passable knowledge in three more.

  Not a hint of an accent, though. He was either first-generation American, or he’d excelled at getting rid of any defining characteristics about his voice.

  I betted on the latter.

  There was something dark, foreign, alien about him. He was not from here.

  My stomach churned at the certainty of what came before the endearment.

  Had I not known it would come? My death?

  “Well I guess they’ll come,” I said, voice small.

  Anger, real hot anger, flickered from the depths of his glacier. “What?” he hissed.

  “They’ll come,” I repeated. “And you’re right, my death will be certain. Most likely slow.” I glanced to the bag. “Because I know there is no way I’m packing that, or leaving the house.” I paused. “I can’t.”