Twenty-Seven ◑ The Statues

“I am,” Cade affirmed after a pause too long to be considered normal, indulging in a one-second handshake with Dimitri. There was a certain tightness in his shoulders, a stiffness in his smile. “Please, call me Cade.”

“Dimitri,” the god introduced himself briefly, his gaze flickering towards Jamie, whose face immediately went red in contrast to her newly-dyed blue hair and royal blue dress. “And you are?”

“Jamie.” She laughed feebly as Dimitri took her hand and planted a kiss on top of it. “You must be the supermodel.”

“I’m afraid not,” he answered smoothly. “You look more like a model to me.”

At that, Jamie let out an uncharacteristically high-pitched giggle, which made Lucille wonder if Dimitri had their group under some sort of a spell. Jamie definitely seemed like she’d been charmed, so were the women in their immediate vicinity. They kept casting looks of interest at Dimitri, who was just smiling coolly at them all. Even Cade himself was a bit disoriented, like he was still trying to decide whether he should befriend Dimitri or shove a champagne glass down his throat.

Whatever it was, Lucille didn’t like it. The tension between the two men was stirring something unsettling deep in her gut. It crawled up her throat and her mouth, leaving a bitter taste at the back of her tongue.

Cade adjusted his cuffs, the rictus smile still plastered on his lips. “Lucille, the reviewers have all been dying to meet you. After my speech, I’ll take you to them.”

“Of course!” Lucille replied. Feeling awkward, she added lamely, “Um, good luck with your speech.”

“Thank you.” He nodded curtly. “We’ll be going now.”

Without waiting for any of them to speak, he turned around, took Jamie by the arm, and steered her away, into the crowd in the dance floor. Jamie waved at them over her shoulder, mouthing something Lucille couldn’t fully interpret. Lucille thought they’d go dancing, but they didn’t. The pair just disappeared among the people swaying along to the music, leaving her with Dimitri, feeling strangely . . . bereft.

“So that’s your boss.” Dimitri raised an eyebrow, smirking down at her. “The man who almost lost his job because of you.”

“Don’t start.” Lucille waved him off, her windpipe constricting. She couldn’t help glancing at the spot where Cade and Jamie vanished. “I’m still guilty.”

“I know.” He swept her up in his arms and led her to the dance floor again. “I’ll distract you.”

The gesture was sweet and kind. Quite romantic, even. Lucille wanted to vanish into the moment, to let herself enjoy the night with someone she actually genuinely liked, and perhaps ask him about the things she needed to know.

However, as she laid her cheek against his chest, an overwhelming sinking sensation settled in her stomach. It was slowly building up, sharpening into real pain.

Lucille burrowed close to Dimitri, much like how a drowning person would grab onto anything to stay afloat. Her hands bunched around the fabric of his jacket. Tears were drumming behind her eyes, and she struggled to keep them at bay, knowing she would have no way to explain this if he ever saw.

And he wasn’t numb to what she was feeling. His steps began to falter. After a while, he pulled away from her, his palm on her cheek. “Lucille, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that there’s. . . .”

The rest of her words disappeared from her mind as she looked up to face him. The background was no longer the ballroom and the party, but the strange bedroom in her dream weeks ago. Same dim orange light from the candles, same white curtains, same carved bed.

And staring back at her was Dimitri’s dream version too—the one who held the knife that was covered in her own blood.

A strangled yelp escaped Lucille’s lips. Her knees trembled, but she managed to step back and free herself of his touch. She blinked repeatedly and the surroundings went back to normal, but she couldn’t unsee the bedroom or that form of Dimitri. Both stayed printed at the back of her eyelids like a tattoo.

“Lucille?” Dimitri reached out for her. “Lucille, what’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned on her heel and ran out of the ballroom, away from him. Away from everything.

The hallway greeted her like a yawning mouth the moment she bursted out of the ballroom. Her vision was blurred, shifting between the Manor and the bedroom, from reality to her nightmare. The immaculately dressed people lounging around blended into nothing and then appeared again, all in a vicious cycle that left her gasping for air.

Lucille kept walking, summoning all her willpower to stare ahead and act normal. She didn't know where she was going, but she hastened her pace, the pain in her diaphragm growing stronger by the second. She swerved around hallways and broke into crowds, opened doors and passed through arches. No direction, no purpose. She was merely following her ache, the desperation to escape.

Her heart began to pound in her ears, the sound mixing with the distorted snippets of laughter and conversations. The lights switched before her eyes, from the stark yellow glow of the chandeliers to the flickering quality of the candles. The floor was lurching under her stilettos. The ceiling and the walls were pressing against her.

It was a terrible symphony of sound and sensation, and it reached its crescendo as she stumbled into the cold confines of the indoor statue garden.

Lucille gasped, clutching the base of her throat and yanking off the thin pearl necklace that seemed to be choking her. The thing fell out of her slack grasp with a slight thump, the pearls bouncing on the marble floors and rolling out of sight. She limped her way inside, propping her arms onto the different statues for support.

The floor-to-ceiling glass panels of the disjointed room were opened into the night, but no wind came in. The absence of any fresh air catalyzed the tightness in her chest, the sharpness of the pain. The threat of tears rose rapidly, the pressure building up until she had to squeeze her lids shut.

*What was happening?* a voice in her mind kept asking, perhaps the only sliver of rationality left in her. *What was going on?*

She didn't really want to find out, didn't want to open her eyes and come to any sort of conclusion. The pain was already too much. With a deep, resolute breath, she rested her forehead against the base of one of the marble busts.

But the sculpted stone took the form and the texture of real skin the moment she touched it.

Lucille stumbled backwards and held back a scream. The bust had turned into Mia, a detached head propped on a pedestal and with the eyes still as white as the marble.

"You're alive," it said, smiling sweetly at her. "Shame my shot went wonky. The world would've thanked me if I killed you. Isn't that right, Martin?"

To Lucille's horror, Martin's laugh echoed from one of the statues behind her. "That's correct. I would've paid you a hefty sum to get rid of this bitch."

"Me too," the voice of Robert Arkham Senior's wife streamed out from the mouth of another bust. "You ruined my life, Lucille. I know you're under the impression that you've done the right thing, but look how unhappy you made my husband, my family. Then, you subjected my son to the same fate."

"I only had a brief affair, yet I paid for it with the rest of my life," another statue lamented. "Didn't even let me apologize to my wife."

"An apology could've changed something, right?" the statue closest to her asked. "Did you think of that, Lucille? Did your so-called victims ever think of that?"

One bust scoffed. "Not when they're working with the devil."

"Especially not when the devil disguises herself as the hero."

"And seeks the years of a human's life as payment."

"Look, I'm not even a cheater. I just got in the way, and she had to get rid of me."

Soon, all the statutes in the room were taking on different faces, speaking all at once and complaining about the things that Lucille had allegedly done to them.

And the worst part was, she couldn't remember who most of them were.

Centuries worth of punishments, centuries worth of faces, all crammed into one room. A cacophony of voices seeking to tell their side of the story and be heard. Their collective demands and accusations dug into her head, her very soul, causing her knees to give way.

She was crying now—not a gentle quiet weep but a fully-fledged show of torment. The palms she'd pressed close to her ears did nothing to muffle the sounds around her. She couldn't even close her eyes now. She had no choice but to see the faces in the room, all talking to her with empty gazes.

"Please," she pleaded, but her voice was drowned under the others. "Please, don't. Please make it stop. . . ."

Lucille crawled across the floor, towards the corner of the statue garden, where she curled up and tried to block everything out.

The statues kept speaking, growing louder and louder until the walls began to hum. She pressed herself further into the corner, shoving her face at the spot where the walls met the floor in the hopes of finding solace in the tiniest bit of darkness—

"There you are."

Lucille's heart jumped with hope at the sound of Dimitri's voice. She turned around, expecting to see him holding out a hand to help her up, but instead she found herself face to face with the dream version of him.

And he wasn't here to help her.

The statue garden had vanished, and taking its place was the bedroom in her dream. It didn't fade or vanish no matter how rapidly she blinked. Once again, she was locked in the scene. Once again, she was trapped in a memory, alone with a man who was scowling down at her. . . .

A man filled with rage.

"I've been searching for you everywhere." He grabbed the back of her dress and yanked her up. "My little treacherous wife."