59. Winnie

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

WINNIE

I n no time at all, the girls have shoved Mum’s newly accumulated possessions into the back of Komal’s van. I notice Dora dumping the paperbacks into the recycling bin and flash her a grateful smile.

We pile into the van. “Where are we going, boss?” Komal asks Alaric. He takes out his phone and pinches the screen to zoom into the map to show her.

“You…you’re using a map? On your phone? ” I can’t believe it.

“I have changed my opinion about the annoying rectangle.” Alaric shrugs. “Perdita taught me nothing about love, but everything about the magic contained in this one device. She even taught me to text. See?”

He turns the screen around to show me a long text conversation with Perdita, mostly her sending him pictures of artwork in museums in Italy and him explaining the artist’s techniques in excruciating detail. He’s even using emojis! My eyes fall on the last message from the Midnight Princess.

Perdita: Winnie is lucky to have you. I’m sorry for messing it up. Go get her, tiger.

I hand him back his phone. “Who are you and what have you done with Alaric Valerian?”

His grin could melt the polar ice.

Komal tears off down the road, angry rock music that would be right at home on my Get Shit Done playlist blaring from the tinny speakers. The girls sing along while Isis tells my mother’s fortune and Alaric…

…Alaric smiles and laughs and jokes with them. He even sings along with a couple of songs he recognises from my playlist, his deep, rumbling tenor giving me a serious lady boner. He’s learning to let down his guard around other people and have fun . I’m not the only one who’s changed.

It’s 2 AM when we arrive at the new house. Alaric has a gate and door code ready for Mum, who leaps out of the van to type them in. She flings the door open and gasps. (Like mother, like daughter.)

“Winnie, come look!”

I follow her inside. She turns all the lights on and stands in the middle of the room, spinning in wild circles. “It’s beautiful! I can’t believe it’s all mine!”

It’s strange to see her in a room with crisp white walls and a floor that isn’t hidden beneath mouldy papers.

Strange, and wonderful.

Maybe this is just what she needs – a place that’s truly hers, away from memories of my father, away from the idea of a perfect childhood she wished she’d given me. I know that a new house won’t fix her desire to hoard, but for the first time since I left her house at eighteen, hope fills my heart when I look at her.

Maybe, with my support and love, and with a team of professionals who will help her manage her hoarding, my mum could be free of her stuff.

The Nevermore Murder Club marches inside, carrying the boxes of things Mum has already acquired that I haven’t managed to sort yet. Maisie and Celeste get to work stacking the kitchen shelves with groceries they brought with them, while Komal and Mina fold new towels (I resist the urge to run over and colour-code them) and discretely whittle down Mum’s overzealous crockery purchases. Arabella perches on a bar stool, filing her nails and calling out wan encouragement.

Beth and Isis start moving the couches around.

“What are you doing?” I ask as they shove the TV cabinet across the room, aware of the neighbours trying to sleep on the other side of the shared wall.

“We’re feng shui-ing the furniture,” Isis says as if it’s obvious.

“At two in the morning?”

“No time like the present. This place is sucking energy like a vampire in a blood bank,” Beth adds. “Sorry, Alaric.”

“No offence taken.” Alaric looms in the doorway, surveying the scene with furrowed brows. His eyes flick to me, and the corner of his mouth quirks into a question I don’t yet have an answer for.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “You don’t know what this means to me, what you did.”

“I have done nothing.”

“Alaric.” I elbow him in the side. “You came from Italy to London. You bought my mother a house . You convinced all my friends to go along with your crazy scheme and drive down here in the middle of the night to move her in. You convinced my mother to go to therapy , something that she’s never before agreed to. I don’t know what you’re still doing here when your wife is waiting for you in Italy?—”

“I never married Perdita.”

I raise an eyebrow. “But you said?—”

“I went to Italy with her because I couldn’t remain in Black Crag any longer when every hallway and storage container and cobweb-riddled corner reminded me of you. I left because I needed to forget you, Winnie.” His gaze makes another crack in my heart. “I needed to obliterate what you meant to me so I could go on enduring, but I found it impossible. And then your friends tracked me down and told me what happened to your mother, and I was on the first plane back.”

“His first time flying,” Komal pipes up. “I got him a great deal on the tickets!”

Alaric shudders. “And humans think that vampires are the monsters. Cramming that many bodies into a fibreglass tube with terrible smells and screaming babies is true torture. Give me Reginald’s driving any day.”

“Why are you two still hanging around?” Komal tosses her keys to Alaric. “We’ve got this. Go show Winnie her place.”

That’s right. I’d been so preoccupied with Mum that I’d forgotten Alaric said he got me a place.

My eyes widen in surprise at the keys in Alaric’s hand. “Can you even drive?”

“I am a centuries-old vampire prince from one of the most noble bloodlines of the Nightshade Court.” Alaric holds out the keys to me. “I have no clue how to work that infernal contraption. You will drive. I will work the map and choose the playlist.”

Alaric may be able to read a map on his phone now, but he hasn’t fully grasped the concept of traffic because he leads me on a zig-zagging journey across the city before yelling at me to pull over in front of an old Victorian brick factory.

“Alaric, this isn’t a house.” I frown at the old brick facade as Alaric fumbles with the keys. The place is beautiful in a derelict, industrial way, but I don’t see…

Oh.

Alaric holds open the enormous factory door so I can glimpse that magazine-worthy interior. Whatever genius designed this place kept the high ceilings and period features, including the old pipes and brick pillars, but they’ve installed a contemporary interior with glass, steel, and richly veined marble surfaces. A comfy corner sofa stretches around a central fireplace that’s already ablaze, and warm lighting and cosy rugs make the huge open-plan space feel homely.

“Viviana gave me the name of her architect, and he happened to be about to put this place on the market when I called,” Alaric says as he drops my keys back into my hand. “The moment I saw it, I thought it screamed Her Most Majestic Madame Winifred.”

Heat from the fire warms my face as I walk through the galley kitchen, running my fingers over the marble benchtop, touching the shiny new coffee machine, and kicking off my shoes to feel the soft rugs beneath my toes. I notice little details:

A record player and a bunch of records stacked on a shelf. All bands from my Get Shit Done playlist.

A stack of vampire romance novels beside them, bookmarks marking page 64.

A purple container on the kitchen counter labelled ‘Reginald’s Hot Chocolate Mix.’

A series of storage baskets beneath the coffee table, just waiting to be filled.

A large painting placed between two of the high windows, taking up nearly the whole wall, of the night sky over the valley, with Black Crag silhouetted in the distance.

A cross-stitch pillow on the sofa featuring a border of garlic bulbs and the words ‘Vampires Need Snuggles.’

And in the centre of the glass-and-steel dining room table stands a silver candelabra, identical to the ones I have to carry around the halls of Black Crag.

He sees me.

A lump of something like yearning rises in my throat.

“—there’s a master bedroom on the mezzanine upstairs.” Alaric waves his hand at the floor above the kitchen. “Down this hallway is a guest bathroom and two rooms. One has its own entrance, and would be perfect for your storefront?—”

I’m dangerously close to crying. “You put this together…for me?”

He shrugs. “All you’ve ever wanted is a home, Winnie. If it couldn’t be with me, I thought, perhaps…”

He trails off, instead gesturing to the vast open space, the blazing fire, that cursed candelabra.

I step towards him. “Did you have help with the decor? I’ve noticed a distinct lack of Stabby Chic.”

“Reginald and Arabella helped with the details. She says that my ‘Mary Shelley meets Bernard Black’ aesthetic wouldn’t work for you. Do you like it?”

“I…” I swallow. If I say anything more, I will burst into tears. I stare down at the keys in my hand. The one Alaric used in the front door is shiny and new, but the second is an old, clunky thing. “What’s this second key for? The garage?”

“The second key is for Black Crag.”

My heart stutters.

Neither of us speaks. The way Alaric’s eyes study me, it’s like being burned from the inside out.

Finally, he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“So many times over the years I have wondered why I endure, why I continue on this earth when I so hate what I am and what I’ve done. The answer is the same reason I’m standing here today – hope . Hope isn’t some passive dream, Winnie – the hope inside me has claws and teeth and blood boiling in her veins. That key is my hope. I brought this house for you because you deserve a home that’s just yours, a home that isn’t built on bloodshed and haunted memories, a place where you are safe to soar. But I…” he swallows again. “I wish that you didn’t want it, because you already have a home. With me.”

The keys fall from my fingers.

“Alaric…” I breathe.

But I can’t find words for this sensation in my chest – a blooming, as if the butterflies inside me were never butterflies at all. All this time, they’ve been caterpillars making their first shambling journeys, spinning their cocoons from the shards of my old, discarded life.

Now they are unfurling, blooming, becoming wonders of bright colour.

I cross the rug in two steps and throw myself at him. He starts, caught off guard, but catches me, because he’s always there to catch me. Because I’m safe with him. I’m home in his arms.

When he kisses me, it’s like Celeste’s warm caramel sauce drizzled straight into my veins.

I’ve spent my whole life running from the trauma of not being able to trust someone who loves me, who was supposed to take care of me but couldn’t. That fucks with your head. I know that I dwell in this strange place of both hating my mother for choosing her stuff over me and desperately loving her.

So when I got out, I was finally safe. Except that I wasn’t. Because the world is full of things that will hurt you if you let them. So I chose the safe options – staying with Patrick, letting Faye take control of the business – because the alternative meant trusting myself to survive the hurt, and I didn’t know how to do that.

But in Alaric’s arms, I realise something about myself. Avoiding pain is a kind of hurt you inflict on yourself. Even someone like Alaric who has been through more hurt than anyone should have to endure is still here, ready to lay his heart at my feet knowing that I might choose to stamp it into mush.

I live with hope, too – hope with blood under her nails and dirt in her hair. I am ready to have my heart broken, because people aren’t perfect and neither are vampires. We’re all sacks of skin and memories, dragging our mess around with us. Sometimes that mess is things, and sometimes it’s feelings, and sometimes it’s memories that aren’t all happy.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to tidy away the mess and I’ve missed the beauty in it – until him. Until he showed me that not all mess is a sign of weakness. That I can be messy and loud and creative and bold and I can fuck up a hundred times and he will always be there for me, because that’s what love is.

“I love you,” I whisper against his lips, and the whisper becomes a cry. “I love you, and I’m afraid.”

“I’m afraid too,” he whispers back. “But that’s half the fun.”

We crash together in a tsunami of lips and teeth and fangs and hope. His kisses are so wild and desperate that we have to breathe together to survive them. Somehow, we end up on the sofa in front of the roaring fire, our clothes thrown across the tiled floor and our hands all over each other. The white scar below his armpit glows faintly in the firelight, a reminder that all victories are hard-fought and won with blood.

When Alaric wraps his lips around my clit, my heart surrenders before my body, as if I have been waiting to be his. His fang pierces me again, driving me to such pleasure that my cries ring from the high ceiling.

After I’ve come again and he’s spilt himself inside me with the roar of a monster untamed, he wraps fuzzy blankets around us and places the ‘Vampires Need Snuggles’ pillow behind our heads. We watch the fire together as the minutes tick closer to sunrise.

“What are we going to do?” I ask.

“Right now? I’m going to make you scream my name one more time before the sun rises and I have to go to sleep. I’ve put black-out curtains in the bedroom so?—”

“No, I mean, I said I love you, but nothing has changed. You’re a vampire and I’m a human. Our love is still forbidden.”

Alaric stills.

I prod him. “We have to talk about it.”

“We do not.”

“We should have talked about the Kiss ages ago. If you’d told me, I would have had time to consider it. I could have told you that it…” I swallow down the weight of my words. “That it doesn’t repulse me. That I could be interested. Maybe.”

“I won’t do it. I won’t make you into a monster, Winnie.”

“When I get back, we’re going to work on your self-esteem. Why are you so determined to believe that all monsters are evil?” I rest my head on his chest, listening to the slow, steady thud of his vampiric heart. I squeeze him as hard as I can, but it’s like squeezing stone. “You have regrets. We all do. That doesn’t make you unredeemable. It makes you more human than many of my kin. I don’t hate what you are, Alaric. I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of being like you. I think that you’re wonderful. And the idea of spending eternity with you makes me happier than a two-for-one sale on storage containers.”

“You mean it?” His voice trembles. He brushes a strand of hair from my face, his eyes wide with awe.

“You make me happier than a big mess, a loud playlist, and a mug of Reginald’s hot chocolate,” I grin. “So yes, I would be honoured to share eternity with you. But I’d like some time to see how things go first. I have a lot of changes to make in my life, and that might be one too many all at once.”

“What changes?” He sounds wary.

“I’m retiring the Winnie Wins System.”

“You can’t do that. It’s yours. It’s?—”

“Faye can have it. It’s outdated. Passé .” My grin broadens. “I’m instigating the Winnie LOVES System. It’s a brand new approach to cleaning, and it’s all mine.”

Alaric’s lips flatten into the long-suffering look he wears whenever I talk about tidying. “And what, I’m afraid to ask, is the Winnie Loves System?”

“I haven’t exactly figured out all the letters yet, but it’s going to be brilliant.”

“What’s V?”

“Why are you so concerned about V?”

“V is not a common letter.” Alaric frowns. “If your new system is going to endure for all eternity, then it needs to figure out V.”

“Fine.” I stick my tongue out at him. “V stands for Very Naughty Vampires Who Don’t Listen To Their Professional Organisers Go To Bed Without Snuggles.”

“That’s a terrible system.”

“I’m kidding. It stands for Very Much is How Much I Love You. Just roll with it,” I laugh when Alaric makes a face. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll have all of eternity.”

“But that part is true?” His breath grazes my cheek. “About loving me?”

“That part is true.”

“The way you rise from the ashes, Winnie the Majestic, even a phoenix is in awe of you,” he murmurs as he leans in to kiss me again.