Alone again. Thank God.

After a while, she heard the whump! of an expensive car door closing and the deep purr of a powerful engine. She watched through the living room window as the limo pulled away. The windows of the limo were tinted but she thought she saw Vassily’s pale face pressed against the glass. Looking at her.

Oh God. What had she done?

Charity pulled the living room curtains closed—she’d had enough of the outside world—put the tea glasses, tea pot, and jam onto a tray and carried it into the kitchen. She was feeling so weak the tray shook in her hands, the tea glasses rattling. That moment standing in the open doorway had sucked what little warmth she’d had right out of her, together with what little strength she’d been clinging to.

She stopped and leaned against the sink, arms around her midriff. Such a bone-deep chill, as if her insides held a core of ice. She felt completely ground down, reduced to bone held together by skin. Not too far from the grave herself.

The trembling grew stronger. Bile rose in her throat again. Tears leaked out of her eyes. She didn’t know whether to try to make it to the bathroom to throw up or simply collapse to the floor and throw up there.

With difficulty, she swallowed back the bile trickling up her gullet, then waited while her stomach settled. She locked her knees.

No vomiting, she told herself sternly. No collapsing to the floor. There will be no one to pick you up if you do.

It felt as if there couldn’t possibly be enough heat in the world to warm her up. The only thing that could make her warm again was Nick, and he was in a coffin in the stony cold ground.

Oh, how he had warmed her! She hadn’t felt cold once in the week they’d been together. Sleeping naked in the dead of winter hadn’t been a problem with Nick in bed with her. He was a furnace. A constant source of spine-melting heat.

Had been. Now what was left of him was frozen bones.

She would never be warm again, for the rest of her life.

Oh God, how she missed him! A sob wanted to rise from her chest but she repressed it, clapping her hand over her mouth. Her throat shook. A wild keening sound escaped from behind her hand.

She couldn’t cry again. Crying required an energy she simply didn’t have. The tears would be wrung from some irretrievably shattered place inside her and she would never be whole again.

She pressed her hand so hard against her mouth she could feel her lips pressing against her teeth and waited. Waited for the upwelling of grief to subside, like the lash of a scorpion’s tail. All she needed was for it to go down a little, just a little, just enough for her to make her wobbly way back to the bedroom and collapse onto the bed.

She hugged herself even more tightly, in a vain attempt to give herself the warmth Nick had so easily given her.

This sharp, lancing pain had to stop at some point. Didn’t it?

Didn’t all the books say grieving eventually abates?

It was all she had to cling to, that some day this wracking pain would lessen, even if it would never go away. She was like someone who had been grievously wounded in battle. The surgeons and nurses could give her blood transfusions and stitch her up, but deep inside her, the tissues were rent, and the wound would never completely heal.

Surely the craziness would stop some day. It would have to, wouldn’t it? Prewitts were long-lived. She could easily live to ninety. Her skin crawled at the thought of another sixty-two years of this madness.

Over the past three days, she’d felt Nick’s presence a hundred times a day. He was around the corner, behind that door, he’d just left the room. And each time her heart would soar and then crash and burn when he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there. He would never be there again.

So why was her body tormenting her so? Wasn’t it bad enough that her husband was gone, without having these flashes of his presence?

Like…now.

Every hair on Charity’s body rose as she walked slowly toward her bedroom. Her feet dragged, her heart thudded. A big boulder of terror pressed down on her, cutting off her breath. Spots formed in front of her eyes, like a big buzzing cloud of gnats.

For she could feel Nick, feel his presence. She could smell him. He was here, in this house, right now. Thinking that was craziness, she knew it, but she couldn’t stop herself.

This was an entirely new level of slick horror added to the grief, the terror that she was losing her mind.

With each step toward the bedroom, she could feel his presence more strongly. It was insane. Her mind was telling her she was crazy but every sense was on alert, sending frantic signals to her brain. He’s here he’s here he’s here! Like the beat of a jungle drum.

In the week they’d been together, her entire body had become a tuning fork, attuned to Nick’s body. He was here, she could feel it. No amount of reasoning could convince her he wasn’t.

This was beyond horrible.

She’d observed firsthand Aunt Vera’s slow, awful slide into dementia and it was the most terrifying, horrific, heartbreaking thing she’d ever seen. Aunt Vera, too, saw long-lost loved ones in the shadows in the corners.

Terrified, Charity reached out a shaking hand and pressed it flat against her bedroom door. There was nothing behind that door but an unmade bed and tear-sodden handkerchiefs strewn about the floor. She knew that. She knew that. But on an entirely different level, her body knew something else.

She stood for long moments with her trembling hand on her door, afraid to open it because behind it would be nothing but proof that she was losing her mind.

Chilled, sick, trembling, she finally gave a little push. The door slowly yawned open, the sound loud in the still of the house. The room behind was shrouded in shadows. She hadn’t bothered to open her bedroom shutters.

Nick’s presence was very strong.

Charity was rooted to the spot, utterly unable to enter her own bedroom. Her perfectly ordinary bedroom had suddenly become a place of monsters, waiting to eat her alive. A black pit with her sanity on the bottom, forever lost to her.

The door opening had created currents of air that brought Nick’s scent, Nick’s presence even more strongly to her.

There was a slight noise inside her bedroom.

She couldn’t stand this, simply couldn’t. There was nothing left in her that could withstand this kind of madness. She tried to lift her foot, tried to chide herself into walking into her own bedroom, but she couldn’t. Her feet were anchored to the floor, as if mired in quicksand. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.

The shadows in the room swirled, or maybe it was her vision blacking out. Her legs were trembling now, barely able to hold her up.

The shadows shifted and shifted again.

The sound of a boot heel striking her hardwood floor. The darkness coalesced, gained an outline.

A tall, broad-shouldered figure dressed in black stepped forward. A deep voice said, “I won’t let you go to Worontzoff’s house, Charity.”

Nick. Back from the dead.

Her eyes rolled to the back of her head.

Fuck!

Nick leaped forward to catch Charity before she collapsed onto the floor, cursing himself as he did. He hadn’t war gamed it. He hadn’t run it through his head in any way, which is what he always did, no matter what the move. This time, for the first time in his life, he just barreled ahead without any thought for consequences.

Otherwise he might have thought about the shock to Charity’s system at seeing her dead husband alive once more.

Nick eased Charity down, icy dread flooding his system. People died of shock, he knew that. Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Charity’s face was bone white, almost waxen. Her system was sending as much blood as possible away from the periphery toward the heart, as always happened in moments of great stress. Some shocks are so great blood circulation slows and eventually stops.