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It doesn’t really start out with a cabin in the woods. A lot of other tedious, mundane shit happens before then. But basically, it starts out with a cabin in the woods.
It’s a long secluded drive down a long, barely-there dirt road surrounded by dark forest on both sides. Grace arrives at the doorstep of a simple, but well-built log cabin.
She smirks to herself. Perfect place for a Final Girl. There’s a definite creep factor, despite—or because of—its dark beauty. She can see why none of the other Le Domas fuckers ever came here.
*
Actually, that’s a lie. It starts with a dream. More like a blip of a dream, like when people used to channel surf. Or the scene from a movie cut too short. The same dream blip, over and over again. Blip—awake. Blip—awake. What drives her batshit the most is the incompleteness of it, like a satellite signal dropping out.
*
Some of the mundane shit involves a lot of meetings with lawyers and estate managers. When Grace is about to begin the process of rewilding the Le Domas property, including hiring people to clear the mess of charred remains, she makes her first visit to the estate since surviving the world’s suckiest game of Hide ‘n’ Seek.
She goes to the fountain that sits right in front of the pile of ash and rubble that used to be a really big fucking house. Feeling like an idiot, she addresses the air: “I’m razing what’s left of this Amityville shitshow to the ground. But I’m stopping short of salting the earth. I don’t want to punish the land for the things they did. I’m returning it all to Mother Nature where it belongs. I won’t be profiting from it.”
She pauses to look around. “So don’t pull any shit. Like attacking anyone I hire to get the job done. Or me.”
The breezeless air suddenly whips up a bracing wind that sends her hair flying in all directions. It’s localized to just in her immediate vicinity, carrying with it a pungent whiff of smoke. It dies down just as abruptly as it appeared, as if someone has flipped off a fan switch. Her hair’s a rat’s nest and her eyes water from debris. She’ll take that as a yes, then.
She’d briefly entertained the idea of enlisting a priest to purify what’s left, but a deep faith in christianity has never been her thing. It hadn’t felt right, anyway. Especially because she did win a game against the Devil—or at least a devil.
*
Grace always sleeps in her lame bed in her lame apartment—thank FUCK she’d kept up the lease despite her dearly departed’s protests that his home is her home—when she bolts upright, gasping, just as the door is flung open to a familiar lanky silhouette leaning against the doorframe.
“Hey,” says the silhouette.
She runs up in a fury, punches it in the shoulder before she even fully registers who it is. There’s just that familiar insouciance that gets her moving on instinct.
“Jesus Christ, you scared me!”
“Go back to sleep.”
“I was asleep, you fucker!” she yells, but she’s already realized that she’s awake now and yelling at an afterimage of something that was never there.
*
This repeats every night in a row for a week, before she snaps. Enough of this shit: Cabin in the woods it is. The one that sits in the middle of the woods that Alex told her about offhandedly months ago.
She’s been debating whether or not the property is tainted by the Le Domas line and if she should leave well enough alone, but fuck it. If she’s right, Daniel’s the only one who spent time there. Technically, he was spared a death at LeBail’s hand.
Maybe a change in scenery will release her from this maddening dream.
*
It’s only after hours of trying to remember the location and almost giving up, that Grace manages to pull in at dusk. At least that probably means the location is just as hard for other people to find. No one’s there as she drops the sole duffle bag on the floor. She walks up the steps, torn between paranoia and the undeniable sense of complete isolation.
She flips the light switch—heeeyy, electricity!—and flops facedown on the only bed. “Am I relieved—or disappointed?” she asks the cabin.
“Yes,” she answers, and buries her face in the pillow to let out one good scream. Still got it, she thinks, before unconsciousness slams into her.
“Hey—”
“GODDAMMIT!”
She screams her way bolt upright, already in the middle of stalking toward the room’s entrance without having a chance to shake the sleep fog from her mind.
She’s already downstairs and kneeling before the fireplace before she realizes what she’s doing. There’s a convenient stack of firewood and matches by the hearth. It’s a beautiful fireplace, one of the most ornate parts of the cabin, seemingly never used. For some reason, being the one to christen it feels like a big deal. She starts a fire with an air of reverance, making each simple action count.
*
“So, rewilding, huh?”
She doesn’t turn around to see what’s silhouetted in the moonlight in the open doorway to the cabin. She must’ve been mesmerized by the flames, tired as she is. Her subconscious registering no threat.
Maybe she’s the threat. Inside her chest is a molotov cocktail of rage and pain and the ghastliest kind of hope that should never see the light of day. She stares into the flames and imagines her thoughts calibrating to the dancing orange light. The cheerful crackling warmth of wood being consumed in a contained, orderly fashion is the only thing staving off insanity. She knows the best worst thing about herself is her fucking hopefulness. Goddammit, after everything, she’s still a hopeful person.
“You know—” She’s also sleep-deprived to the point of near-insanity, and doesn’t look back as she interrupts herself midsentence to climb the stairs to the only bed. She needs to be horizontal this second.
Grace lets out the breath she didn’t know she was holding when she hears the familiar soft clinking while she sits with her back to the open doorway, too anticiptory to lie down yet, despite the exhaustion weighing her down.
God, she would know that sound anywhere, even with her back turned in a dark room in a dark house in a dark wood in the middle of nowhere thinking dark thoughts. Just from that particular desultory way the ice cubes clink together in the glass because they’re CUBES and not one big CUBE or SPHERE.
Did he stop at the quaint little general store half an hour away? Grace tries to picture him loading a cooler in the trunk of his luxury sedan and can’t quite do it.
Grace knows that distinct lanky gait that always pretends to be too hungover or drunk or pampered to move at the speed she’s witnessed when it finally decides to. Though judging by the sound, it chooses to move slow and measured as it advances behind her.
She’d know that unfairly good scent even when buried under the reek of alcohol, which is much fainter than usual, mostly just coming from the glass. It’s not expensive cologne or fancy milled soap, but something natural, innate, almost reminding her of freshly baked bread with a bit of salt. Not a hint of smoke—except what’s coming from the fireplace.
She’d know the psychic pressure of being not-touched, her space not-invaded, the weight of calculating eyes mysterious and gravity-sucking as black holes boring into her.
She’d know the silent scream of pain behind the magician’s trick of diversion by way of sardonic self-indulgence.
All of that. Anywhere.
“Had any annoying dreams lately?”
Not to mention that voice. Utterly bleak and yet refusing to go down without a smirk. Grace thought she was prepared to finally be confronted with the real thing, but the sound of it outside of her dreams stabs her through the chest and raises goosebumps on her skin. Suddenly she feels un-alone and doesn’t know what to do with herself. Her words come out halting, choked out.
“—the thing that hurts the most—the most. agonizing. thing—” She pauses. “—is not that the supposed love of my life was willing to use me as an actual human sacrifice to a literal devil.” She barely manages to squeeze the next words out in a whisper. “It’s that I thought I was finally going to have a place to belong, to have a moth—”
Tears slip down her face as she fails to choke out the last word. His forehead is suddenly pressed against her back for a second, before lifting. He climbs across the bed to sit next to her, keeping his glass steady the entire time. She rolls her eyes even as she’s crying.
“I’m such a fucking mark.”
“As someone who has had, up until certain recent events, the dubious honor of being my mother’s son my whole life,” she snorts, “I can honestly say,” he waits until she turns to look directly into those bottomless dark eyes.
“it’s not you, Grace, it’s her.” He waves his free hand, taking a sip. “Them,” he says, punctuating the word with a crunch of ice.
She reaches her hand out blindly and he places the glass in her hand. She can feel him watching her take a big gulp even though she’s not looking back.
“Why do you always trust me?” Exasperation etches his voice, softening the sound.
She puts the glass on the nightstand and flips around behind him, bracing herself with a hand against his side for leverage so that she can be horizontal. After seven days in a row of interrupted sleep, she is so, so tired.
“How can you stand to touch me?”
She doesn’t bother answering, her back is to him while he walks his fingers along the length of her spine like they’re a person. He’s testing her, even tightrope-walking the jagged scar that peeks above her tank top. There isn’t the slightest flinch or tightening of muscles.
“How can you stand me touching you?” The finger person sways drunkenly, clumsily falling down and hopping over her scar from one fingertip to the next. She slaps at it like it’s a horsefly.
“Ha,” he says, as if she proved his point.
“Idiot, it tickles.” She grabs his fingers blindly and mashes them in her hand.
“OWW?” he complains, as if it’s only hypothetical. Instead of trying to free his fingers, he retaliates with the gentlest brush of lips on the widest part of her scar, shocking her into releasing his hand. The briefest corner of his smug bastard smile catches on the edge of her shoulderblade before his mouth is gone like it was never there. She’s annoyed, suddenly not so tired anymore.
“I just do,” she says. She flips around again to face him. He shudders when she places two fingers on his neck scar where he got shot. It’s insanely satisfying. The last time she felt this vindicated, she’d watched all her in-laws explode. She likes the symmetry of them both having scars from that night.
“You’re too forgiving. It’s disturbing.”
“I killed your brother. With a smile on my face. Your whole family, really. How can you stand to touch me?”
“Because I like it too fucking much. Not that you didn’t have every right. If anyone earned the right to be a family annihilator, it’s you, Grace.”
Daniel says the wildest shit with utmost sincerity. Christ, she is, isn’t she? She deserves a true crime podcast dedicated to her.
“All that shit you talk, playing the sleazy brother-in-law, and what, NOTHING?” She throws her hands up in the air. “You’re right. I shouldn’t fuck you because you’d just be doing it out of a need to punish yourself—”
The bastard cuts her off by literally laughing in her face. “Oh god,” Daniel says in the most slappable tone she’s ever heard from anyone in her life. “You’re always overestimating my sense of morality. It’d be adorable if it wasn’t so irritating.”
“PROVE IT,” she snarls, baring her teeth.
When he takes a second too long, she lunges forward to bite down on his neck scar. Now that’s the most satisfying thing she’s felt.
“Jesus CHRIST,” Daniel says, using that all-too-familiar exasperated tone, like the whole world exists to be a giant pain in his ass and Grace makes up the greatest percentage of that. “Then fuckin’ get up here, Sexy Cujo.”
“Don’t do me any favors, you fucker,” she says, even though he’s already cutting her off with a touch like grabbing onto an electric fence.
“NOW,” he says, and yanks her forward with one hand balanced around her neck and the other a brand on her hip. She gasps at the casual display of strength that he rarely lets anyone see because of how he earned it.
The second she’s in his lap, his voice is an unrelenting harsh confession in her ear. “When he first pointed you out, I didn’t stop him from being with you. And I could have. I could have, but I wanted him to get you. To bring you close. To me.” He leaned in so he was right in her face while using his hand on her neck to move her forward, “into my life. Because I wanted you… for myself,” he finished, practically hissing-shouting the words by the end.
“I’m a monster,” he says in a register gone gutteral.
Grace isn’t shocked. She’s not afraid or enraged. She meets his gaze with absolute calm. “Yeah, I could tell, from the way you kept looking at me. When you hit on me it was so over-the-top. Performative. There’s no way you were that stupid around women, not with Charity as your wife. No idiot survives that.” They both pause as they realize he almost didn’t. “You were trying to get me to leave. But the way you looked at me. The way you still look at me.”
He backs off—or tries to, but she grabs the nape of his neck, digging her fingers in. He hisses, but arches into it, like he can’t help himself. “You’re all fucked-up. It’s not your fault. You’re still in freefall. You’ve gone through too mu—“
“Shut up,” Grace mutters, yanking him into a savage, brain-breaking kiss. There’s no hate in it, just monstrous desperation traded back and forth. And something else too terrifying to name just yet, so they crawl all over each other and chant each other’s names to sacrifice their sanity to that which remains unspoken. For now.
*
It really begins in the aftermath of a dead House, when the paramedics shout at stories-high flames seemingly parting like the red sea to let them pass and lead them to a body not fully dead.
It should begin after she signs off on the last of the medical bills and waits and waits to compare scars, only to realize she’s still going to be alone even though he’s back to consciousness and discharged himself from the hospital without telling her.
He continues to avoid her for weeks.
Blip.
Even in dreams she has to deal with the run-around. Whose dreams, she’s not even sure.
*
She lied. It really begins when she’s at her fiance’s side and standing across from his brother for the first time, meeting his gaze and refusing to look away from what she sees there.