Page 121 of Where the Snakes Sleep

I frown. “What?”

“Alberte hid them in your property. You found them. Until you decide what you want done with them, I will not touch anything.”

I stare at him, suspicious. “You could take the journal right now. You’re stronger than me.”

“I know.”

“Then why aren’t you?”

Camille’s expression softens with something so sad that I immediately regret asking. “Because I have spent enough time taking choices from you.”

The words hollow me out, and I look away.

Part of me wants this to be manipulation too, because holding my anger would be easier if Camille remained consistent in his awfulness. Instead, he is standing feet away from the answer to the central question of his entire life and refusing to touch it because I haven’t given permission.

It doesn’t repair anything. It matters anyway.

“I can’t do this with you standing here. I can’t even figure out what I think because every time I look at you, half of me wants to scream and the other half wants to make sure you’re okay, and I’m really fucking tired of caring whether you’re okay,” I rasp, my throat in dire need of water after all the dust and crying and whatever else I inhaled behind the wall.

Camille’s eyes close briefly. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Probably not.”

I almost laugh. It comes out as a sob instead. I turn away, embarrassed, and wipe my face with both hands.

Behind me, Camille does not move, but after a moment, he says, “Your phone was on silent. You missed several calls. I was frightened when I couldn’t find you.”

My spine stiffens. “I didn’t see anything come in.”

“I am not telling you that to make you feel guilty.”

“Good.”

“I only want you to know why I came inside.”

I glance over my shoulder. “What do you think would’ve happened if… if it wasn’t you who found me back there?” I ask, almost mutely.

He grits his teeth. “I am not sure.”

The answer should not frighten me as much as it does, but Camille has spent the last several weeks having an answer for everything, even when the answer was irritatingly qualified or buried beneath enough scientific language to make me regret asking, so hearing uncertainty from him now feels somehow worse than if he had simply told me Henri’s people would have dragged me out of the wall and murdered me on my kitchen floor. At least that I could understand. Instead, there is only Camille standing several feet away, jaw clenched hard enough that a muscle jumps beneath his skin, looking toward the hole I tore through the wall as though his imagination has already supplied several possibilities he has no intention of sharing.

I hug the journal a little closer without meaning to. “That’s comforting.”

“It was not intended to be.” He looks at me again, and the expression in his eyes makes my stomach tighten despite everything else between us. “You asked what I believe might have happened, and I genuinely do not know. Whoever entered this cottage before was searching, not stealing, and the vehicle had been watching the property well before the break-in. If that person—or anyone associated with them—knew enough to understand what Alberte may have hidden, then finding you alone inside the space with these materials could have created a situation considerably more dangerous than the first intrusion.”

The words are careful, but the fear beneath them is not. Camille can dress terror in clinical language all he wants; I have learned enough about him to hear what he is trying not to say, and despite the anger still burning through me, my gaze automatically drifts toward the kitchen windows. The sunlight outside has begun taking on the deeper amber of late afternoon, casting long shadows across the yard and making the trees beyond the cottage look thicker than they did this morning.

Until an hour ago, Henri Voclain was still partly theoretical to me, some ancient monster preserved in newspaper clippings and Camille’s obsessive research, possibly alive and possibly responsible for a dark sedan and a break-in. Alberte’s journal changed that. Henri is no longer a collection of allegations. He is the man my grandfather believed killed innocent people; the man he was frightened enough of to flee across an ocean; the man who apparently had enough reach to make investigators disappear and then live for more than two decades without leaving a trail.

And if he is alive, or even if only the people he once worked with are still around, I have just smashed open the one place somebody came searching for.

The thought sends a cold ripple down my spine.

Camille watches me register it, which irritates me because I don’t want him to know me well enough to see exactly when my anger collides with common sense.

“I’ll leave,” he says.