Madness. That was what.

And that meant I had to keep it together. Already, though, my hands had begun to shake.

Because the chest that waited behind the drenched fabric belonged to a corpse. Someone who had been dead for a long time. Someone who shouldn’t be standing or walking, let alone bleeding.

Of course, I’d known what I would find. Conceptually.

After catching that glimpse of his cheekbone, I hadn’t had difficulty picturing what he must look like under his regalia. And that image hadn’t been any worse than what now lay before me. But it had been in that hazy, uncertain space inside my head where horrors could lurk but not live.

God. His ribs. I could have counted them. Together, they formed a cage shrink-wrapped by dark yellow and, in places, blackened skin.

Still, my now dripping fingers worked at the buttons that seemed never to end until, abruptly, they did—leaving me to stare at a stomach that made my own churn.

His entire torso resembled the shriveled core of a rotten apple, shrunken and withered and wasted.

Taut, leathery flesh stretched unbroken over his abdomen. If there was nothing inside of him, though, if everything had been removed, then where was all this blood coming from?

I swallowed, the memory of what Lucas had told me in the dream resurfacing in my mind. He’d said they’d found blood in Charlie’s room. Blood that had not been hers or my father’s. It was obvious now whose blood it had really been. But then, if the blood they had found was Erik’s . . . why had it matched mine?

My gaze trailed down the left side of his sunken, concave stomach, to where there ran a black slit. An incision.

Past it, one of the roses that had bloomed on the previously dead vines caught my attention, its petals snow white on the outside, blood red on the inside. Just like the ones I’d brought to the house that day.

In the basement, when I’d asked about his heart, he’d said that he’d lost “all of them,” before referring to himself as “hollow.”

Nausea crept over me as my fingers went to the bloom. I seized the flower—and pulled it free.

Cradling the rose in my right hand, I made a loose fist around it to protect it. Then, without letting myself think, I passed my fist into the papery opening—where his organs must have been extracted.

He made no move to stop me. And because he wasn’t breathing, because he couldn’t, I couldn’t either.

The total hollowness he’d alluded to awaited my hand, and weirdly enough, that helped me not to stop dead in the midst of what I still wasn’t sure I was doing.

He remained motionless as my wrist and then half my arm vanished inside him. As my bid to deliver a heart to him brought us closer, I caught, under the coppery tang of blood, the scent of lavender and honey. The same scents I’d smelled that night he’d brought me here in a dream.