Farm Stay Widow's Spare Room

I am Leilani, twenty-eight, and three months a widow when I first turned onto the rutted drive of the Voss farm. The city had become a mouthful of ash after my husband’s funeral—too many casseroles, too many pitying eyes—so I answered the online listing for a spare room on a decaying Gothic farm an hour past the last decent cell tower. Cheap solitude, the ad promised. I did not expect Eleanor Voss.

She met me on the porch in a black dress that drank the afternoon light, forty-two and striking in the way old oil portraits are striking: high cheekbones, a mouth that knew secrets, dark hair pinned loosely so strands framed her throat. The Victorian house behind her sagged in elegant ruin—cupolas like broken teeth, shutters that never quite closed, windows that reflected candle flames even at four in the afternoon.

“You’ll take the east room,” she said, voice low and smoked. “It faces the orchard. The nights run cold. I keep candles burning. The wiring is… unreliable.”

That first evening I learned what unreliable meant. Cold spots drifted through the hallway like living things. Floorboards groaned under weight that wasn’t mine. And in the tall mirror opposite my bed, just as I unbuttoned my blouse, I saw him: a man in the corner who was not a man, silver eyes hungry and fixed on the line of my collarbone. When I spun, the corner was empty. When I looked back, he was closer.

I should have left. Instead I lay awake tasting my own pulse, and when sleep finally took me I dreamed of a mouth at my ear whispering stay, and of Eleanor’s hand sliding between my thighs while a cooler, broader hand pinned my wrists. I woke wet and furious with myself, and still I did not pack.

By the fifth night the dreams had teeth. Nikolai—Eleanor spoke his name once in passing, soft as a bruise—stood at the foot of my bed in every one of them, solid enough that I could map the scars on his chest, the way his cock thickened when I parted my legs for him in the dream-logic. Eleanor was always there too, stroking my hair, murmuring that hunger was nothing to be ashamed of. I answered them both with my body, arching, begging, and each morning I woke with the phantom ache of being filled and the terrible, thrilling certainty that I wanted the ache to become real.