Ophelia Read online

  Ophelia

  Tara Brown

  Ophelia

  by Tara Brown

  This is a work of fiction.

  All names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright 2019 Tara Brown

  Text Copyright © 2019 Tara Brown

  This work is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This work may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written consent of the publisher.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. No alteration of content is permitted.

  Published by Tara Brown.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Art by Dark Tree Designs

  Edited by Andrea Burns

  All rights reserved.

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  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  The End

  Other Books by Tara Brown

  About the Author

  Sweets to the sweet, farewell!

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene I

  Today

  Tuesday, December 24

  My first Christmas alone.

  Except I’m not alone.

  The many footsteps on the hollow-sounding cobble in the courtyard create their own sort of echo. A white noise made by strangers rushing in excitement at the snow falling on the frozen yard next to us. My breath leaves my mouth as mist. I purse my lips and blow a little more, as if exhaling a cigarette.

  But I don’t smoke.

  She did, and for the first time, I am grateful for it. Her memory will trigger in my mind whenever I walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  And lilacs.

  Always lilacs.

  I wish I could smell them now. I’d do anything to breathe air with her in it again.

  It’s a long time coming, but the absence of her in my life hits me hard. The tears catch me off guard.

  Refusing to cover my face, I let them stream down my cheeks as I walk out onto the crunchy frozen grass, standing under a tree near the cloisters where I just sought shelter.

  I came to Oxford for him, and somehow, she’s the one haunting me.

  I wish they’d both appear. Two ghosts to keep me company.

  But as lonely as I am, I remind myself to be grateful. This is better than being dead, even if I am stuck missing my old life. A life I shouldn’t miss.

  I lift my face to the hazy sky where the falling snow is one with the clouds, invisible until it gets close enough to touch the branches next to me, and then it appears all at once. A flurry coming down on us. The others in the background, strangers playing in the grass, spin and laugh and play.

  Whereas I let the tears fall back and close my eyes, feeling the soft touch of the icy snowflakes as they land and begin to melt. I tell myself they’re the icy caress of the dead. People I loved. Their cold fingertips become streams joining the ones flowing from my eyes.

  My fingers curl into balls, clutching the mittens I had made. In my mind, I’m holding on to him, just as I do every time I slip my hands into the mitts. The gloves, which were once a sweater much loved by a man I loved, cover and keep me warm.

  Missing them both and succumbing to my melancholic ways is too easy, maybe because it’s Christmas, perhaps it’s that I’m habitually gloomy.

  When I open my eyes and lower my face to wipe it clean, a movement catches my attention. A shadow. A man moves in the pillars of the cloisters. A navy peacoat, dark hair, a handsome face. He wears the tragedy of his own death well. Of course, he does. He’s tragically beautiful, despite being a spirit. Or a hallucination.

  The right side of his perfect mouth lifts just slightly, hinting at that smile.

  Unafraid, I walk to him, crunching on the winter grass to the entrance. We don’t speak, I don’t think he can. We amble along, hardly moving. I imagine what his footsteps sound like, even hearing them if I’m quiet enough.

  When we finally reach the end where the large arched wooden doors are, I lean against the pale brick wall and stare at him. He’s not the same kind of ghost as she was. She’d startled me when she first showed herself.

  He’s not pale or damaged. He’s perfect in the places I can see. I would wager that if I were able to reach into the other world and undress him, I would find a hole. A grotesquely stained hole would mar his beautiful chest. The spot where I’d once rested my head, listening to the heartbeat that now would be noticeably missing. Today it would be an empty echo chamber that I could whisper my love into, and like a seashell, it might whisper back. But it wouldn’t be real. He’s not real.

  He finally smiles, and I wish he were really here.

  By the suggestive grin on his face and the way he keeps flexing his hands, fighting reaching for me, in what would be an impossible embrace, I suspect he wishes it too.

  “Happy Christmas,” I whisper.

  “Happy Christmas,” I swear he whispers back.

  I squeeze the mitts tighter and pretend it’s his hands holding mine.

  A feeling I will have to learn to live without.

  Chapter 1

  Saturday, July 6

  Death had been biding his time, lurking behind doors and watching through windows. Waiting. Choosing wisely and striking when it would matter the most. There really was nothing more perfect than a well-timed death.

  That time had come, though I didn’t know why now, nor was I convinced death was done. Not with the Jacobi family.

  I had a dream about it. The whole of the Jacobi home, Elsinore, was burning while I was on the lawn, staring at the castle-like mansion as it went up in flames. At the end of the dream, I walked across the ashes barefoot and found the family portrait, the one I was currently staring at, seeing the faces had been burned, leaving only bodies behind. Headless Jacobis.

  My psychic, Madam Esmeralda, told me that the dream had been an omen to stay away from them. Death was warning me. She said it was not something he liked to do, which meant there was a reason for sparing me.

  But instead of heeding his message, I stood alone in the long hallway of the Jacobi family mansion. I was stuck gazing past the wrought iron sconces that glowed like small golden spotlights, casting intermittent lighting and shadows along the elegant hand-painted wallpaper, at the family portrait.

  It chilled me to the bone t
o see it now.

  Nevertheless, I walked toward it, running my fingers across the gilded paper, tracing the ombré effect used to draw leaves and wildflowers to create a lie of tranquility and peace. Against the cream-colored wainscoting and gold-leaf trim, it produced a memory of the palace of Versailles. A place I’d been as a child.

  Footsteps on the marble floor alerted me. Mindful I shouldn’t be in this part of the house, I hid in one of the shadows. Leaning on the wall, I pretended to examine the skill that had gone into recreating the family portrait at the end of the hall, as if I hadn’t seen it dozens of times. But this time it was different. Despite the distance, all I saw was the version from my dream. Burned faces over pristine bodies. A macabre warning from a deathly deity.

  And oddly, it wasn’t the eeriness of the dream that haunted me, but rather the foreshadowing. As Madam Esmeralda said it would, the nightmare was coming true, which was why I was in the hallway at all. I’d come to see if the two faces of the dead family members had actually charred somehow.

  But they hadn’t. Not really. Only in my mind.

  The painting was perfect though seven days ago, the once three people and four dogs had been cut down to two people and three dogs. Two primary members of the Jacobi family were missing. Dead.

  Romeo, a French bulldog who had a penchant for my brother’s leg, had mysteriously died the same day as his master, King Hamlet Jacobi. Though I could uncomfortably admit, Romeo’s death bothered me more than the king’s. I loved the dog. He’d been an integral part of my childhood.

  A smile lifted my lips as I raised my glass to the black-and-white dog in the painting, praying death wasn’t watching me mock his warning. I hadn’t wanted to come, I’d been forced to be here and pay my respects.

  And now that I was here, I offered a hope that Romeo was in dog heaven attempting fornication on someone who hated it nearly as much as my brother Laertes did.

  “You’re not actually toasting my father, are you?” a voice asked from behind me. The footsteps must have belonged to him. A very specific him. A him I had spent the entirety of the spring and early summer avoiding at all costs. A him who made every tiny hair on my body stand on end.

  “Romeo,” I accidentally said the dog’s name aloud without turning to face the man. Pins and needles covered me as I stared at the painted version of the man behind me, taking the second I needed before having to spin around. He would be a thousand times more attractive in real life than the painting, tragic and handsome in ways that begged to be soothed and smoothed over. And I needed to prepare for the effect that had on me.

  My fingers trembled as I spun slowly, offering a look of comfort and care, hoping to hide the echoes of discomfort surely bursting from me. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean that—it’s just your dog might have been my favorite pet in the whole world. Your father was a good man, and you know I happily toast him as well.” The lie about King Hamlet slipped too quickly from my painted red lips. He hadn’t been a good man. He also hadn’t been a bad man, just a powerful one who frequently felt his self-importance exceeded everyone else’s. Typical in the men I was often surrounded by. Notably, the one in front of me.

  Lucas Hamlet Jacobi, the prodigal son, the Prince of New Denmark, was just as I feared—perfect. Painfully so.

  His heartbreaking stare found its way to mine, sucking me in. He wore his losses beautifully.

  “My father ran a crime syndicate, Ophelia. I am quite aware of who he was.” He chuckled bitterly and leaned against the wall, not twenty steps from me, lifting his glass to his lips and finishing it off in a single swallow. He was visibly drunk and not pretending to be sober for my benefit. He dropped the rock glass to the floor, making a sharp thud. The Murano crystal didn’t break. “But I loved him, just the same. And you’re right, Romeo was the greatest companion anyone could have. A dog to write sonnets about.” The declaration stabbed at my chest. I hated him being in pain, even if all he ever did was cause me the worst kind of agony. “I will miss him more than I want to.”

  “How are the other dogs taking it?” I managed to ask.

  “Not well.” He pushed off the wall and walked to me, infuriating my troubled insides as they balled tighter, and I prepared for the embrace and the kiss. The contact of our lips would lead to a struggle as we refused to let go while making our way clumsily into one of the many rooms in the mansion, removing clothing in a frenzy. At least that was how it had been last time. The only time.

  What would happen in there as the doors closed would set me back another year. Nineteen would be ruined along with eighteen. Hopefully, not as devastating as seventeen. Seventeen had been unbearable.

  I braced for impact, but Lucas brushed past me, his warm fingers tracing along the back of my hand, sending shivers everywhere at once. I didn’t follow him to the portrait. I couldn’t move. Disappointment matched relief, and I was stuck between begging him to love me and running away. I didn’t want to see the portrait again anyway. But leaving was impossible, the desire to tell him what I’d seen was too strong. I wanted to save him, even if it meant saving him from himself. But at what cost? My sounding crazy and being locked away again?

  “What brings you to this specific hallway?” He asked though I thought it seemed obvious I’d come to toast the dog. “You didn’t see anything, did you?” He sounded strange, confused maybe.

  “Just the dog,” I managed to say.

  “I don’t understand how Romeo died with my father,” he admitted quietly.

  “My mother said it was heartbreak,” I blurted as I spun again, taking a huge inhale, hoping to calm my nerves.

  “Mine said the same thing,” he muttered, turning back. “Our mothers—” He didn’t finish it. I didn’t need him to.

  Our mothers were cut from the same cloth. Women married to men their families had chosen for them. Women accustomed to a life of making excuses and smoothing things over. The type of life I should expect to begin for myself at any moment.

  If I was honest it was the life I was currently hiding from, in this hallway.

  “Laertes said you wanted to transfer to Brown for your second year,” Lucas changed the subject, but it didn’t fix my predicament. My brain read too much into the fact he and my brother had discussed me in any way.

  “Father said no.” I scoffed and lowered my gaze, ashamed at the declaration. Standing in front of the reason I wanted to go to Brown added injury to admitting I had no hold over my own future. Something I didn’t need to tell him about; Lucas knew better than I did. “I’ll be returning to New Denmark University in September. What about you? Will you transfer to NDU from Oxford? Come home and take over the kingdom?” The conversation was strained and awkward, partly because his gaze never left my red lips.

  “We all agreed my uncle Claudius should be the head of the family for now. He’s been working with my father for decades. And it’s only July, so I should be all right to go back to England for September. It is apparently adequate time for one’s heart to heal over such losses,” he answered robotically as if in a trance and this was an answer he’d given dozens of times. What he said next wasn’t prepared, it was cruel, though he wouldn’t know it, “I like your lipstick.”

  “Thanks,” I managed to speak, though the panic inside me raged out of control. Sweat formed in my palm as I balled my hand, digging nails into flesh and squeezing the glass in my other grip to prevent it slipping.

  He walked closer, as if granting himself permission to do the unthinkable by way of his confession, but my gaze drifted past him to the painting. It shifted in front of me, becoming charred and ruined, predicting more death. I shook my head involuntarily. “I have to go.” I spun and hurried away from him and death. No, ran. I ran away.

  I just turned the corner as Lucas shouted, “Ophelia!”

  My pace quickened, though the black satin dress I wore was not meant for exercise. A seam ripped in the side, lengthening the slit and showing more thigh than was suitable at a wake.

 
But it didn’t slow me until I got around the next corner and saw the entrance I was moving toward. Safety.

  I took deep breaths to slow my heart as I placed the empty champagne glass on the piano and hurried across the music room to the entrance of the great hall where everyone else would be.

  “What are you doing? You looked like you saw a ghost,” Lucas said, huffing his breath as he ran after me.

  I had seen one, sort of. But how to tell Lucas that? Especially, when he had been looking at me—no devouring, he had been devouring me with his eyes.

  Reaching my destination, I placed a hand on the door, ready to push through but didn’t. I paused, foolishly, peering back at Lucas. The man who had ripped my heart out more times than I could count. I knew we weren’t meant for each other. He wasn’t someone who planned to love another person forever. Every instinct, including a supernatural warning, told me to push through and enter the room on the other side to safety.

  But I didn’t.

  The pause spoke volumes about my sense of self-preservation or lack thereof. My lips parted to warn Lucas about the painting, but he spoke first.

  “I think about you. About that night. I think about us,” he said before he crossed the room with long strides, his eyes fiery with passion. I knew the taste and feel of what was about to happen. A shudder nearly buckled my knees in anticipation.

  But an angel of mercy appeared.