Unraveled by Her by Wendy Leigh

voice.
    The men all drop their weapons on the spot.
    She eases the pressure on my throat and pulls me up from the ground, and as she backs away from the lake, and toward what must be the tunnel, she uses me as her human shield.
    Even if Robert’s men pick up their guns again, she’ll choke me to death before the bullet hits her. And I know that he would never let them take that risk.
    Despite the state I’m in, I start to breathe properly again. In the distance I can see the mausoleum, still ablaze with flames, and Robert is close to me, so close that if I reached out, I could almost touch him. His face is expressionless, his fists clenched, his muscles tensed, every centimeter of his body coiled like a serpent about to strike.
    And even though Tamara has me in a choke hold, as she pulls me farther and farther away from Robert and the men, I see him give a slight, imperceptible nod.
    As the sniper’s bullet speeds through Tamara’s skull, she gives a bloodcurdling shriek and lets go of me. Her eyes bulge out of her head, her neck snaps forward, and in half a second, her face is reduced to nothing but splintered bone and shards of bloody flesh.
    Robert catches me just as I am about to faint.
    And before I do, I hear his last words: “You are safe now, my darling. It’s all over. She’s dead and gone forever.”

    Afterward, with Robert’s help, I was able to piece it all together. When he received the lying letter Georgiana forced me to write and saw the signature “ Ciel ,” he knew immediately that I had been kidnapped.
    â€œBy Tamara, I knew it could only be by Tamara,” he said a few hours after the rescue, as I lay in the hospital, exhausted, drained, unable to find the words to tell him the truth about what really happened, or even to speak at all.
    Later on, I discovered that when he got my text, he sprang into action, marshaled twenty men from his private army—ex–Navy SEALs, ex-SWATs—and, most important of all, stationed a sniper, equipped with thermal-vision goggles, on the highest turret of Hartwell Castle.
    It took almost an hour for firemen to put out the fire in the mausoleum, and when they were done, the purple marble memorial to the late Lady Georgiana Hartwell was burned to ashes.
    When the media learned that the mausoleum had been burned to the ground in a mysterious fire, and with it the tomb of Lady Georgiana, the story hit the headlines. Robert was deluged with condolences and countless requests that he issue a public statement on the fire—and on his emotions, now that the grave of his late, lamented wife was nothing but a heap of ashes—but he steadfastly refused all requests.
    Meanwhile, I spend a few days in the hospital, weak, confused, locked in the past, trying desperately to remember what really happened, what didn’t, what was the truth, and what wasn’t.
    â€œWe’ve checked all her vital signs, completed all the X-rays, and there’s no physical reason for her to still be delirious,” I hear the doctor tell Robert.
    â€œPost-traumatic stress disorder,” he says, with his customary confidence, and part of me thinks he’s right. The rest of me knows he isn’t; it’s not that I’m shocked about what happened to me. I’m shocked that I haven’t told him the full story yet.
    I force myself not to dwell on that and I drift back to sleep once more.
    A few hours later, I feel the heat of Robert’s body close to me. He’s sitting on the bed now, an iPod in his hand.
    â€œI made this for you, after you disappeared,” he tells me. “All the time I searched so desperately for you, I held fast to the belief that one day we would be reunited, and that when that day came you’d listen to the words and understand,” he says.
    Then the songs ring out: “Hymne à L’Amour,” of course, and then “Earth Angel,” “On a Slow Boat to