Music Box (The Dollhouse Books, #4) Read Free Page A

is but a shell encasing my sweet brides and it is delicate. It breaks, just like them. Jacques wilt come and carve a new limb for her. And she wilt again be whole.” His skeletal finger ran down my arm. “Look at your husband.”
    A thought tore through my mind—a thought of the old man in the dungeon room—I’d seen him repairing a life-size marionette on the first night of the désorienter . He must have been fixing one of these dolls, dolls which were all human skeletons beneath their thin veneers of wood.
    Shaking, I obeyed Balthazar and turned to him.
    He stood in his wedding suit—a charred phantom. “It is right thee shalt fear me. I am a harsh husband and thou must never displease me.”
    He reached his clawed hand toward a compartment that held a girl with dark eyes and hair. “My Etiennette. Is she not beautiful?”
    She was the girl from the chapel, the fifth bride. Turning my head away, my breath caught painfully inside my chest.
    “She had skin like a pearl and eyes of coal.” His fingers raked my shoulder. “Thou dost remind me of her. There is something of her in you. But thou skin is like morning sun on the moors. Vous êtes belle .” A long sigh rattled through him. “Ah, so beautiful but so fragile. Etiennette, she broke herself upon the rocks below the cliff. Should thou do the same, I wilt have thee brought back to me and I wilt keep thee here for all time.” He raised his hand high. “I bind thy spirit to me. Thou wilt ever be mine.”
    Bile burned my throat.
    I imagined throwing myself from the ocean passage. The blessed relief of cool black air. And death.
    But once the castle had the second book in their possession, they could have me brought back here from a hundred different earths, each girl undergoing the same terror I felt now.
    No, it had to start and end with me.
    He let his hand drop from my shoulder. “I am weary, my Cassandra—I cannot be the husband now that thee hath need of. I must rest and await my new body. Then we wilt share my bed and our loins, and you shalt bring forth a child. And I shalt again seed the world with my progeny.”
    His finger trailed down my cheek. The black slit that served as a mouth grinned. “At the death of the months of the été , I wilt come to thee and thou shalt receive me.”
    I stared at the grimy stone floor, unable to speak or move. The death of the months of the été meant the end of the summer months. In three months’ time, I would be forced to be with him in his bed. I prayed that fall would never come.
    “And now, wilt thou waltz with thy new husband, my Cassandra?”
    It was said not as a request but as a command. His claw-like hands grasped my shoulder and fingers. He led me into a stiff dance, his breath hot and dead on my neck, the only sound the swish of my wedding dress—its brittle train of lace dragging along the floor.
    Minutes passed, the stygian darkness of Balthazar’s chambers eating into my soul. My mind moved out of my body and drifted above. I could see a frozen bride in an aged bridal gown and a mottled, misshapen groom moving together in an endless waltz.
    “ Je dis bonsoir, ma belle .” His words scuttled across me like insects.
    “Each midnight,” he told me, “thou may go unto the ocean passage, to take sea air into thy human lungs. Alas, the air in my chambers hath proved poisonous to some of my brides. But before dawn thou must return. If thou dost not return, I shalt be woken. And my fury shalt rage like ocean storms.”
    Taking my hand, he led me to the bed and pulled back the curtain. “Thou wilt take rest here, beside me, until I pass into slumber.”
    He laid himself down, crossing his arms over his torso—in exactly the same way that Jessamine used to do, in the same way she had insisted we all should sleep.
    Panic rattled through me as I moved onto the bed and placed my arms across my chest.
    Desperation pricked my skin. How would I even know when it was dark or light outside? I gazed to the