Author's Note PLEASE READ:

I have updated this story with several new chapters and expanded others; some changes are small, but most aren't. The only chapters that remain the same are this one and the last one. If you're going to log in as a 'guest' to review chapters you've already reviewed please, please, please sign them with your username so I know who you are. Thank you all for reading, and reviews are always loved and appreciated!

This is an A.U. loosely based on Kate Chopin's The Awakening. If you haven't read it, it really doesn't matter. If you have Edna=Violet, Leonce=Callum, Robert=Tate, Adele=Moira, Alcee=David, but honestly you won't miss anything if you haven't read it.

In my version of events Violet didn't die when she took the pills, and instead her and her family fled when Tate tried to get her to commit suicide, and the whole asinine Rubber Man debacle didn't happen.

I suck at making titles so I name it for the music I write to, in this case the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club album Beat The Devil's Tattoo.

I felt her presence in the house before I saw her. I thought I was dreaming at first, but then I heard her voice in the entryway. Low, strained, fake. I heard an unfamiliar man's voice speaking to her, excited, her trying to match the excitement. Before I could think about it I was there, invisible, watching them.

"Okay, open your eyes." I felt his hand slip off my face, and I opened my eyes. I thought for a moment I was going to throw up. It was just as I remembered it. The Tiffany stained glass, the paneled wood. I willed myself to wake up from the nightmare, because that's what this must be, but I knew it wasn't.

Callum was watching me anxiously, his face dropping every second I stood in the entryway too shell-shocked for words. He put an arm around me. "I just wanted to surprise you, I knew you weren't happy about moving back to L.A., and I thought... well I know how much you love this place; you've had that picture of it on the mirror in your dorm-room since I met you."

I finally found my voice. It came out slightly hysterical, not sounding much like my own. "I'm sorry. I'm just freaking out a little bit that your parent's idea of a 'starter home' is several million dollars. This is too much." I shook my head, and looked down.

He just laughed, and whispered in my ear. "I know, but it's how they are. Are you happy?" I pulled him into a hug, so he couldn't see the lie on my face as I told him I was. I heard footsteps coming from the kitchen, and froze in place. "It's just the maid." Of course it was. Moira came into the entryway looking as horrified as I felt, but recovered herself quickly. She didn't let on that we knew each other, and I did the best I could to sound like a happy newlywed.

It wasn't until Cal was setting up his office in my dad's old one that we had a chance to talk privately. I was under the portico smoking when she walked out looking angrier than I'd ever seen her. "You shouldn't be here." She looked down at my hands, which were shaking, and made a little sound of disgust. "Still smoking those awful things."

"I quit for a while." I said distractedly. "I started again when I found out we were moving to L.A. If I'd known... I had no idea I was coming back to this house." My voice cracked, and she placed a bony hand on my shoulder before going into the house and getting me a large whiskey and soda. "Thanks." I drank half of it down in one, and took a deep calming breath.

She didn't ask, but I told her anyway. All about meeting Callum two years before at Harvard, how we were married after I graduated a few weeks before, and moved out here for his residency; the house being a ridiculous gift from his parents.

"Every girls dream. Marrying a man who's loaded and loves her." She said shrewdly. "You two have to leave. It's not safe here; you know that."

"What am I supposed to do Moira? Tell him 'Oh sorry, I know your parents just paid more cash for this house than most people make in a lifetime, but we have to leave, and I can't tell you why'?" I finished the drink. "How much danger will we be in?" She knew what I was really asking her.

"I don't know. He was watching earlier, but I don't know." I thought of the last time I saw him, running out of the house as he was trying to get me to commit suicide with him, 'like Romeo & Juliet'. "He's not here now." She said quietly as my eyes searched the air around us.

"Jesus." I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. "It feels like this house doesn't want to let go of me." I could have cried. After everything I was back here. I might as well have died when I took all those pills.

"Do you love him?" She asked quietly.

"Yes."

"Not like the monster in the basement though." Her tone was appraising, as if she was reading the answers written on my skin.

"You say it like it's a bad thing."

"You've grown up a lot Miss Violet." Approval in her voice. It made me smile that she still referred to me that way. "You made a woman's decision, not a girls." I heard Cal calling from the house and went inside.

"I'm starving. You want to go get dinner?" God, anything to get out of this house. I made him drive all the way out to Malibu to a seafood place right on the beach, and lingered as long as possible. In the car on the way back he took my hand in his, and kissed it. "I know you don't want to be here, Violet, but I promise I'll do everything I can to make you happy. Don't think I don't appreciate what you're doing." I had too much to drink with dinner, and was able to smile back at him all tipsy and goofy, making him laugh.

He held my hand the whole way home, driving with his other. I looked down at my hand in his and saw the wedding band on my finger. He made me happy, or at least he loved me, and I loved him, and he made me forget. I didn't love him like I loved Tate, but this was the right thing to do.

I thought about all the nights I'd watched her before. None of them compared to this. It used to make me happy to watch her sleep; this was torture. I'd been waiting when they came in. Followed them upstairs, and thought about snapping his neck when he came up behind her and kissed her neck, palming her ass before they got in bed. She had traced something on his wrist with her fingers for a long time before finally falling asleep. I crept over to the bed, and saw he had a 'V' tattooed there. I looked down at her sleeping form, and loved and hated her in equal measure.

I left her sleeping there with him, and stalked the house threatening every other inhabitant that they were to leave the new owners alone. I shadowed her every movement from them on. As I watched her I noticed the little changes; her hair was a few shades darker, and her body more womanly, but sill slender. Mostly though there was an awareness about her that she didn't have before. One thing that didn't change was that whatever was going on in her head, her face didn't give it away.

When he came home though, that was when I descended into hell. I spent a night watching him in his study as he poured over medical books, and wondering what the attraction was. Violet came in for a while he was working at the computer, and stood behind, one hand resting on his chest as they spoke. I could feel the bile rising in my throat. I tried to convince myself that it was simply the sappiness of her kissing the top of his head and telling him she loved him before she went to bed, but it was jealousy. I would endure seven more years without her for a moment like that.

I watched the night, a week after they moved in, as they had sex. I wanted to paint the wall with his brains at her sharp little intake of breath when he entered her. I watched as she moaned and writhed, really watched her, but in a thousand tiny ways it was different than when I was inside her. There was no love there, not for her anyway, and I wondered if I should have just let her die when she took all those pills. I wondered if we'd both be happier if I had.

We had been here a week. I was in hell. Officially. Population 1. When Moira walked in the kitchen I was smoking at the island and looking over my course schedule for graduate school. "Doesn't it bother him?" I looked up. "The smoking. He's a doctor."

"It does, but he gets it. He used to smoke too when I met him. I told him I'd quit again once things settle down. Speaking of which, why's the house to quiet?"

"I don't know." She did, but she wasn't going to tell me.

"Why is he keeping everyone in line? I didn't think he'd want me here?" She refused to meet my eye and kept scrubbing away at the counter. I sighed. "Well if we're going to get out of here you guys better put on a show. Hey, maybe you could try and seduce Callum like you did my dad."

She looked at me stonily. "It doesn't work with him." I just gaped at her. "He doesn't see me as a sex object. It's only their perception of me, you know."

"He's not gay, is he?" I really felt I'd asked that question more than enough in my life. "Doesn't matter, Patrick or Chad could take a pass at him."

She just rolled her eyes. Well, eye. "No, he loves you."

"I never thought that would be so inconvenient." I stubbed out my cigarette. "Do you know where those boxes of pictures went? I can't find them."

"I put them in the hall closet upstairs, so they'd be out of the way." I trudged up the stairs and checked the two closets without finding them, so I started checking the empty rooms, and found them in the middle of my old bedroom. I glared at them momentarily from the doorway. I know Moira didn't put them there. "Funny." I said dryly and took them back to the master bedroom. The tape had been ripped off the top, and they'd clearly been pulled out of the box and put back in haphazardly. I put on some Nick Cave, and started sorting through them. Most of them were going downstairs, but there were a half dozen I wanted in here, all of Cal and I when we were in school.

I was adjusting one of us spectacularly drunk at a friends house when the music cut off. I tilted the frame and saw Tate standing by the bed. "Why did you marry him? The money?" His voice was harsh, angry. I couldn't see his eyes, but I was sure they were solid black and slightly manic. I turned to face him, and he looked just as he always did. My heart skipped a beat just like it always did. "Why did you come back?" His tone was unbearably bitter.

"You think I wanted to come back? If I'd known he'd bought this place I wouldn't have gotten on the plane. I never wanted to come back here." I walked over and started sifting through the photos on the bed. "And I married him because I love him." I snapped, walking away with more pictures.

"Bullshit." He spat. "I've been watching you two; it's not love."

I let out a mirthless chuckle. "Why? Because he hasn't tried to kill me yet?"

I heard him rush up behind me, and braced for the blow I was sure was coming, but all I felt was his breath hot on the back of my neck. "Tell me, was it me or him you were thinking about when he was inside you last night?"

I turned my face to his and sneered, "You didn't hear me crying out your name last night did you? And why haven't you ghosts gone crazy yet? Moira told me you guys usually have the living out of here in a few days. Does it make you hard to watch me fuck him? Is that why you're keeping us around?"

I slipped out from in front of him, and as I walked away a picture went whizzing past my head and smashed into the wall in front of me. When I turned he was gone.