“He couldn’t have… You can’t be serious…” Lark whispers.
“Dead serious, unfortunately,” I reply, putting the phone on speaker as I sit on the couch and pull Winston onto my lap. “I just booked a flight back to Raleigh. I want to get out of Boston right away. Can I stay at your place for a little bit until I figure out what the fuck to do with the tenants in my house?”
“Of course. Always. As long as you want. Text me your flight details and I’ll change my flight so we can leave together.” A string of swears and disbelief flows from Lark as I text her my flight number. When the details come through, she repeats the information before she heaves a long sigh. “Oh sweetie, there has to be some kind of mistake. That man loves you.”
My huffed laugh is bitter and sardonic. “That’s what I thought too. But he made it pretty clear that he doesn’t. I’m a ‘fucking psycho’, apparently, and therefore can neither love nor be loved. I guess that’s not news. Turns out, I’m too psycho even for him.”
“That’s what he said to you? And you didn’t pluck his eyeballs out and flush them down the toilet?”
A faint smile passes over my lips and fades away just as quickly as it appears. “I probably should have.”
“What else did he say?”
“I dunno, some weird stuff,” I reply, trying to remember the recent details that already seem hazy beneath the pain. “He said I needed to go home, and at first I thought he meant here, to the apartment. But then he said ‘no, to Raleigh’. When I asked why, he wouldn't give me a reason at first, just that it wasn’t working between us and that the restaurants had to take priority.”
“But I thought it was working.”
“Me too.” I pick at Winston’s fur, replaying every word of our breakup, even though I’d give anything to forget them all. “I asked him to talk it through together. That was something he’d said at Fionn’s place, that we would talk about stuff like normal people do.”
“That sounds reasonable and pretty non-psycho to me.”
“Yeah. Same. Then he said something kind of strange.” My brow furrows as I open the search function on my home screen and type in the word ‘lobby’. It brings up a message from Rowan as one of the options, and I press on it to open his text. “He said that he ‘never wanted to be like everybody else’. He claimed specifically that he’d told me that on the way to the Best of Boston gala on April tenth.”
“Okay… what’s weird about that?”
“I don’t remember him saying that. Not ever. And the gala wasn’t on the tenth.”
Lark pauses. She’s probably thinking I’ve lost my shit, and she might be right. “Maybe he got the date wrong?”
“But the gala was two days before his birthday, on the twenty-seventh. Don’t you think that’s kind of strange that he wouldn’t remember that?”
“Sweetie, I dunno. If he’s in the midst of a breakup and obviously stressed about restaurant shit, he might have gotten the dates wrong.”
“I guess, but then he corrected himself and said the thirteenth. It’s the way he said it, the way he put it all together. It was just weirdly specific,” I reply, scrolling through messages he and I shared around those dates. “He said something else about our conversation in the car on the way to the event, that ‘the restaurant was the only thing that made sense in his life’. But I’m positive he never said that.”
“Hun, Sloane, I love you. I love you more than anyone, sweetie, but he might not fully remember all the details. I mean, he’s clearly fucked in the head if he’s going to give you up, so who knows what’s going on upstairs, you know?”
Lark keeps talking, explaining every reasonable theory for why he could have said what he said.
But I don’t hear a word as I push the cat from my lap and rise to my feet.
Because I’m staring at a text I’d sent him at the end of March, the same day he’d called and asked me to be his date for the awards.
Do you think this gala will have an ice cream buffet? If so, I should probably let them know that you only accept freshly-milked semen.
My blood turns to shards of ice in my veins.
I remember holding that white tub in my hands in Thorston’s kitchen as I read the homemade label to Rowan.
April tenth to thirteenth.
I know what he said on the way to the gala. I remember it as clearly as I remember the warmth of the kiss he’d pressed to my neck in the lobby, the tingle of electricity in my skin when he’d taken my hand across the leather seat during the drive. ‘At least one thing is going right at 3 In Coach’, he told me. ‘Stuff inevitably goes wrong. It just… feels like a lot lately.’
Lark is still talking when I say, “I have to go,” then disconnect the call.
My fingers are cold and numb when I open the app for the camera I installed in the restaurant kitchen.
My stomach churns as I take in the details on the screen.
“No…” Tears flood my vision. “No, no, no…”
I clutch at my heart as it shatters for a second time. Blood drains from my limbs. The edges of my vision darken and I press my eyes closed tight. A sound of anguish tumbles past my lips as my knees buckle, my phone dropping from my hand. I know the horror I just saw is real. But there’s no time to fall apart.
What if you’re not fast enough?
I don’t answer that question. I can’t. The only thing I can do now is try.
I swallow the lance of pain and steady myself to take one turn in the middle of the room. My gaze lands on my leather case where I keep my scalpel among my pencils and erasers.
Hands shaking, I pick up my phone and dial the Unknown Caller, a contact whose name I never entered into my phone. He answers on the second ring.
“Spider Lady,” Lachlan says. “What’s the occasion?”
“I need a favor. Urgently,” I reply as I whip my case from the side table and stride toward the door. “You have as long as it takes for me to run twelve blocks.”
“Sounds fun. I like a challenge. What do you need?”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” I say, already descending the stairs by twos. “And you’re going to give me everything you can find on David Miller.”
OceanofPDF.com
22
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FINESSE
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ROWAN
The sharp edge of the mandolin lays against my inner forearm between the ropes that bind me to the chair. My palms face upward in curled fists, my short nails digging into my flesh as I brace against the pain I’ve already endured and that which is yet to come. Ragged breaths saw from my chest and I grit my teeth. I know what’s about to happen. Blood already pours from two other wounds, and he’s determined to get the perfect slice this time.
The blade catches in my skin and peels it from the flesh beneath.
I swallow a scream as David pushes down to resist my futile struggle and glides the mandolin toward my elbow until a thin strip of my skin is cut away. He tosses the bloodied tool onto the prep counter where it skids to a halt next to his gun.
Then he tears the flap of skin free from my arm with a merciless tug as the sound of my distressed cry fills the room.
“You know, I developed a taste for this at Thorsten’s,” David says as he leans close until he takes up all the space in my vision. He grips my hair with one hand and wrenches my head back to smile down at me. His once vacant eyes are not fucking vacant anymore. They are ravenous. And they’re pinned on me. “Did you develop a taste too?”
Blood drips across his fingers from the sliced skin pinched between them. I thrash in my chair but can’t escape his hold.
