He spotted a light coming from a nearby room and approached it slowly, cautiously, then turned through the doorway, ready for whatever villain may await him.
Hayde knelt beside Maggie, gripping onto one of his daggers, which was jammed into Maggie’s abdomen. Her dead gaze looked directly at Kinzer. It seemed to speak to his heart, telling it how he’d failed her.
His chin quivered and his face flushed as he stepped into the room, his thoughts swirling.
Hayde turned to him, his eyes seemingly filled with sympathy.
But what had happened?
A part of Kinzer suspected the worst… but a part of him believed there had to be another explanation. Hayde just had to tell him what it was. Kinzer wasn’t even sure if it’d be true, but at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to believe whatever he said.
Surely, there had to be another explanation. Hayde had been helping him. He’d helped them into this house. If he was a villain, he had had so many opportunities to kill him already, and surely he would have.
Just tell me it’s not what it looks like. Tell me it’s something else. Anything else.
“What happened?” Kinzer asked, finally stating the question that consumed his thoughts.
Hayde rose to his feet and retrieved his other dagger from its sheath. He glanced from Maggie’s corpse to Kinzer. His lip trembled.
“What does it look like?”
“No,” Kinzer said.
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
A tear rushed from Hayde’s eye. But why?
“I deserve a direct answer. Did you kill my friend?” His voice choked on the wordfriend.
“Of course I killed her. Isn’t it obvious?”
Kinzer gripped firmly onto his sword. “You could have killed me at any time. You could have sided with Janka when we were upstairs. You had chance after chance to ruin everything… but you didn’t. Why?”
Hayde smirked, but it was thwarted as his expression twitched.
“I told you,” he said. “I take care of me. I do what I need to do to survive.”
“She didn’t do anything to anyone!”
“No, but I don’t need either of you now. I just needed you to trust me so I could get in here. I was trying to get to the Christ, and I thought if you got to him…”
“For who?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know? Here you thought I worked for Janka and Veylo all along. And I did. I was their emissary, but I have another employer as well. And I needed to get to that baby.”
“So all this… everything with me…”
Kinzer almost couldn’t bring himself to say it. It was too painful. He’d seen something so beautiful in Hayde. He’d seen someone so wonderful. He’d never thought he’d be able to love like that again, and yet he had. How could something so powerful have been a lie? But he knew the answer. Because it had been that way before. The same thing had happened with Janka. What horrible curse made this always happen to him? Was he so trusting that he let in these twisted, most heinous of characters?
“It was all a lie,” Hayde said with a flinch. “You were just so stupid… so easy to manipulate… so easy to gain trust from. I would’ve thought after Janka you would’ve wised up, but no. Just as stupid as ever.”
His words ignited Kinzer’s rage. He grunted and leapt forward, readying his sword.
Hayde clashed the quillion of his dagger with the blade of Kinzer’s sword. Kinzer pushed weight on his sword so that he forced Hayde back against the wall.
“Did you honestly believe those looks, those words?” Hayde asked. “Does a simple act of seeming selflessness sway your judgment so easily?”
Hayde’s words tore through him. The pain was more severe than anything he’d experienced from any blade.
