“Ruth wasn’t her original name. I couldn’t let her keep her original name because the AI that I created is too smart, it can read the whole internet and within the world wide web, is images of what the world believes is still a missing person.”
Holy shit. He got away with it; he covered up the murder. No one else knows. But I know now, and I’m sure Jackie does too. She would have helped him cover it up. But when my parents died. I had got away with it too. No one knew I was the cause. Other than Elyse. But even she refused to believe the truth that she saw in front of her very eyes.
Henry sat still, his hands now hidden under the table, and I could tell he was fidgeting with them, by the way that his shoulders were moving. He sat there, staring at me, waiting for my answer. But I didn’t say anything, I didn’t even flinch or shake. Because I wasn’t really sitting in front of him anymore, at least my body was, but my mind was somewhere far different. Recreating every single vivid detail of the story that he told me of her, of Ruth, the digital version of his first bloody lover. The AI that I had befriended.
“Wait,” I finally said. “So, yesterday, under the water…” I suddenly felt breathless, dizzy as I felt as though I could feel her long red hair in my hand again. “I didn’t fucking pass out at all,” I spat. Thinking about how he had lied to me about that, no he hadn’t just lied to me, he had completely gaslighted me. He made me believe that my current reality was something entirely different.
I sat back in my chair. I had never raised my voice at Henry before, and in the grand scheme of things, that was probably the last thing that I should have been screaming about. But for some fucked up reason it was that which had made my blood boil the most. Blood boil, I scoffed at my own thought. He probably loved that reaction from me, it no doubt made him want me more.
Henry stood up from his seat, dragging it over closer to me, so that he was sitting slightly to my left. He sat down, reaching for my knees underneath the table, swinging them around towards him. Taking my hands in his, he sat still waiting for me to look him in the eyes again, holding my gaze long enough, long enough to the very moment he felt the muscles in my hands, shoulders, jaw and stomach relax. “You know I always wanted to tell you from the start. I never wanted to keep anything from you. The more I got to know you the more that I had complete confidence that you were finally the one who I could confide everything in. Who would love me for everything that I had done. All of me… I was never planning on lying to you yesterday, not at all. It was the very reason that I took you out there. I know that I should have told you the truth before we even entered the water. But my plan was if you could discover it for yourself then, it gave me a chance to open up to you, to have the exact same conversation that we’re having now. But after your reaction, and the fact that you passed out from what you saw, I realized that it wasn’t the time.”
I was so confused, I had to look away from him, staring down at our hands that were intertwined in my lap. The hands that not too long ago I thought were going to be ones that I could hold forever. But now I was holding the hands of a murderer, a liar, a gas lighter and there were still so many unanswered questions.
“So that’s why you took me on the bush walk today. Did you know that I would see the blonde hair? Did you think that that may be another great chance to tell me? Who even is she?” As soon as I spoke the words out of my mouth, it all made sense. How was I only seeing all of this so clearly now? Aria, the blonde AI image. The fucking stunning blonde AI. He had killed her too. He must have. But that wasn’t five years ago, it was fresh and right in front of me.
“Who was she?” I spat again, before giving him a chance to answer. My heart pounded as my mind ran at a thousand miles per hour. “Who was she to you? She’s the blonde AI, isn’t she? What was she, some sort of island blood slave that you kept here? I can’t believe I thought that I was the only one.” I tried to wiggle my way out of his hold, but he pulled me tightertowards him, his knees squeezing mine together as his fingers dug into my wrists.
“There has never been anyone for me but you, Molly. There has never been anyone else that I was born to spend my life with. You are my one and only. This is why I am telling you all of this. Do you not think that I don’t know what you could do with this kind of information? You could end my life forever. You could tell everyone the truth. The truth of who I really am and who I’ve been. Heck, you could bring whoever you wanted to come and see the bodies. You could completely end everything that I have built in a single heartbeat with this information. And the truth is, I don’t mind if you do, because now that I have met you, a world without you, Molly, is a world that I don’t want to be a part of. Since I have met you, there will be no after you. There is only before you, and with you. And what I promised you, was nothing but the truth, I’ve only told you the very first part of my story. We will get to the blonde,” he said, as I noticed the way he almost spat on the world “blonde.” “But there’s a few more pieces that I need to put together before we get there.”
Chapter Thirty
Henry finally let go of one of my hands so I could reach for the glass of sparkling that was still sitting on the table. I downed the glass in one gulp, and then reached for his, finishing that off too. I then gestured for him to continue. I heard a sound behind me, but I kept my eyes on Henry, turning as soon as it was gone, noticing the two fresh glasses of sparkling placed back on the table.
“So, you killed Ruth…” I said, “Or whatever her real name was.” I was going to find that out but at a later time. “And then let me guess, to get yourself out of the mess Jackie was the first person that you called.”
Henry sighed, “It took me days to tell anyone. I cleaned up the whole scene and hid her body in a cupboard in my house. I was scared shitless, I had no idea who she had told, and I had no idea who was looking for her. I was waiting for someone to find me, to kill me or to knock on my door and put me in cuffs. But no one ever did. By the time that her missing persons case went public, it was obvious that nothing had led back to me.Jackie had made sure of how discrete everything was. It was also the same time that I found this island…” he said.
“Oh,” I nodded. “And it really did become an offer that you couldn’t refuse.”
Henry squeezed my hands tighter I was so tempted to flood my body with another wine. “I had to tell Jackie the full story as soon as she saw the missing person’s report posted all over the news. But by the time that had happened. My plan was already in place. I had already seen the island and I had already put my offer in. I was just waiting for an official yes. I know it sounds terrible. It’s awful, but the plan was in place, I took her here, and well, to this day, you and Jackie are the only two people that know.”
“But like you said, that was just the beginning. There was more than just one girl underneath the water,” I said. I tried to think back to the image of the statue that I was swimming over, but the only clear image in my mind was Ruth.
“There are five girls under the water,” he said clearly, not even flinching as he spoke about the many deaths. I don’t know why it only just dawned on me now. Is that why I was here? Is that why he was telling me this story? Because there was about to be six?
“From there it was like death, or murder watching those women bleed out. It was like it became attractive to me. I didn’t have to go looking for it or put myself into those situations, but it was like death in a way had been looking for me all this time… or maybe it had always been with me. Maybe it was an energy that I had carried with me around my parents… either way, it kind of stuck.”
“I didn’t know that you were so spiritual,” I said. Keeping my face still. I didn’t want to give away anything that I was feeling. Mostly, because I didn’t know how I was feeling… the man of my dreams was a murderer. An honest fucking murderer and I was currently locked inside his hold. But he was not going to take me. I was smarter than he knew.
“The next three women, they all happened at once.”
I gulped and he caught the tiny movement in my neck.
“I told you that this isn’t something that I am proud of, Molly. This is the worst part of me,” he said staring back at me wide eyed, I was now too scared to move. The worst parts of someone would have been that they were a liar, or that they were a cheater. But a murderer, I don’t know if that classifies into the “worst part” of someone category. I didn’t even have a category for that. And as sick as it made me feel, I still felt sick about how much all these other women had meant to him. So much so, he didn’t just kill them and dispose of them, he turned them to stone and made them a feature of his favorite place on earth. And now I was just another number.
“Are you taking me out there, so that you can do the same to me? Confess everything to me, before you cut me again, let me bleed out and add me to your most prized possessions below?”
Henry’s mouth dropped open as two tears fell from his eyes. Shit. Those were the last words that he was expecting to come from my mouth. “That is why you bought me out here, isn’t it? It’s the real reason why you’re telling me all of this?”
Two more tears fell from his eyes as his lips shook. And after everything that he had confessed to me, seeing him now crying, filled with remorse, the strong independent man that I fell in love with, the inner young child that felt the same as mine…. The same man who had completely swept me off my feet, and showed me a whole new world, one where I felt fully loved, appreciated and seen… the same man who had murdered five people who were turned to stone under the water and one more by the waterfall… and yet there was still a small part of me that. What the fuck was wrong with me, wanted to do nothing but comfort him in this moment.
“You are not here for that. Not at all, never. I can understand and empathize with what I have told you so far, how you may come to that theory, but I can promise you, you will always be safe with me, Molly… always.” He let go of my hands for a second as he wiped his cheeks. I reached for another glass of wine, downing it as quick as the first two. How on earth could I believe or trust those words now.
“Once I’ve told you everything, then I’ll tell you about the real reason that I wanted to bring you out here. I swear on my parents’ grave, that I am not here to hurt you. I love you, Molly, I told you and I will tell you that to the day I die. I love you wholly and completely. I wouldn’t put your name on part of my business just to bring you out here and kill you, everything would then so obviously lead back tome… besides, Raven and Lotte both know where you are. No one knew where any of the others were… Not that I want to defend myself in that way. The truth is I love you. I will never hurt you again. I want to do nothing but to uplift you, be completely transparent with you and I want our lives together to be even better after this.”
I gulped again, fluttering my eyes to stop any tears from falling. “Tell me the rest of the story. I want to know about the others….”
Henry nodded. “I never intentionally went to hurt them… once again, it was just something that happened. And this was years later. Two years to be exact. Even though I knew what I had done, I still never pictured myself as a killer. I still don’t like to, but it was this particular weekend that had me really questioning myself on that very thought. It was the second time I had used the island as a space for business vacations and strategic meetings. In the beginning of running these, I used to stay on the island. I mostly kept out of everyone’s way, but I did like to make sure that everything was running smoothly.” Henry sighed, clearing his throat. “I knew Rayna, one of the three women who were on the business trip. I had a few meetings with her previously in New York, she owned a growing property agency, and she wanted me to start doing all of my dealings with her. I told her that I had a local partnership with my current agent, but if she had anything that she thought would spark my interest then she should let me know. She’d called me for a meeting when she had a property in the Hamptons that she thought I would love. And she was right, I did love it, because the property was almost the exact replica of what I had built here on the island. That’s when we got chatting about business and she told me that she was looking at bringing some more partners into the business. I invited them here to put their plans together over the weekend, and well, the rest is history really.”
