He snickered. "Noteveryother day."
"You broke into Mr. Duffy's car."
"It was for the Halloween prank! And you and Rowan both helped."
"Still breaking and entering, mate."
He smirked, completely unrepentant. "And yet, we never got in trouble. What does that tell you?"
"It tells me the universe has a real fucked-up sense of humour."
He laughed out loud at that. "Fair."
When he finally found whatever he was looking for, he flipped through a few pages and straightened in his seat. The grin faded, though not completely. "Alright. I've heard a lot about what's been happening from Rowan already. Now I need your side of it."
I sat back as I tried to pull the last several months into something that resembled a straight timeline. I walked him through it from the start – how I saw things start to shift with Marcus, how Rowan started to pull away from me, the beating, the stalking. Every now and then, Charlie jotted some notes down.
And then I admitted what I hadn't told Rowan yet. "It wasn't just him, either. Marcus started to come after me, too."
His brow lifted slightly, but he didn't interrupt.
"Started with texts. Then voicemails. I didn't tell Rowan. Marcus was wearing him down enough on his own. He didn't need any more stress."
"You still have them?"
I nodded and pulled my phone from my pocket, unlocking it and opening the text thread before handing it over.
Charlie spent a few minutes going through them. For the most part, he kept his expression unchanged, but I did occasionally catch a crack in the mask. That's when I knew he'd gotten to thereallybad ones. He wrote a few more things down, then slid the device across the desk to me. "I'll need copies ofthose before you leave. You wanna bring up the calls?"
I took the phone back to dial into my voicemail. I skipped over some of the older ones that had nothing to do with this, but when I reached the first one from Marcus, I put it on speaker and set it on the desk.
The room echoed with his voice. It was the kind of tone that tried to pass for reasonable but felt off in a way that was tough to explain. Flat. Calm. Measured. Charlie kept quiet throughout, his pen idle as he listened to the string of a dozen or so messages.
As the minutes went on, I could hear the subtle turn in Marcus's words. They tightened just a little more with each voicemail as his carefully practised patience started to fray at the edges.
Then the last message began to play. The one that made me want to hunt the bastard down the first time I heard it. This voicemail was different. The mask was long gone, and what came through was raw and ugly in a way the others hadn't been.
"You don't know when to quit, do ya? You're not invincible, Elias. And I don't like loose ends."
His next words were soft, almost casual, but they sent a bolt of ice straight through my chest."I could make you disappear, and Rowan wouldn't miss ya. He listens to me. And if he doesn't... Well. Accidents happen. Don't they?"
A dead click. The room stayed eerily quiet for a moment after that.
Charlie let out a slow breath. "Jesus. And you guys dealt with thishowlong?"
"I met him in August. I don't know when Rowan got involved with him."
He shook his head and muttered, "Guy's a goddamn Jekyll and Hyde. That wasnotthe lad I saw at the park."
"Yeah. He's good at playing the victim."
His mouth twitched with the start of a grin as hescribbled a few more notes. "I wonder if we'll find a secret lab when we search his flat. Maybe he's got some mad scientist equipment."
I shot him a flat look while trying hard not to laugh. "Yes, Charlie, I'm sure he's running a full-fledged villain's lair out of his overpriced kitchen."
"It would explain a lot, though, yeah?"
I couldn't fully hold back a chuckle.
