The darkness was rising up to meet me. I tried to fight it, tried to cling to consciousness, but it was useless.
The drug was too strong. Or maybe I was too weak.
Then the world went dark.
And I fell into nothing.
17
Tom
The park was nearly empty at this hour, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows across the walking path. Most people had already gone home for dinner, leaving only a handful of joggers and dog walkers scattered throughout the sprawling green space. Julia walked beside me, her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her jacket, her breath forming small clouds in the cooling air.
We’d met up a few times since that night at her grandmother’s house. Carefully orchestrated encounters that looked casual to any outside observer—running into each other at a coffee shop, crossing paths at the library. But there was nothing casual about it. I was monitoring her, making sure the seed of darkness I’d inadvertently planted hadn’t gone rogue despite our agreement.
So far, she seemed to be holding to her end of the promise. There were no new killings. She seemed satisfied to meet up with me once in a while and just talk.
But today, I had a different purpose for our meeting. One that made my stomach twist with something uncomfortablyclose to desperation.
“You’ve been quiet,” Julia observed, glancing up at me. “More than usual, I mean. Is everything okay?”
It wasn’t okay. Nothing was ever going to be okay again.
I was keeping Shay locked up in my basement.
Shay—brilliant, fierce, impossible Detective Sawyer—reduced to a prisoner. The space that had once been my sanctuary was now her cage. She fed on freedom the way flowers fed on sunlight—it was essential to her very nature. She was never meant to be caged.
That’s what I’d loved most about her. That wildness. That refusal to bend.
But she was wilting day after day, like a plant kept too long in darkness. I could see it in the hollowing of her cheeks, the way her eyes had lost their sharp edge, the listlessness that had replaced her usual restless energy. She was wasting away before my eyes, and I was the one killing her. Not with violence, but with captivity. With the slow, grinding cruelty of confinement.
I’d fucked up. Monumentally, catastrophically fucked up.
She’d found out I was a serial killer. Not the whole truth—she believed that I’d only killed three people: Linda Fell, Alfred Thorne, and Martin Baker. The vigilante cases she’d been investigating, the ones she’d been so certain were connected.
But she’d been wrong about one crucial detail.
The only one I actually killed was Alfred Thorne. The rest belonged to Julia.
I had no intention of telling Shay that, however.
I could still see the twist in her expression when she’d realized the truth. Her hand reaching for the knife…
I panicked.
I was ashamed to admit it, even now. I, the one who was always in control, who never let his emotions rule him, who approached everything with cold calculation and careful planning—I panicked. Felt real, visceral fear for the first time in years. Not fear of being caught or killed, but fear of losing her. Of watching her walk out that door and knowing I’d never see her again, except maybe through bulletproof glass during visiting hours.
And that panic cost me everything.
I’d moved without thinking, had grabbed her wrist and twisted. The knife clattered to the floor. She’d fought like a wildcat, all teeth and fury and desperation. We’d crashed into furniture, knocked over the dishes and lamps.
I hadhurther.
Something that I never imagined myself doing.
But it was too late now to feel any regrets.
If I were brutally honest with myself, somewhere deep down, I didn’t feel any.
