I positioned the needle, my hands shaking so badly I could barely hold it steady. The point of it touched her skin, dimpling the surface, and I felt the resistance of flesh that didn’t want to be pierced.
I looked at the woman beneath me. At Eliza Taylor, who’d smiled at children while damning them to hell. Who’d destroyed thirty-seven lives and walked free. Who would destroy more if she lived.
At the life I was about to end with my own hands. An act that I could never take back or pretend it didn’t happen.
The syringe trembled in my grip, the needle catching the light.
I pressed it against her skin. Felt the moment it pierced through, that subtle pop of resistance giving way.
I pushed the plunger with steady pressure.
I watched the clear liquid disappear into her bloodstream, propofol flooding her system, a wave of chemical death spreading through her veins with each heartbeat.
Her pulse continued steady for a moment, strong and regular beneath my fingers. Then it began to slow. Her breathing grew shallower, each breath further apart than the last. The life was draining out of her in intervals too small to see but impossible to miss, like watching sand slip through an hourglass one grain at a time.
I forced myself to watch, to bear witness to what I’d done. To not look away, not hide from it. If I was going to cross this line, I would do it with open eyes.
When her pulse stopped—when the rise and fall of her chest went still and the last breath left her body—I set the empty syringe down on the concrete floor.
I’d just killed someone.
The reality of it crashed over me in waves, each one threatening to pull me under. But I couldn’t afford to drown in it. Not yet. Not while Tom was watching with that expression on his face—that terrible hope and joy lighting him up from within, making him look almost beautiful in his madness.
I turned to him slowly.
I reached up and cupped his face in both hands, the way I used to before everything fell apart. My palms were against his cheeks, thumbs brushing his cheekbones with the gentleness of a lover’s touch. His eyes fluttered closed at the intimate gesture, like a man dying of thirst finally given water. It was the kind of touch he’d been desperate for since the moment he’d taken me, the acceptance he’d been craving.
I felt the weight of his attention, his hope, his desperate need radiating off him. This was what he’d wanted all along—notjust my compliance but my understanding. My acceptance. My love, twisted and broken as it would have to be.
“I understand you,” I said, my voice soft. Loving. Everything he wanted to hear. “I see you now.”
There was love in his eyes. Pure, undiluted love, shining like something holy.
He reached for the cuff still locked around my wrist, fumbling for the key in his pocket with trembling fingers. So eager to free me, to hold me properly, to celebrate this terrible communion we’d just shared.
The cuff clicked open. The metal fell away.
I was free.
For one perfect moment, we stared at each other. His hands were placed over mine, while mine held his face between my palms. A sweet and tender moment that could have been beautiful in another life, in another universe, if we had been anyone other than Tom Hayes and Shay Sawyer.
Then I drove my forehead into his nose with every ounce of strength I had.
The crack of cartilage breaking was sickeningly loud, a wet crunch that echoed in the basement. Tom fell backward with a cry of pain and surprise, his hands flying up to his face as blood poured between his fingers.
I didn’t wait.
Didn’t think.
Didn’t hesitate.
I just picked myself up and started running.
I heard Tom shouting behind me, scrambling to his feet, his voice thick and garbled through his broken nose. But I didn’t look back. Looking back would only slow me down.
Thirteen steps were taken three at a time, my hand on therailing, pulling myself up with desperate strength. Momentum and desperation carried me when muscle failed, when my legs screamed in protest.
The basement door was open—he’d left it open, careless in his moment of triumph—and I crashed through it into the main floor of the house. The front door was visible from here—across the living room, through familiar space, thirty feet that might as well have been thirty miles.
