Then he walked back around the bed, towards where the box sat, grabbing the remaining chunk of Rowan’s heart.
No!
41
BETH
I do.
Terror had struck Braemont.
It wore the shape of a bloodthirsty monster who turned the city into his playground, people into pieces, spilling blood wherever the impulse struck.
It had been seven days of uninterrupted horror. Headlines were screaming, and church bells had been mourning without rest.
Rowan McRae was dead.
But so was Alastair McLeod two days after.
Followed by Taylor Johnson.
Then Ewan MacGregor.
Finland Campbell.
Hampshire Buchanan.
Lachlan Stewart.
Rory MacAllister.
Duncan Sinclair.
Tavish MacLaughlin.
Ten names.
Ten endings.
I knew all of them.
Some had sat a few rows away from me during class. Some had bumped into me while I was searching for Kenzo in the football team’s locker room, some walked up to me at the community park. And some simply handed coffee to me with a soft smile, learning my order by heart, stealing my attention.
Oh, I knew all the ten names too well. Because once upon a time, I had let them touch me. Had called it two adults doing adult things. I had done more than kiss them. I had wrote their names in my diary.
Their deaths were wrong in the same way. Too deliberate, not rage, not chance.
I didn’t need proof or a confession. I knew who had done it.
He was sitting right next to me.
Zaghan had called the killings accounting.
I was the one who wrote their names. He simply crossed them out. One line through each name. Clean and final.
He said it was cleansing. He said he was erasing the hands that had ever touched me. Erasing the memories of me ever being with someone else. He said he was correcting the past, fixing the wrongs, rewriting the story.
He said no one who knew what I tasted like was allowed to live.
