The cleaner in me worked with efficient, mechanical precision, doing what I needed to do to minimize the chances of any parts of the body being recovered from the ashes and identified. Normally, I wouldn't leave her here or take the chance. But Konstantin wanted absolute proof. So that's what I would give him.
When I was finished, I disconnected the camera and pocketed the memory card. Then I doused the building. Gasoline along the baseboards, acetone pooled in the corners where it would catch fast and burn hot. The smell was sharp and chemical and it mixed with the copper scent of Raven's blood on the concrete. My stomach lurched, and I swallowed it down.
Glancing around one last time to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, I struck the match.
The building caught fast. Flames climbed the walls, ate through the old wood framing and found the acetone and bloomed into something alive and hungry. The heat pushed me back three steps, then five, and I stood in the gravel and watched it burn.
The fire would gut the structure within the hour. By morning, the county would have an old burned-out building, a body hidden within it they'd hopefully never find, and a case that would go cold before it ever got warm.
Raven Oakley was dead.
I got in the car. Checked her pulse again—still there, still threadbare, still the most beautiful thing I'd ever felt under my fingertips.
Then I started the engine and drove north. Away from Bastrop, away from Austin, away from every place that knew my name or hers. The highway stretched out in front of me, empty and dark, and in the backseat, Raven breathed.
I drove for sixteen hours and only pulled over twice. Both times to check on her. The first time, her pulse was stronger. The second time, her eyelids fluttered. A movement so small I might have imagined it.
The safe house was north of Sioux Falls. A cabin I'd rented under a name that didn't exist, paid in cash with no paper trail. Remote enough that no one would come looking. Close enough to a town that I could get supplies.
Still wrapped in my blanket, I carried her inside and laid her on the bed. Getting the first aid kit, I cleaned her up and did what I could with the injuries I knew she had while she was too out of it to feel anything. Then sat down in the chair beside her, put my head in my hands, and allowed the mask to come off.
It didn't happen all at once. It came off in bits and pieces. Like plaster that had dried out in the sun and slowly crumbled over time, revealing the cracks and holes underneath.
I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough that the light through the windows changed from gray to gold. Long enough that my hands stopped shaking and started again and stopped again. Long enough that I replayed every second of the warehouse in sequential order—every blow, every scream, every mark I'd left on her body—over and over again until I'd never forget it.
Because I didn't want to forget.
I'd done this.
The bruises on her face, her ribs, her arms—they were all mine. The split skin on her cheekbone—mine. The raw, torn sound of her voice when she'd called my name and begged me to stop—mine.
The words she'd screamed at me—You're a fucking monster. You were always a monster?—
Mine.
I sat in that chair and watched her breathe and waited for her to wake up.
And I understood, with the kind of clarity that only comes after you've destroyed the thing you love to save it, that she was right.
I was a monster.
I'd always been a monster.
The only difference was that now I was a monster with something to lose.
CHAPTER 22
RAVEN
Pain woke me. Not all at once but in layers, like a symphony tuning up. First the dull bass note throbbing through my ribs, then the sharper strings of my cheekbone, my jaw, the split skin above my eyebrow where something had opened and dried and pulled tight. Then everything else joined in, a full-body crescendo of hurt that made me gasp before I even remembered how to breathe.
I tried to move and my muscles screamed in protest, locked rigid, like they'd been clenched for hours and forgotten how to let go. Every joint felt welded shut. My throat was hoarse and raw, and when I swallowed, the pain was so bright and immediate that my eyes watered behind closed lids.
But I was lying on something soft. A bed? Clean sheets that smelled like detergent and nothing else. No lavender fabric softener, no trace of my own shampoo in the pillowcase.
My fingers curled into the cotton sheets and I listened.
Wind was blowing outside, low and steady, pressing against what sounded like a single-pane window. No traffic. No bass thrum of a highway. No sirens, no horns, no eighteen-wheelers downshifting on the interstate. I heard birds. And something that might have been crickets, though the rhythm was wrong for Austin. There were too many, and they were too loud.
