And I could do it again if I wanted to. Every single day for the rest of my life. For now, I’m sated enough.
I yawn, my eyelids already fluttering closed again before I fall into a dreamless sleep.
Chapter 28
Lincoln
Blood drips down my chin and I scrub it away with the back of my gloved hand, acknowledging the mess of man at my feet, who is no longer recognizable as human. I’m getting sloppy. Too caught up in my own guilt and anger to think clearly.
I left the house a week ago, and I’ve spent all that time chasing down Pawns. Plentiful and easy to find, but with no information of any value. Ten years of torturing hundreds of the fuckers for days taught me that. That still hasn’t stopped me from destroying the piece of shit currently lying in a pool of his own bodily fluids though, or the five others that have come before him this week. It gets me nowhere in respect of my mission to take down the Brotherhood, but it does make me forget about her, at least for a while.
The only time I’m not torturing myself thinking about Imogen is when I’m torturing someone else. I can’t escape her. She’s consuming me and there’s not a single thing I can do to stop it. I’m a smart man, a man of logic and reason, until it comes to her, when I lose all sense of rational thought. Not to mention all sense of what’s right and wrong. Because what I did to her, and what I still want to do, is all kinds of fucking fucked-up.And that I’m twice her age and I bought her at a fucking auction aren’t even the worst of it.
But at least she’s aware of those facts, and I can use them to push her away. Not that I’m doing a very good job of that so far. I seem to be pulling her to me instead, or perhaps it’s me being pulled to her. A draw to what I find inescapable and infuriatingly impossible to resist. That’s why I’ve been on a killing spree across the West Coast of America. Drawing attention to myself after eighteen years of meticulously hiding myself away.
Lincoln Knight is a carefully constructed persona, hidden behind layer upon layer of falsehoods. Dig too deep and you’d start to find some anomalies in his past. Like the fact that he doesn’t actually exist, despite his social security number and his birth certificate stating he was born to Bella and Marvin Knight in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Nobody digs too deep. They want to know about my personal life, how I got my scars, who I’m secretly fucking, but never whether I actually exist at all.
A police siren passing by a few streets away reminds me I need to get out of here. I wipe my clothes and gloves clean of the Pawn’s blood and slip out the back door, heading to my car. There’s a message from Edgar on my cell phone.
Where to next?
My jaw tics. He’s been following behind me, cleaning up some of the mess I’ve left in my wake. Not literally speaking of course, but his connections with law enforcement as well as the kinds of people who can be persuaded to take the credit for some of my misdemeanors make him indispensable. There are a surprising number of local crooks who are willing to take the credit for the kind of torture I’m capable of. Not to the cops, obviously, but to their peers, for sure.
Where to next? I’ve been away for a week and achieved what?Do I feel better about losing control with Imogen? No, not even close. Have I atoned for any of my sins? Also no. So what the fuck am I doing other than keeping Edgar busy and potentially drawing attention to myself, and thereby fucking up the main goal? And also, I miss her. I really fucking miss her. I’m soaked in someone else’s blood, bathing in the consequences of my sins, but I’m certain that just seeing her smile could make me feel clean again.
I type out my reply.
I think it might be time to go home.
A few seconds later, his reply lands.Good idea.
Thanks for everything.
Anytime.
I toss the phone onto the passenger seat and start up the engine, ready to head for home, while thinking about the mess I just left for Edgar. I wonder sometimes why he continues to do it. It’s been eighteen years since my sister, Olivia, died, and as far as I know, he’s never found anyone else. I’m sure there have been women, but none that have lasted.
We met the day after she died, the same day he got out of prison for aggravated assault against his stepfather. Like me, Edgar had a difficult upbringing, one that led him to some places he shouldn’t have gone. He insisted on seeing her body, and I took him back to that house and showed him the place where I’d buried her. He dug up her corpse with his own bare hands. Then he held on to her for hours. I’ve never seen a man cry like that before. Never seen him shed a single tear ever since, but I often wondered what a love like that must feel like. She was theother half of him, he told me. His missing piece, and without her, he would never be whole.
He joined my cause that same day and has been by my side ever since. He was by my side the day of the explosion thatkilledme, or at least it killed who I was. The charred body left behind was actually a guy named Parker, but he was identified as me due to the skull tattoo on the inside of his left wrist—matching ones we both got when we were stupid fourteen-year-old kids.
We were recruited by the Brotherhood a few days apart, and in a lot of ways we were alike, at least on the surface—young, too smart for our own good, and full of ideas about ruling the world. We ended up in the same foster home together, and we gave each other the tattoos after our first successful assignment. At the time we were given little information and a set of instructions—to steal some papers from a guy’s briefcase while he was having dinner with a redhead. I was never content with limited information though; I always wanted to know more, while Parker was never curious. Later, I pieced together that those papers brought down a prominent senator, who had been stupid enough to piss off the Brotherhood.
Parker was a mere Pawn though—one who’d been a guard at the auction where Olivia was sold—so despite our shared history, the Brotherhood never suspected me. I should have known he was a sick fuck. Even when we were fifteen, all the signs were there, but I suppose I chose to ignore them.
As I had no dental records, and the burned corpse had no fingerprints left—at least not after Edgar and I seared them off with a hot poker—the Brotherhood assumed they’d completed their mission. The explosion left Parker dead and Edgar deaf for life, but it gave me the freedom to become Lincoln Knight.
For Olivia, for Imogen and the other family I lost, Lincoln needs to stop making reckless decisions and get back to focusing on the primary goal: erasing the Brotherhood from existence.
Chapter 29
Imogen
For someone who has spent the majority of her life either alone, or wishing she were, you would think I’d be pretty thrilled with Lincoln’s latest expedition. He’s been gone for eight days, longer than he’s ever left the mansion before, and now I’m certain that his absence has something to do with what happened the night before he left.
What if he’s gone to another auction? Is he out there looking for a replacement for me? Am I not what he expected? Too naive? Too passive? Not passive enough? Undesirable?
I’m driving myself crazy with questions. Questions with answers that shouldn’t even matter to me.
