My pride will be the death of me.
Literally.
He hums again, this time with amusement, seeing through my obvious lie.
“Do you think your father’s victims felt the same way you’re feeling now?” he muses.
Before I can respond, his fingers dive into my hair and grip tightly before craning my head back, exposing my throat further. I strain against him, but all it does is cause my neck more pain.
“You can’t kill me,” I say through gritted teeth, the words uneven and shaky. “Everyone will know it was you.”
He chuckles, the sound sinister. “Darling, I’d never kill you. You think I’d take your life like your father took my mother’s? Like you’re nothing?”
“Aren’t I?” I parry. “Nothing to you?”
His face softens with faux sympathy.
“If you were nothing, how could I watch you break?” he asks quietly, his tone as devilish as it is curious. “You’ve always been something to me, Reverie, and some things are so pretty when they fall apart.”
My mouth falls open, and then he slashes the knife across my throat. I gasp sharply, violently jerking in his hold. Time suspends while my brain tries to compute what I’m feeling. Did he lie and slice my throat, anyway? Am I in agony? Choking on blood? Do I feel the life draining from me?
None of it registers. Nothing except sheer panic and horror.
A few seconds tick by, and finally, my brain processes what really happened. The sharp edge didn’t glide against my skin, but the smooth, blunt side. There’s no pain, no real blood, no death.
Only the same fake blood covering his knife slashed over my throat, just like the other girls dressed as Lionel's victims.
I blink rapidly while his gaze tracks the trails of crimson drippingdown my neck and into my T-shirt.
Shudders roll through my body while I work to keep my mind from spiraling into a black abyss. It’s hard enough knowing my father did something so atrocious to so many women, but it’s another thing to force me to experience even a fraction of what they did.
Tears burn the backs of my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. I made that mistake only a few nights ago, when he kicked me to the edge of death’s doorstep, and now he has a goddamn picture to prove it.
I won’t make it again.
He tsks, as if disappointed by my refusal. Keeping a tight hold on my hair, he tucks the knife into the back pocket of his jeans, replacing it with a black Sharpie instead. This time, I’m not surprised when he bites the cap off, holding it between his straight white teeth as he stains more numbers into my heather gray T-shirt.
When he’s finished, he releases me entirely, recapping the marker and tucking it away again.
He stares at me expectantly, and I avoid meeting that expectation.
Though part of me knows it doesn't matter—they’re all fucking dead, anyway—there are certain dates I really,reallydon’t want to see.
His mother’s being one of them, and there’s no doubt he scrawled across my chest the day she went missing.
“You can’t keep ignoring her like you do with the rest,” he says quietly.
He might as well have stabbed that knife into my chest. He thinks I ignore Lionel's victims, but he has no idea how readily they haunt me.
Clenching my jaw, I drop my chin and read the numbers.
03/18/11.
I squeeze my eyes shut and tell myself to just breathe, even if it feels like an elephant is crushing my chest. My mind descends into a familiar black nothingness I once called home, dredging up memories and thoughts I can’t bear to think about.
After several slow, deep breaths, I open my eyes and lift my chin, meeting his cold stare, his face carved from the same stone encasing his heart.
Underneath all that rock, there’s something tender and vulnerable, but it’s as accessible as the core beneath the Earth’s crust.
