Remo’s voice stays eerily calm. “He made me stand there. Told me if I looked away… I’d take her place.”
The sky seems to fall around us and a new understanding of what we all went through rearranges in my brain.
“I didn’t look away,” he says.
A long, suffocating silence follows.
“I watched everything.”
His voice cracks on the last word, and suddenly I get it. I get why he’s so angry all the time, why he’s so hellbent on any form of revenge, why he feels a visceral need to control everything—every outcome.
Remo exhales tensely and shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it.
“And now I can’t stop.”
I frown. “Can’t stop… what?”
His eyes flick to mine. And for the first time in my life, I see in them something completely untethered.
“You’re not the only one who watches people, Fiero.”
“What…” I swallow, my throat drier than bone. “What do you watch?”
A beat passes and I pray he isn’t watching the same kind of thing—beatings, rapes, raw-knuckled murder.
“Women,” he replies.
“In what way?” I ask slowly.
“I follow them. Track them. Learn their routines.” His lip curls like he hates himself for it. “I don’t touch them. Don’t speak to them. I don’t even want to.”
A hollow laugh escapes him.
“But I need to know where they are,” he continues. “What they’re doing. Who they’re with.”
“How many?” I ask. “At any one time?”
“For a long time I’d watch two or three.” He lifts a shoulder. “But lately… Well, for about two years now… just one.”
I nod slowly.
“I hate it. I hate that I can’t stop. That it feels like…” He sighs heavily. “A weakness.”
I finally release the railing and stuff my hands into my pockets. “Is that what you thought when I got close to Pfeiffer? She was my weakness?”
His brow dips like he’s coming to the same realization as me. “I guess.”
The truth hits me like a freight train.
“You projected it onto me.”
“I suppose I did,” he says simply. “I needed you to be wrong.”
The honesty in that nearly knocks the breath out of me.
“So I pushed and pushed, until you did what I wanted.”
My stomach twists.
