Page 172 of Deacon

Jude laughed softly. “Isn’t it?”

Nausea climbed my throat as I looked between them. “You’re both out of your minds.”

Neither man looked at me. Mason was fixed on Jude with the stunned concentration of somebody watching a life he believed in come apart in front of him.

Jude shook his head. “You were the one whining online about her. You were the one posting about the woman who wrecked you and walked away like it was nothing. I just happened to recognize the shape of the story.” He took one unhurried step toward Mason. “And once we met, you were lonely enough to believe anything that let you feel chosen again.”

Mason looked like he might be sick, but Jude only softened his voice, turning cruelty into something almost intimate. “I gave you somebody to be angry with. Somebody to want. Somebody to build toward. You were going to give me access.”

My hands curled into fists. “Access to what?”

Jude turned toward me fully. The pleasant mask didn’t disappear so much as become irrelevant, because now I could see the certainty underneath it. He had spent years treating every refusal as something temporary, something he was entitled to correct.

“To you,” he said. The simplicity of the answer frightened me more than shouting would have.

“You think all those little run-ins were accidents?” he asked. “The ER visits?” A faint smile touched his mouth. “Seeing Mase gave me reasons to be there. Reasons to bump into you without raising alarms. What he couldn’t provide, I got on my own. Digitally. Same way I found him.”

Mason closed his eyes for a second, which told me that part was not new to him. Jude watched him do it before turning that same awful fondness back on me. “Your searches. Your log-ins. The places you clicked from, the places you spent time.” He tipped his head slightly. “You’d be amazed what people leave behind when they think they’re just living.”

My laptop. My phone. Grocery runs and late-night searches and every ordinary thing I had never thought to guard against someone who believed watching me was love. “You tracked me.”

“I watched over you.” He said it with the calm certainty of a man expecting gratitude.

“You stalked me.” The correction came out flat because anything louder felt too much like giving him the reaction he wanted.

His smile held. “Different words for the same thing, depending on whether the woman is grateful.” He paused, then added softly, “Yet.” My stomach turned.

Jude nodded toward Mason. “He was going to give me the in. The softer face. The one you might actually step toward when you wouldn’t step toward me. And in return, I gave him what he wanted too.” His eyes returned to Mason. “Or thought he wanted.”

Mason’s voice barely carried. “You said we were building something together.”

Jude looked at him with lazy contempt. “And you believed that because you needed to.”

“Jude,” Mason breathed. His face had gone slack with hurt, as if saying the name might somehow bring back the man he thought he knew.

“You should have seen yourself,” Jude said. “All that talk about us. About a future. About the three of us. Like she was just going to fold herself into whatever shape made you feel healed.”

Mason backed up, his eyes fixed on Jude as if distance might somehow change what he was hearing. “You said—”

Jude cut him off without a flicker of remorse. “I said what kept you useful.”

Something changed in Mason then. He was not innocent. He had listened, believed, followed, helped. But whatever Jude had promised him had been real to him, and I watched that belief die.

Mason stepped fully in front of me. “This wasn’t the plan,” he said, voice shaking but louder now. “You said we were going to help her see reason. You said she would come here because she wanted to, because she finally understood. This?” He gestured toward me and the room. “This is kidnapping. This is using a child. This is insane. I’m not doing this. We need to let her go. Now.” For one heartbeat, I let myself believe his choice might matter.

Jude’s face went still. “Mason,” he said quietly, “move.”

“No.” Mason swallowed but stayed where he was. The word held between them, steadier than the rest of him. “I mean it. You crossed a line. You crossed every line. This ends now.”

Jude studied him, then looked past his shoulder at me. Whatever remained of his pleasant expression emptied out. His hand moved toward his waist, fast enough that I saw Mason react before I understood why, and a gun appeared in Jude’s hand.

Mason’s mouth opened. “Jude, no, wait—” The gunshot tore through the room before he could move.

I screamed as Mason jerked backward and hit the floor. The sound kept ringing in my skull while my brain struggled to understand the body sprawled on the hardwood. One of his hands twitched once, then stopped, and I couldn’t move.

Mason had lied to me. Helped lure me here. Helped build something sick around a version of me that existed only in his head. And when he finally understood where it had led, he had stepped between me and Jude. Now he was dead.

Jude lowered the gun with horrifying calm. “He was useful.” He glanced at Mason’s body before looking back at me. “But he was weak.”