Nevertheless, my bones are weary and my mind cluttered. I’m going to bed.
And I’m going to wake up a new me. Or at least the version of me who suppresses everything I’m not willing to remember. The one who doesn’t lose her shit in an elevator unless it involves stupid people. Which, of course, would be perfectly acceptable.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I drift into slumber and find myself caught in a familiar nightmare...
There is blood in the ocean.
I don’t notice it at first, but then, most people don’t. It’s called denial. We refuse to see what we eventually have to cope with, or perhaps even confess. For the innocent, they don’t expect the brutality of the actions required to take a life, so they simply cannot process the inconceivable. For the guilty, it’s all about denying your own ability to do such a thing, and denial can be a slow, brutal sword that carves you from the inside out. Though there is another class of people that are more animal than human. Those so sick, so demented, that they feel a fleeting joy from death, and then seek more joy by doing it again. And again. You won’t find guilt in their eyes. You won’t find remorse. There are times when I’ve felt like one of those animals, but then the guilt starts again.
But you see, there is no remorse. I’m not sure what that says about me.
And so I walk on the beach, not seeing what is there, and it’s like so many other walks along East Hampton’s beach. Cool sand between my toes. The taste of salt on my lips. A gust of wind lifts my long brown hair from my neck. I see it happening, like I’m above the scene, looking down. Like I’m dead and that other person on the beach is alive. Sometimes I can almost hear that wind whisper my name, too:Lilah. Lilah. As if it’s calling me to a place it knows I must travel to, but I continue to refuse. It is a gentle, soothing caress of a whisper—a seductive promise that acceptance will bring relief, even forgiveness.
The wind lies. It always lies.
But then, that’s why it wants me. Because of my lies. Because it knows how they haunt me. It knows my secrets when no one else knows. Only that’s a lie too, and I blink to find the only other person who does know in the distance, and he’s closing in quickly.
He walks toward me, graceful and good-looking, his suit ridiculously expensive, the wet sand beneath his black lace-up shoes impossibly smooth everywhere he steps. But then he’s a man who easily convinces people he walks on water, so why not sand? A man whose accomplishments are second only to his arrogance, while his charisma is just one of his many weapons. He can kiss a woman and make her crave more—he certainly did that to me—but I remind myself that this does not make me naive, as he also has the power to utter only a word and have grown men follow him. He is the picture of perfection that very few see is framed with broken glass. But I see. I know things about him no one else knows.
Like he does me. And therein lies the problem.
Rejecting him, I turn away from his approach, facing the ocean, a new dawn illuminating the sky, a strange, red spot tainting the deep blue of the water. It begins to grow, and grow some more until the lifeblood of someone gone and possibly forgotten spills through it like oil set on destruction. Blood is now everywhere. There is nothing else but it and the guilt I’ve tried to deny.
And suddenly, he is behind me, his hand on my shoulder, and I shiver with that touch. He did this. He spilled this blood.
Only ... no. That doesn’t feel right. I think ...I did this.
I sit up to the break of sunlight through the curtains, and the bed beside me is empty. Kane is missing. My fingers curl into my palms, my body trembling with the aftermath of that nightmare. A nightmare that haunted me nightly for months after I moved to LA. After I left Kane, when I was still trying to blame him for me being me. When I wanted my sins to be his sins. And how did I not put two and two together? How did I not recognize that my problem with rivers of blood was always about that night, the ocean where I was attacked, and my guilt over killing my attacker?
Kane was right.
I’m living with guilt.
And it pisses me off.
That man I killed, that man who raped me and intended to kill me, deserved to die. Heneededto die for the betterment of the world, and for the protection of others, he might hurt. Guilt in this situation is just stupid, and I don’t like to be stupid. Letting a monster live or walk free to kill again is never the right outcome. Last night’s murder proves that right in every way.
Letting that freak in a mask kill again is the worst kind of stupid. It’s an example of me—and all of the local law enforcement involved—just plain missing things. “No more,” I murmur. “This has to end.” I glance at the clock that reads 5:58 and I throw away the blankets, pushing to my feet and padding into the bathroom, where I pee and then brush my teeth. I pause a moment in front of the mirror and stare at myself. I don’t see a killer. I see a wife, a profiler, a member of the bitch society, which isn’t real but should be, and the woman who is going to catch a serial killer we have not even named.
I decide to call him The Scream King, a play off the TV showScream Queens. Okay, I think it was a TV show. It’s not like I have time for television.
I also note the mascara smudged under my eyes, and other remnants of makeup I never got off last night. I decide I can live with a mess on my face but not the bitter taste in my mouth that no toothpaste can ever erase. It’s the taste of death and failure, and those things only go away with an arrest. And Iamgoing to arrest him, not kill him.
Probably.
I hope.
It would look good if I didn’t kill him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I walk to the closet, pull on leggings and a tank top, and prepare to get to work on catching my Scream King.
On my way to my office, aka Purgatory, I snatch my phone from beside the bed, and only then do I consider the idea that Kane is gone, not just downstairs. I assumed he was making coffee, but the whole Miguel thing is an explosion waiting to happen. I walk to the top of the stairs and call down, “Kane!”
“I’m here!” he shouts back. “Making coffee.”