“She hurt me long before I ever hurt her. If she hadn’t broken my heart, I probably could have saved her.”
“You could have saved her at any time,” I snapped. “What you and the rest of your friends did was a choice. Every step of the way, you could have pulled back and helped her, but you didn’t. You murdered her.”
“That we did. I’d say I regret it, but I’m not entirely sure I do. I finally got sleep after she was gone.”
That bastard.
I yanked at my restraints. I no longer cared if I didn’t have my knives. I was going to strangle him with my bare hands.
Charles reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out a worn, leather-bound journal. “I keep records. I used to say that if I wasn’t into real estate, I would have liked to be a writer. Your mother always encouraged that. She got me my first journal. This one. Thought it was only right to bury it with her daughter.”
I stared at it, then at him. He really was going to kill me.
“How many people have you put at the bottom of this lake?” I asked, interrupting his ramblings.
“You’ll be my first,” he admitted. “But not the lake’s first.”
My blood chilled. He was so calm about all of this. It was deeply unsettling. For the first time since I’d started my revenge tour, the danger felt real.
Suddenly, hepivoted the conversation. “What’s your favorite horror movie with a lake, Evelyn?”
I licked my lips and darted my gaze around, looking for something that could help me escape this. I was realizing this man liked to play with his food before eating it. I’d have to play with him.
“Cabin Fever,” I answered.
“Never heard of it. I can’t remember the title of my favorite, but it was about an author who would bring women to his cabin. After he was done with them, he tied bricks to their feet and took them out on his boat, dropping them into a lake to create his own little garden under the water. You ever see that one?”
It was then that I spotted the boat just offshore and the cinderblocks beside it about twenty feet behind him. My stomach dropped. He wasn’t going to shoot us and toss us overboard. He was going to drown us.
“No, I haven’t.” I answered.
“I’d forgotten about it until I found this journal and started to reread it.” Charles opened the book and began flipping through the pages. “Lots of interesting stuff in here.”
“Sebastian,” I whispered when Charles stuffed the journal back into his pocket and headed to get the cinderblocks.
“It’s okay, Final Girl,” he whispered. “Don’t panic.”
It would have been the perfect time to panic.
“I had to cut my date short for this,” Charles grumbled, bringing one of the concrete blocks over, dropping it in front of me. “She’s a cutie, very eager to please. Blonde, young, stupid. After Lita, I couldn’t be with brunettes.”
“Why did you break up?” I wanted to keep him talking, but I was also genuinely curious. Sebastian had brought up a good point the other night. Charles was the man most likely to be my biological father out of the six. He paused, squatting down near my feet.
“She cheated on me. Right after I took her to Paris.”
Silence followed his confession. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask when that was. Had it been nine months before I was born? I searched his face, looking for signs of myself. Did we share a nose, dimples, maybe a special freckle? I saw nothing that would indicate blood relation, and it made me a little sad. He was the one who’d loved her.
“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure why, but I felt bad for the man who’d tied us up and was planning on tossing our bodies into the lake.
My apology seemed to pull him back from his memories. He’d gone quiet. He wrapped a rope around my ankle and tightened the knots. I winced. Sebastian and I shared a look, and I shrank in my seat.
“Elliott told me. He’s the only true friend I’ve ever had. She deserved what she got in the end. And you will too.”
Did he really consider an affair deserving of rape and murder?
“Wait, did she cheat on you with Elliott?” I blurted. I wasn’t entirely sure where it came from, but something about the way he spoke of his friend made me curious.
He shot me a look that said to stop asking—but also, yes. Charles bent down in front of me, pushing the cinderblock under my feet.
