I should have seen it coming. I should have read the signs. The clues that are now staring me in the eye, sticking their tongue out at me. The mask didn’t hide a stranger. It was a man I once loved.
Too many noises, too many scenes, jam my brain as I put the pieces together. The conversation I’ve had with Tristan comes first, when he questioned my sanity after Butterfly Man’s little night visit.
Give me something to work with here. Any detail that can lead me to find him.
He’s tall, strong, unhinged. But in a way, he’s…gentle, even familiar.
Familiar? Do you recognize anything about him?
I laugh hysterically. How the fuck could I not recognize him?
Then Gia’s voice rings in my ear, and I burst into tears.
Butterfly Man’s actions are driving you to push away the only people who care about you. He wants you isolated, Birdie, and you’re letting him win.
The isolation, the control, the mindfucks… They have always been his game. I’ve lived through it for eight years. How could I be so oblivious? So fucking dumb?
Didn’t he come home rushing after you found the note? Didn’t he install the security system himself on the very sameday? Didn’t he literally beg you to come home just so that he could protect you?
I’ve said it then, and I’ll say it now. The stalker situation was an opportunity to slither his way back into my life. To show me I still need him. To convince me that even after all these years, I’m nothing without his protection.
I’ve always known that blackmail is his backup plan to claim me; be mine or rot in prison.
Husband Dearest’s voice stabs my skull.This isn’t over, Birdie. I’m not letting you go. You’re mine, you hear me? Mine!
I scream my lungs out.
“Birdie!” Tristan is the only thing keeping me standing. If he lets go, I’m going to collapse. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
My chest feels crushed, like Blake’s hands are around my throat even now. “It’s him.” I lose control of my tears as if I haven’t been training myself to stifle them since I can remember. “It’s Blake. My husband is the one who’s been sending me the notes. Blake is Butterfly Man, Tristan.”
“I know, baby. I know. But he can’t hurt you anymore.”
“No wonder he couldn’t find anything in the hotel surveillance.” I laugh at my silliness. “Did you know we had a fight the other day before that night at the hotel? I wanted to leave him. But then… The note happened. I wasn’t that scared, but he said things… He convinced me the cameras were tampered on purpose. He made sure that I’d feel scared, so I stayed because I knew he’d protect me.”
Bile rises to my throat. “Come to think of it, every other note that came before coincided with one of our fights. Every time he felt I was going to leave him, he played the stalker game.”
“He was manipulating you into staying with him with fear,” the detective says. “Classic emotional abuse behavior.”
“How many times has he held me when I was terrified because of feeling watched, hunted? How many times has he whispered reassurances while orchestrating my torment? For what? All of this pain for what? Money?”
“It’s a big motive, Birdie.”
My mind reels backward through our marriage. Blake’s possessiveness disguised as protectiveness. His need to control every aspect of my life. The way he’s isolated me from everyone I’ve known, from the whole world on that island, claiming he was keeping me safe.
First from what happened here in Miami. Then from the stalker he invented. The stalker he is.
“The murders. Oh God, the murders.” Saldana, Gia. But neither Blake nor Shane were going to die. Butterfly Man was stalling, playing his sick game only to take what he wanted. Leverage to blackmail me, to rob me out of all my money.
Aaron… Blake killed him, too. His first kill in my name. “Blake’s reaction after Aaron’s death flashes in my head. How he’d held me while I cried, murmuring that at least one person who’d hurt me was gone. I’d thought he was trying to comfort me. He’d been gloating.”
Then he went back here, just around the same time he disappeared from the Vineyard, to finish the others. To cover his tracks.
“Aaron?” Reid asks. “Who’s Aaron?”
“None of your business,” Tristan says.
“If it’s another murder Abel committed, then it’s definitely my business.”
