“Max… I told you, you couldn’t handle her.”
He spat blood all over the ground, giving me a smug smile. The anger pulsed through me.
“By the way, I was worried she would feel used up by the time I got her back. But she felt awfully nice in the woods. Still so fucking tight.”
I nearly dropped the bat when I heard that.
“What did you say?” My voice trembled, my legs shaking.
“She didn’t fight me after I hurt her. I loved every minute of it.”
I pulled my mask off, wind rushing through my hair. All hesitation was gone now. A darkness spread through my body, and a heavy feeling of hatred pulsed through my veins.
I wanted him to see my face when I killed him. I lifted the bat, my hands shaking with rage, my heart hammering against my ribs. Time slowed. The world narrowed to the swing, to him, to the choice I had to make.
“This is for her.”
I swung.
The bat felt like thunder in my hands. The first hit folded him. Jackson’s smug face contorted as if surprised I did it. Blood splattered all over my vest as he let out a yelp that was swallowed by the pounding in my ears.
From that moment on, my mind went blank. I only felt. I could feel her. Crying. Smiling. Laughing.
His head was slumped over as he tried to gather his breath.
The second hit was uglier. Wood met jaw, and Jackson’s knees buckled as he fell forward out of the chair. His hands clawed for the ground as if he could sink into the dirt and hide. There were sounds I’d never heard from him—raw, animalnoises—until I drove the bat against his kneecaps, and he stiffened with a loud groan.
Around us, the world narrowed. I wasn’t Max anymore. I was someone else.
The man behind the mask.
I was him.
When Jackson tried to push up, his face smeared with blood, his eyes wild and unfocused, I hit him one more time. The bat cracked against his temple, and the sneer drained from his face as I beat it in like a pulp.
The screams I made echoed through the trees. He folded like old paper as I beat him.
I stood over him, chest heaving, the taste of adrenaline metallic in my mouth. Jackson wasn’t breathing.
Had I killed him?
Someone grabbed my arm, tearing the bat down, pulling me back, but I was already somewhere else. My mind was in a place where only anger lived. My vision tunneled; the edges of sound stretched thin and distant. Mackenzie’s voice cut through the haze like a knife, and it was the only thing I had left to hold onto as the darkness rolled over me like a wave.
Everything went black.
When I woke up,I was in my house at GCU, the one I had rented for Mackenzie and me. I was completely clean. Not a single speck of blood.
I groaned as I tried to sit up.
“What the fuck happened?” I groaned. My eyes fluttered open and closed as I tried to regain some sense of composure.
My whole body felt like it was about to shatter. I lookedaround the room. Everything was in its place—my sheets on the bed, my things on the dresser.
Baseballs. Awards. Stacks of textbooks. It was exactly the way I would’ve set it up. If I had actually done it.
When the hell did this happen?
I tried to pull the covers off me, but a soft ping from my phone on the nightstand made me freeze. That sould shouldn’t have been the scariest thing, but it was. I stiffened and snatched up the phone, my thumb clumsy on the screen.
