"Because you said you'd come back."
The silence pressed against my ears like water.
"Where are you, Daddy?"
"Why won't you answer?"
"Why won't you come home?"
The tears came without warning—hot and sudden and silent, tracking down my cheeks in paths that felt like burning. I didn't sob. I didn't shake. I just sat there, against the coldconcrete wall, with a dead man's blood drying on my hands, and I cried for reasons I couldn't name.
Gabriel.
Where are you?
Why did you leave?
Was it something I did? Something I said? Something I became?
"You're ready."
For what?
For being alone.
For hunting a ghost.
For killing strangers in basements and calling it love.
I pressed my palms against my face and felt the blood smear across my cheeks. It was still warm. It was still wet. It was still the only thing that reminded me I was alive.
The count.
I tried again.
One. The handler.
Two. The warehouse.
Three. The guard.
Four. The woman.
The blonde.
Batch 39.
S or M.
Had she been real?
Had I killed her?
Or had I dreamed her, the way I dreamed Gabriel's hands on my throat, gentle and cruel and neither and both?
I stopped counting.
The numbers didn't matter. The bodies didn't matter. Only the hunt mattered. Only the search. Only the desperate, endless need to find the man who'd made me and demand to know why he'd left.
