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WHAT YOU SEEK
YARA
Iread the note and the text message again and again. And again. At first, I couldn’t make sense of them. When I finally did, my hands began to shake.
The Strangler: Your forty-eight hours start now. Will you save Sister Serena, Little Love, just like she saved you?
Of course, I wanted to. But after chasing this bastard’s ghosts through hundreds of graveyards, I knew one thing.
He didn’t want his victims saved.
“What’s wrong, love?”
Everything was wrong.
He was so far ahead that I couldn’t even see what I was missing. I had always been the smartest one in every game I played, but not this time. This time, he was the one who knew all the rules.
His games. His rules.
“How am I going to save Sister Serena?”
Right then, I knew how my victims must have felt in the moments before their deaths. Lost. Afraid. With no clue what was happening or why.
But then again, I wasn’t one of my victims.
I wouldn’t let myself become one. I had survived too much, endured too much, to ever let myself be reduced to that.
“That fucking bastard,” Ryden spat, wrapping an arm around my shoulder and pulling me against him as if he wanted to protect me from the world. It was too late now. The world had eaten parts of me before he even came into my life.
“When I find him, I’ll make sure he dies a slow, cruel death,” I gritted out, staring at the note.
The Strangler had just upped the stakes, and if I didn’t continue the game, he wouldn’t simply stop. He had invested too much in it to stop now.
He’d keep going until I played.
“Let’s go find Sister Serena,” Ryden said, as if it were that simple.
“She’ll die at the end of this game, and we both know it,” I said, rubbing my eyes. My body burned. Feverish. Frustration soon followed anger. “I stopped playing, and now he wants to pull me in again. He wants to make me feel guilty and desperate.”
No, I wouldn’t let him control my emotions, not anymore. I had already given The Strangler a lot of power over me.
“But would you be okay not playing? You’d blame yourself if Sister Serena died.”
“I can’t put myself through this. Not again.” The words made sense, but they were all wrong in my head. “I already do, you know, blame myself. I was the reason all of them died. He’s trying to distract me, trying to push me to play it according to his rules. If I do, he’ll win, Ryden, and he can’t win. I won’t let him—”
My phone vibrated again.
TS: The first clue lies written in the past. After you walked through the river of blood, you breathed again, and the monster was gone. The ride with your demons begins here.
Ryden’s jaws clenched.
I read it again.
“Written in the past…” I said it out loud. “I think I know where the clue is,” I said. “But should we? He could be sending us on a wild goose chase. There is no end to it, not a good one.”
“Can you sit here and do nothing?” Ryden asked, staring at me, as if he was afraid I would fall apart.
