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There’s a long pause before he says in the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard, “Come on, Summer, I thought this is what you wanted?”
Despite my best efforts to be quiet, I release a deep breath, and it’s all he needs to discover my hiding spot. He steps around the tree and gazes down at me, blood dripping from his arm. A cruel smile forms on his lips through the mask he’s wearing.
I stare up at him, and his eyes, shining through the black slits, no longer hold any semblance of humanity. The evil within him seeps through his skin, as if it lives within the fibers of his mask.
My frightening fragment is gone; he’s back to normal, yet I still don’t recognize him.
“Please,” I whimper, curling into a ball on the ground in front of him.
With his head tilted and eyes flaring, it seems like Mikael is slowly gaining control. “Please, what?” he responds. “What do you want, Summer?” His voice audibly changes again.
I drop my head. “Just let me go.”
I shake as he runs his fingers up my face. “Well, that confuses me, baby, because you came all the way out here to see me, so why would I let you go?”
“I came to get Misty. You have to let her go, Mikael. She has nothing to do with this. I’m not going to kill her.”
He takes a deep breath and licks his lips as if envisioning her dead. It makes my skin crawl thinking of her with him. It makes me utterly sick knowing his hands were on her in any capacity.
“Is that why you came? To save Misty? Are you finally feeling something under that cold heart of yours?”
There he goes again, calling me a liar. What did I ever lie about?
A rush of anger consumes me. “I feel things. Unlike you, I have a conscience.”
He merely snickers. “Summer, Summer, Summer. I feel things, too. I feel everything. Every moment you’ve lived your perfect fucking life, I’ve felt my hatred for you. My anger erupts every fucking time I look at you.”
My chest shakes as I choke on my words. He crouches so he is eye level with me. “You still don’t understand the whole fundamental part of what makes you so unique, do you?”
He leans in so close, running his hand over my wound, mixing our blood together. Even in a psychotic state, he still smells delicious, heavenly.
How I remember him in my dreams, even with that scent of burlap.
“Your conscience has nothing to do with what you feel. I have a conscience, too, baby. Everyone does. A conscience is simply a reflection of the knowledge that you believe to be right or wrong. It’s an external factor, Summer. Nothing more.”
I swallow hard, hating how what he says makes so much sense. Hating how much he sounds like Lincoln. It’s a corrupted version of Lincoln with elements of Mikael, and that split mixed in.
He continues, “You could have saved poor Cali. You could have saved Grant, and you could have saved Misty. You could have warned her or told someone.”
I flare my eyes up at him. I don’t want to answer… Saying it out loud makes me just as bad as my father.
He drags his knuckles along my cheek. “You’re in love with me, baby. Aren’t you?”
I pause for a moment as those butterflies hit my stomach. “Yes,” I whisper.
“And that’s why you haven’t turned me in, isn’t it?”
“This is all so wrong.”
“You’re rationalizing your love for me, Summer. And in doing so, you’re allowing terrible things to happen to innocent people, just like your daddy did with his science. He studied fear, and what a better way to understand it than to create it in the most heinous way?”
I let out a small sob at the mention of my father.
He shifts beside me, looking down at me. “You cry for him… Even knowing what he did, and what he was, you still love him.” It’s not a question.
“He was my father, Mikael. He was everything to me. He’s all I knew.”
Something about him snaps. My father makes him snap, just like I make him snap. Split reemerges, and his eyes give off that terrifying shimmer.
