AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I aim the flashlight in the direction of the trees where I suspect the shadow is lurking. “Who are you?”
No answer.
“If you want to take a jab at me, come out. You’re neither the first nor the last.” I’m proud of how my words are steady and confident.
I’m sure as shit not confident right now.
Those people and the hatred in their eyes frighten me. I always feel as if they want my head on a stick or wish I was buried six feet under like those victims.
“I’m here!” My voice rises. “I’m over here, so if you want to —”
My words cut off when the shadow runs towards me at supersonic speed.
I lift both my arms to protect my face. That’s what they go for the most — the face. It’s as if they want to erase anything that resembles his face. Mainly the eyes. The fact that I have my father’s eyes has made me a monster just like him.
Something crunches against my ribcage. At first, I stare with stupefaction, expression frozen, not sure what’s happened.
Then pain explodes in my side and hot liquid spills from me, soaking my coat, and when I look up, I see the shadowy form of a masked man snatching a knife away. A trail of blood flows from the wound and drips onto the dark ground. The dim glow from my flashlight turns the view gruesome, haunting even. The blood is nearly black — like a demon’s.
Unable to carry my weight, my legs stumble and I twist my foot as pain spreads across my nerve endings and shoots straight to my brain.
Then I’m falling.
To keep myself from going down, my fingers dig into his mask and I pull, my nails scratching his skin.
I make out a tattoo on the side of his bald head. A dragon.
He hits my hand, and the flashlight slips from my trembling fingers. I follow soon after. My energy fails me and I drop backwards.
Straight into the eighth grave.
My head hits the dirt, and a metallic taste fills my mouth before blood gurgles out from it.
The dark shadow stands over my grave, the light from the flashlight forming a halo around him. His black-gloved hands rest over each other, the blood on the knife he still holds glinting under the moonlight.
He’s watching me so intently, as if he’s my father and I’m one of the victims he suffocated to death. He doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound. He just…watches.
My eyes roll back, slowly closing. The last words I hear are Dad’s.
When I see you again, either I kill you or you kill me.
5
Jonathan
Aurora is back in her old house.
Not her flat, but the fucking place she escaped from as a teen to have her rebirth.
Fuck.
It takes us an hour to fly with my private jet from London Heathrow to Leeds Bradford Airport. An hour I don’t fucking have to spare. And currently, Moses is driving us straight to that house, which is taking another thirty minutes I don’t have.
Why would she come here, of all places? If this is a ploy to escape me, then she doesn’t know who she’s dealing with. She must’ve felt li
ke she had some leeway just because she’s spent a couple of months with me.
The fact that I claimed her as mine means something simple — she’s not allowed to disappear.
