AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“How do you know, stalker?”
He grinned at me. “Admit it. You’re impressed by me.”
“And you’re impressed by me,” I shot back.
“I’ve never tried to hide that.”
Cain rolled his eyes. “You just can’t stop flattering the little devil, can you?”
“We all have our own relationship with her,” Remington threw back. “You act like a possessive psychopath, and for some weird reason, that turns her on. Pax is all angsty, and they can angst together. Stellan taps into the sweet girl she really is underneath her general stabbiness. A complicated little monster like Aurora needs all of us.”
Remington was joking around, but he was also speaking the truth. My relationship with each of these guys was so different, and as I looked at Stellan, still wearing the dirt on his hands from his sister’s bracelet, I thought that they each completed a part of me in their own strange way. Cain’s rage felt like a mirror of my own at times. He let me be my savage self. I could be unbridled and unashamed with him. And I could be sad with Pax, but that was only part of it; the two of us comforted and soothed each other. And I could be nostalgic and tender with Stellan. Maybe… maybe I could hang onto the best parts of Delilah after all.
And Remington… Remington just felt like home. Even though I always said I didn’t have one. I rested my hand on his shoulder and leaned up on my tippy toes to brush my lips against his cheek.
Remington hugged me around the waist, tugging my body hard against his. He gave Cain a self-satisfied smile and Cain rolled his eyes.
Then I stole the cell phone out of his hands. “Show me how to get to these messages.”
I couldn’t stand to be in the house any longer. I went outside to the porch and sat on the steps, although I could feel them close behind, giving me privacy, but not too much, because they wanted to stay close and protect me. I was grateful for that. As much as I wanted to believe that the cult was really gone, we couldn’t be stupid. And I couldn’t shake the nagging sense that the Demon was up to something. He always was.
Remington helped me pull up the message from my hacker friend, then retreated.
I was able to find some videos. They were in a Google account he once used. He must have sent them to someone. I’m trying to track them all down. I’ll make sure that they disappear, and we’re the only ones who have them.
I responded,thank you. When are they from?
You don’t want to watch them.
No, I don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have to.
I asked her,do any of them match up with the date February 27th, 2019?
What happened then?
It’s when I moved.
My father was… erratic. By his standards. He’d always been measured and controlled in his own blood-thirsty way.I’m trying to figure out what he was up to.
I can tell you what he was up to most of that night.
I’d stayed up that night, almost all night long, scrubbing the house to get rid of any signs of evidence.
Send me the video
Aurora…
Send it to me
She did, and I opened it with shaking hands, terrified of what I would find.
But I didn’t see Sophia. It was my father torturing the man from the basement, his dinner guest. I looked at the timestamp, then fast-forwarded. It was the same time Sophia would have come over to my house. As I jumped ahead in the video, making sure he never left the basement, it was obvious the Demon was busy until early in the morning. I remembered that night, and how late it was when he had finally turned the body over to me to leave and bury. That time frame when I had left the house had seemed as if it might be the window where he had killed Sophia. But the timeline just didn’t make sense. From her diary, she hadn’t waited that long to come to see me.
“Aurora? What is it?” Stellan asked from behind me.
He came and sat on the porch steps beside me. Together, we walked through what we remembered of the timeline in Sophia’s diary, making sure that we were both on the same page, and examining the timestamps.
Stellan buried his face in his hands. “So the Demon didn’t do it. It was one of his followers. And we’ll never get the chance to interrogate them.”
