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The video camera was still in his hand, the red dot flashing in the dark. He’d been filming this whole time. Filming her—and all of this. Wearing the accoutrements from her abuser’s films.
“There’s a sick and deliberate artistry to this,”Rafe had said, and apparently there had been more truth to that than either of them had known.
“Adonica Blake,” he said, in that creepy robotic voice. “Now that you’re here, we can finally begin the last important scene of your life. Your death.”
She shivered, the thin sweater doing nothing to keep out the cold. Her life had been turned into a replica of her films by this man, and she was the unwitting star.
He killed Rafe, she thought.And now he’s going to kill me.
“Who are you?” she said, swaying slightly on her feet. “Why are you doing this?”
The man clicked his tongue in disappointment. With his gloved free hand, he pulled off the mask. And Donni felt the ground ripple ominously beneath her feet.
“Johnathan?”
Chapter Twenty
A Man with Two Faces
Everything was swirls of black fatigue, streaked by flickering red veins of pain. There was a glugging sound that made him feel as if he were sinking deep underwater. So deep that the fishes wouldn’t have eyes.
(Here’s looking at you.)
Before he fell, it occurred to him that he might be dying, and when his eyes opened again, he found himself thinking,I must be dead.
Because it looked as if he were in exactly the same place that he’d been before, and Rafe expected nothing less of hell. Wouldn’t it be just like the devil to have you spend your whole life bracing for hellfire and eternal flames, only to end up in the purgatory of your former existence?
What a fucking joke. Fuck death.
Fuckthis.
But then he moved his arm and pain exploded through him in a hot fireball and he gagged, coughing several times as he rolled onto his less painful side. Blood streaked on the kitchen tile in his wake and hung heavy in the air. Heavy enough that it had a taste.
A grey shroud hovered his eyes, shimmering like the sweat that was now dotting his skin.Okay, he thought to himself.Note to self. Don’t fucking do that.
Slowly, he got to his feet, trying to move his left arm as little as possible. It felt like it might be broken and he was pretty sure he’d banged up his knees when he fell, but there was a reserve of panicky energy crackling through his veins in silvery, needling bursts.
Donni.
The glugging sound was the drugged wine gushing out of the bottle in slow, pulsing bursts. Below it was a spreading pool of pale golden liquid, feathered with crimson where it had mixed with his blood and been tracked over the floor in smaller pools. He must have slipped in it when he’d fallen. And maybe the killer had stepped into it, too.
The killer.Fuck.
Donni and her phone were gone. When he reached into his pocket, his was, too. He went to the landline and picked up the cordless, listening intently. There was dial tone.
Rafe called 9-1-1 and waited an agonizing few seconds before the operator picked up. He gave them the address—“there’s human remains on the porch and someone’s been fucking kidnapped”—before hanging up the phone. That ought to light a fire under their useless asses.
Where would he take her? Where would hefuckingtake her?
All he could focus on was the thick taste of blood in his throat. His head spun as he tried to think back to all the clues that they had laid out before. The photographs, the flashdrives, and—
Whytecliff.
The killer had put on a little show for him at Whytecliff, gussying up the place with lurid graffiti and then playing sinister and meticulously synchronized recordings as if he fancied himself the conductor of this morbid performance. Because itwasa performance. And Donni was the star.
Would the killer take Donni to Whytecliff?
Was that where her list of sins would be read?
