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His silent nod was a confirmation, setting a knot of dread in my stomach.
“Just stay here. Enjoy the show. And when it’s over, if I’m not back, I want you to stay with Noah and Eric. I don’t want you alone for a single second tonight, alright?”
I could barely put a coherent string of words together. A writer, and I was wordless.
Fuck.
He rose, and with an instinctive desperation, I unfastened my Apple Watch, handing it to him. There wasn’t any solid reasoning that made me do it. Maybe all of this shit just made me paranoid as fuck. Made me scared of my own shadow, of sleeping in the dark.
An extra layer of caution wouldn’t hurt. “Please, take this. I need to know you’re safe. At least with this, I can use the Find My Watch app on my phone to know where you’re at.”
“Smart.” He slipped the watch onto his wrist, his gaze holding mine for an extended beat. “I love you,” he whispered, the words a fleeting touch before he leaned down and kissed me. Something about this felt wrong. Like I had slipped off the deck of a steady ship into rough and choppy waters working to pull me under. I wanted to get up and go with him, but his urgency told me this wasn’t like the last time I cosplayed as his Watson. The stakes felt higher tonight.
It felt like he had found him. Maybe it would be all over tonight? Maybe I could finally wake up from this fucked-up nightmare and start enjoying my life again, not scared of someone sneaking into my house to watch me sleep.
I turned in my chair, craning my neck to watch Gabriel disappear through the theatre doors.
The curtain rose like a river of crimson red, defying gravity and flowing up to reveal a breathtaking set. I tried to get lost in the musical, tried to not to let my brain draw up the most horrific scenarios possible. But the tension only coiled tighter and tighter in my chest as the minutes ticked by. The divide between the staged spectacle and our reality blurred. This was no performance; our lives were the unfolding plot, and the climactic resolution was inching ominously closer.
Fuck.
29
GABRIEL FERNANDEZ
I knewwho the Midnight Chemist was.
The text that had dinged into my phone was the one that cracked this entire case wide open. Leaving Tristan physically hurt me, like an invisible cord snapped tight around my gut and tried yanking me backward with every step I took, but I knew he’d be safe in the theatre, and I knew that I couldn’t waste any time with this.
I knew who the killer was.
The second I left the theatre, I whipped out my phone and called Zane, the owner of Stonewall Investigations.
“Zane, tell me everything you know.”
“I don’t even get a hello?” Zane teased with a chuckle. There was a buzzing excitement in his tone.
I laughed, looking up at the cloud-dusted sky.
“I’ve got a name,” Zane said, “for who ordered those glass vials you found in the hide-out.”
That was good, but it wouldn’t be enough. I already had a name, too. First and last. I needed more.
That’s when Zane gave me more. “I’ve also got an address. This guy bought the vials with a gift card, not realizing it still tracked some of his information.”
I wanted to reach through the phone and hug Zane, that’s how happy I was. An address could easily lead me directly to the Midnight Chemist.
“What did you get?” I asked over the sound of an angry set of honks as someone dodged rear-ending a parked car by a couple of inches.
“I’ve got a first name: Marlin. And the address is an apartment building. It’s called the Iconic in Midtown. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get an apartment number, but that’s where the vials were sent.”
Marlin Brooks, aka the Midnight Chemist.
And the Iconic… that sounded familiar. Extremely familiar.
I’d been there before. Eric used to live there; Steven still did. They were neighbors at one point.
Could that mean…
