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Though it took just about all of the inner courage I had to do it, I set both hands on his chest and pushed him away with all the force I could muster.
He feigned hurt, giving me a pouting frown. “She’s perfectly fine where she is. You don’t have to worry about her anymore.” When I gave him a serious look, he sighed and shook his head. “Fine. You want to see every inch of the pool house yourself? Let’s go.” Before I could say a word, he took my hand in an iron grip and dragged me along.
Out of my room, down the hall, to the stairs we went. I couldn’t fight him, couldn’t resist, even if the aura radiating from him right now was telling me to run the opposite way. Gareth wasn’t happy with me and my insistent curiosity, but I just couldn’t shake the fact that something was wrong here, and I needed to know what it was.
My heart was in my throat when we reached the hall downstairs and turned to head to the back. What would I do if something was wrong? If she was dead, her body hidden somewhere secret in the pool house, what could I do? I couldn’t go anywhere; I didn’t have any money. I could call the cops and then Erin, and see if she’d let me stay over, but then I’d have to explain to her that her crush was an absolute psycho and a murderer.
Would she believe me? Would she even try to?
“All I can say is,” Gareth paused as we pushed out of the back door to the patio, “you’re lucky I have a soft spot for you.” He pulled me alongside the pool, toward the pool house in question.
A soft spot?Thiswas Gareth having a soft spot?
His free hand reached into the pocket of his sweats, and he pulled out a key. His other hand tightened on my wrist, and I stopped myself from swearing under my breath. He had the key on him this whole time, of course. Why would he take it out and hide it somewhere in his room? Silly me for hoping for something like that.
We were walking into the pool house’s entryway shortly. Gareth didn’t let me go once we were inside; he kept a firm hold on me, even as he dragged me toward the light switch and illuminated the place.
He lugged me through the kitchen area, past the living space, where he’d set up his studio. Around the corner we went, a place in the pool house I’d never seen before—gotten too distracted by the weird locked fridge and the art in the living room area—and what I saw was a locked steel door with a keypad and a thermostat just outside it, along with a switch.
He flicked the switch. The hairs on the nape of my neck stood up. All of the hair on my arms too, for that matter. Gareth finally released me, only so he could crowd around the keypad and block it out using his body, so I couldn’t see the code as he put it in.
Within seconds, the door unlatched, making a loud clicking noise, and Gareth set one hand on the door handle, turning his intense green-eyed stare to me. His mouth was drawn into a hard line, telling me he was anything but amused. “I’d ask you if you’re sure about this, but knowing you, you’ve already made up your mind.”
He was right. I had. This, whatever I was about to see, would either prove my dark suspicions were right or that I was just paranoid and insane.
Gareth pushed open the door. He used his body to prop it open, and then he grabbed me and pulled me inside, pushing me in front of him so I had nowhere to go. A blast of cool air hit me, seconds before the smell. The air in the room was thick with metal… like blood.
And then I saw why.
Hanging in the center of the chilled room was Emily, the poor chef Alistair had hired to keep us fed during their honeymoon. Her clothes were gone, God knew where, every inch of her body exposed to the cold air. Strung up by her feet like a dead animal, her arms hung down near her head.
My heart damn near stopped when I laid eyes on her, on the deep, garish gash in her throat, so long it went from side to side, exposing muscle tissue and ligaments and everything else that lay beneath the surface of the skin. She had more gashes on each wrist, though not as deep as the one on her neck.
“See?” Gareth spoke, sounding totally normal. Natural. Not at all like we stood four feet away from a body… from a woman he’d killed. “I told you she was fine.”
My mouth fell open. No words could come from me as I gazed upon the corpse. She’d been hanging in here since yesterday, bleeding out into what looked to be a large, oblong bucket beneath her. Blood filled it up, bright red.
There really was nothing as red as blood. There was something so pure about it, so beautiful—but this… this was just wrong.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the trough of blood, not even as I asked, “How could you do this?” My voice trembled, nearly breaking. I was right. My new stepbrother was not only a psychopath, but a killer, and I’d bet anything this wasn’t his first.
He was a serial killer. A fucking serial killer who liked to paint with the blood of his victims. That had to be what was in the fridge in the kitchen, why it was locked. How many were there? Did I even want to know?
“I know, I wasn’t careful with her,” Gareth spoke, still standing with his back against the door, holding it open. “I spilled too much blood in the kitchen.” He let out a harsh sigh, as if that was his biggest regret about this whole situation. “I do hate wasting it like that.”
Finally, I turned away from the body and stared at him. It was like I was seeing him for the first time, really, truly seeing him. Past the cold and angry exterior and to the inner demon within. He was worse than a monster. He was so much worse… and now I was stuck with him. Stuck with him because my mom had thought it’d be a good idea to marry into a rich family, so she could have the life she’d always wanted.
Gareth Montgomery would kill me, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.
His serious demeanor wavered somewhat, and he said, “You do know that this is your fault, right?”
“How is thismyfault?”
“If you wouldn’t have ignored me, I wouldn’t have done it. I would’ve had you to occupy myself with instead of that.” He pointed at the corpse, as if her body disgusted him. “You did this just as much as I did.”
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. How in the world could any of this be my fault? I might feel guilty about it, but her death wasn’t literally on my shoulders—my hands, rather—the same way it was on Gareth’s. Gareth was the one who’d killed her, not me.
But I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t.
