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When we’re finally both utterly and completely spent, I scoop her up in my arms and carry her into a hot shower. Then to my bed, where I wrap her in my arms as the darkness sucks us both under.
This is different than anything I’ve ever known. It’s not anything I ever wanted, expected, or looked for.
I came for revenge.
I gotherinstead.
And I wouldn’t change that for the world.
29
DEIMOS
They sayit’s best to leave the demons where they lie, and to let the ghosts of the past remain there.
I say fuck that.
Hunt down the demons. Rip them from their hell and cut them to fucking pieces. To suggest anything else is to suggest that demons and ghosts can be trusted to stay in the past and not come for your fucking future.
Not that I literally believe in shit like demons or angels or whatever. But you get the idea.
If something hurts you, destroy that thing. Don’t let it sit anywhere collecting dust just waiting to come for you and hurt you again.
That theory is what has me digging into the piece of human excrement that preyed on Dahlia and her mother. The man who touched her, that Adele then stabbed to death and Adrian Cross buried.
I need to remember to thank Adrian for that if we ever cross paths again.
The piece of human excrement’s name was Bernard Aubert. He was in shipping logistics and finance, and he and his family were quite well off. His death was ruled a missing persons case. But a few months later, remains were found on a hiking trail in Khao Sok National Park in Thailand that DNA testing positively IDed as Bernard. A secret email account also came to light, detailing Bernard’s ongoing affair with a woman who was never identified or found.
Though I only know him by reputation, I’m guessingallof that was Adrian’s doing.
Bernard was survived by a wife and a daughter. And that’s where things get interesting. The wife, Claudette, had already been succumbing to stage four breast cancer when everything went down, and she died a mere three weeks after her husband’s remains and affair were discovered.
It’s a shame she died. It’s a worse shame she died without knowing just how truly evil the man she was married to was.
Meanwhile, the daughter—Juliette—fell off the map. She was seventeen and in university when her father did what he did to twelve-year-old Dahlia. She went to that school for one more year, and then utterly disappeared.
Gone. Not a trace, or a breadcrumb.
At least, not to the average person looking for her. But I’m not the average person. And when I finally find the breadcrumbs I’m looking for, and follow them through the woods, too many things begin to add up, and too many alarm bells start ringing.
Because again, I donotbelieve in coincidence.
Juliette Aubert is now Julie Humbolt. She lives in the US—in fact, she lives just two hours outside of New York City, up in New Paltz.
That’s the first alarm bell.
The second? She’s a registered gun owner.
The third is that her work frequently brings her to the city.
The fourth is, she’s an avid runner.
…Which is how it comes to pass that two days after Dahlia bares her soul to me, and I rip open mine to her, I find myself standing outside a dark house on a quiet, unassuming cul-de-sac in New Paltz, New York.
I can put the pieces together. Maybe young Juliette was smart enough to put the pieces together too. Maybe she was home when her father was stabbed forty-nine times downstairs. Maybe, even though he was a monster who deserved far worse than he got, she was angry about her father being killed. About the life that was taken from her.
Although he was high up in his company, and on paper he was making bank, the reality was that Bernie-boy was as bad at managing his finances as he was at being a human being. After his death, it came out that he really didn’t have anything but a mountain of debt. So it’s not even as if his daughter got a big trust fund out of it.
