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This is the only time Kallum drops his guard enough not to see my next move.
I lower my face close to his, my eyes holding his bound as I say, “You never asked my name.”
As I stare into his intense gaze, I watch as it slowly registers, the understanding of what I’m saying.
“That night, you never asked my name, Kallum.”
Two things happen at once: I reach under the box and grab the handcuffs, latching one steel shackle around his wrist and the other to the metal bar of the wood rack. Kallum gets one arm banded around my lower back and drives his hips up to slam inside me with vicious, decimating thrusts. I seal my eyes closed.
“Look at me,” he growls.
My eyes instantly open, and an orgasm grips me, tearing through my body as I clench around the hard length of him. His muscles contract, and I feel him release deep inside me, his groan rumbling against my chest as I tremble through the peak of my climax.
A cruel and beautiful smile slants his mouth. “There you are, darkness.”
I pull back, slowly slipping farther out of his reach. The snow continues to fall in a hushed tone outside the windows, further insulating us as I quietly pull on my clothes.
“You said when the case was closed, you’d reveal every dark truth to me.” I toss Kallum his joggers. “It’s time to honor our deal.”
He sits up against the fireplace, his wrist handcuffed to the rack, his back to the flames. “I never asked, because I knew your name already, Halen St. James.”
I blink and nod, my thoughts churning as I cross my arms. “Question everything,” I say, my voice low, “the chance of our meeting, how you came into my life, even how long I’ve known you. Question everything…even the first time we met.”
“Oh, how I love the story of us.” He studies me closely, trying to gauge just how much of my memory I’ve recovered. “I might love it even more that you’re finally carrying handcuffs.”
“The longer I questioned, there were things that I just couldn’t reconcile,” I say, a shiver still clinging to my body as I let my thoughts tumble out. “In the university parking lot, you said, ‘come back to me.’ After you found me covered in blood, you said it just like that. The way you did when you carved a sigil in my thigh during the ritual, and in the SUV after the wreck—but it was then when it struck me, how odd of a thing that is to say to someone you’ve only just encountered. Then on the terrace, you said the first time you saw me was in the setting sun. Yet it was night when Wellington attacked me. So if I question everything, even the timeline, then all the hints you arrogantly dropped during the Hollow’s Row case start to paint a different picture.”
Kallum rattles the handcuff against the bar. “You know I’ll get free of this.”
I nod again, swallowing hard. “A magician with a bag of tricks. I’m well aware of your skills, Professor Locke. But first, I’m going to get what I came here for.”
I rub my thumb over the slashed scar on my palm, feeling the recurring pang in my chest. This has become a compulsion, like touching the verse on my forearm used to be.
As I remove the sweatshirt from the file box, I again touch the soot on the fabric. Then I hold the gray garment up to Kallum.
“Another detail that kept bothering me was how I managed to get soot on the sleeve. I would’ve had to reach into the fire, but why?” At his intentional silence, I square my shoulders. “Then I remembered seeing it drop to the bottom of the fireplace. I reached in, but it was too hot. When I stood to grab the fire poker, there was a cufflink sitting right there on your mantel. Not the one that I brought with me from the crime scene. Not the one that I had put in my pocket before the attack, that was then burning through my bloodstained jeans. But thematchingcufflink to the pair.” I take a breath to fill my lungs. “And I realized as I stared into the flames…in a solitary moment of terror…it was all too convenient. How easily you went along with the staging of the scene. How you spurred me on to kill him. How you made me an accomplice.”
I knock over the box. The contents of the third Harbinger crime scene spill across the rug.
“I asked you if you were the Harbinger killer,” I say, my chest rising and falling quickly. “I looked into your eyes, past the blood and mask of a killer, and I said you weren’t the Harbinger. You never corrected me.”
He tilts his head to the side. “You didn’t want me to.”
I huff a derisive breath. Kneeling down, I pluck out the one piece of evidence that, the moment I spotted it, stopped my heart. Angling the printed picture toward Kallum, I point to the foreground. “You were framing Wellington as the Harbinger killer.”
The picture was taken that same day while I was photographing the scene. In the background of the image—once zoomed in—is a man dressed in a stylish, all-black suit with distinct, identifying tattoos marking his hand.
“You were there,” I accuse him. “First you stole Wellington’s cufflinks, then you planted one at the third crime scene. It had the college insignia and his initials. Once discovered, it would’ve been easy to trace the evidence back to Wellington and name him the prime suspect of the Harbinger killings.”
Kallum licks his lips, and a faint smile twists the corner of his mouth up. “I’d offer a slow clap but—” He yanks at the handcuff to emphasize his bound state.
“The best I can figure, you were on your way to plant the other cufflink in Wellington’s car when you stumbled across me being assaulted in the parking lot. But that raises another question: why not just leave the cufflink behind after the murder in the first place? Why chance returning to the scene of the crime later?”
He doesn’t look away, waiting for me to string the connections on the figurative murder board.
“The evidence couldn’t be recovered too quickly,” I say, reasoning. “You had to make sure that investigators were on the scene first. Specifically, one person you wanted to find that evidence. Only, I wasn’t supposed to go to the campus alone. I wasn’t supposed to show up at night, ruining your scheme.”
“That did throw a tire iron into the plan.” Kallum smirks arrogantly. “Luckily, the universe had a far better plan for us.”
