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Sleep had been much harder until he’d grown up and found the music again. It was a comfort to know that in nearly two hundred years, no fire had ever destroyed that music. It had survived. Like he had.
He’d grown bigger and stronger, ran away, gotten a job. It was only years later that he worked up the courage to face his stepmother again. By that point she seemed so small and helpless.
Hers was the first life he’d taken. After he’d finished, he’d cut her into pieces, burying them in different states. It was possibly foolish to have so much evidence scattered in so many places, but he’d convinced himself if he didn’t separate the pieces, they’d only reassemble and come after him again.
After that, he’d slept soundly for a few months. But then the itch had started, and no amount of scratching would make it go away.
He wondered if he’d cried out or screamed in his sleep tonight. Instinctively, he wanted to reach out for Mina for comfort and to make sure she was okay… as if his stepmother could have stepped out of his dream and into hers to cause more carnage there. But he could see she wasn’t here. Why hadn’t he fought to keep her? Why had he let them take her? Michael couldn’t have done a goddamn thing about it if he’d ordered her downstairs until they left.
And now the dreams were back.
He took a quick shower and put on a T-shirt and some sweatpants and tennis shoes. The house was quiet as he ascended into the main entryway. The lights were out except for the guide lights set low into the wall. He went out to the pool as if he might find Mina waiting for him to bring her back inside.
The collar and security bracelet were still on the ground where they’d fallen after he’d thrown them. He bent to pick up the collar and inspected it under the pool light. It was undamaged, which surprised him given how hard he’d thrown it. He went back inside and placed the collar in a box in his room. He couldn’t destroy it. It was the only thing he had left of her.
When the collar was safely tucked away, he went back upstairs to the gym, put a Chopin CD in the sound system, and got on the treadmill. He didn’t give a shit if he woke the whole house. If someone came in, they’d take one look at him, turn around, and walk back out. If they didn’t, they’d wish to God they had because there was nothing he wanted more right now than to hurt someone.
When the dreams came, the only thing he wanted to do was run. Run from her, run from himself, run from everything, run from the monster that chased him, even when he was that monster. He didn’t know who or what he ran from this time. But he was afraid nothing would stop his stepmother now.
For a while, hurting others had been enough, but then Mina was required. Without her, the dreams might never go away again. Without her, how could he make them stop?
12
Aweek had passed since Brian released her. The dreams wouldn’t stop. Every night they grew darker, more punishing, revealing everything he’d tried to keep buried deep within his psyche. Every night he reached out to hold Mina for her protection or his comfort he couldn’t be sure. Maybe both. He became more erratic, punishing girls for looking at him the wrong way rather than waiting for them to be sent to him.
“Shut the door,” Lindsay said, when he stepped into the shrink’s office after being summoned like a child.
“Look, I know I’m more out of control than normal. It’ll settle down in a few weeks.” He had no idea what his fucked-up mind would do or how long it might take tosettle down. “But you all need me. You can’t run this operation without me, and you know it. And you can’t exactly fire me.”
“That’s not why you’re here,” Lindsay said. He was drinking that pansy-ass camomile tea he always had brewing as if it somehow made him sophisticated and refined. As if he didn’t have his own sadistic streak. Just because it wasn’t brought on by damage and trauma didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
“Then what do you want? I have bad sluts to punish.”
“I need you to deal with Mina.”
Brian’s eyes narrowed. “What exactly do you mean by ‘dealwith Mina’?” He had better not mean what Brian thought he meant.
“I mean deal with her. Vivian and Michael aren’t keeping her locked up. They’re just letting her wander around free. She has access to phones. She can leave them at any time. Once she gets her bearings she will go to the police and report all of us. I don’t know if she could lead them directly here to the house, but she knows where my office is in the city. She knows whereDomeis. We’re trapped rats here if we don’t handle her.”
“No.”
“Brian, I know you think you had some attachment to this girl, but she’s dangerous to our survival.”
“So much for all your fucking promises to her. You all think I’m the biggest monster here, but I don’t lie about shit. Between my word and your word, anybody is safer with me and my word than with you and yours.”
“If she hadn’t come here and I thought she was a real threat and I’d sent you out to take care of the problem, you would have done it.”
Brian remained stoic. He would neither confirm nor deny, but his gut said that no he wouldn’t have. He had a vanishingly small circle of empathy, but somehow Mina had worked her way into it. She’d been protected the moment he’d seen her. If he’d been sent to kill her, no matter his original intention, something in her would have made him pause long enough to find the scars and the damage in her eyes that so mirrored his own. Then she would have gone immediately on the protect and defend list.
He ignored the voice in his head that accused him of destroying her anyway. Punishing others for her misbehavior to feed his ego and protect his reputation—even while he saw that it was damaging her. If he could go back… if he could undo that…
It was startling to feel regret.
It was such a foreign and uncomfortable emotion, he could barely stand to hold it in his mind. Everything he touched broke apart in his hands, even Mina. And if he tried to say anything different, he’d be a liar.
“If you won’t do it…”
Brian stood and leaned over the desk. Lindsay visibly shrank back.
