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“Why?”
Remi presses the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray and speaks up, “Your trouble somehow involves New York, and what involves New York concerns Lachlan.” He chuckles. “Let’s just say he wasn’t nice on the phone and warned us that if we bring any trouble to his city, there will be hell to pay. He has no interest in cleaning up our mess.”
“Yeah?” They all nod. “You can tell him to fuck off.” Collective laughter fills the air at my reply.
Lachlan will always have my respect for what he does, but he can warn me all he wants. I’ll still do whatever I think is needed.
The Four Dark Horsemen listen to no one but themselves.
Open confrontation with Lachlan is something I’ve successfully pushed out for years. However, if something is inevitable, we prefer to meet it head-on.
Whatever we want we get. That’s our absolute law, and I pity anyone who thinks otherwise.
“I’m just saying it’s not me who got us in trouble this time around.” Remi utters the words like he expects a compliment for staying put for the first time in his life and controlling his hotheaded nature that always lands us in some kind of mess.
He acts on his emotions and thinks about the consequences later. Maybe because he always had us to pick up the pieces.
“The question remains, though. What’s going on?” Santiago drops on the couch next to Florian, offers him his glass, and he takes it, sipping a little from it. “What can be so important that you even got Callum involved in this shit?”
By how he voices his question, I understand that Callum might have spilled about the threat but not about Isla. A weird sense of relief washes over me when the dark-haired beauty comes to my mind as the idea of sharing her with anyone, even my best friends, awakens something primal in me.
As long as they don’t know about her, she belongs only to me. She’s mine, and I wish to keep it this way for eternity.
Craving her from a distance and never daring to touch for my touch alone inspires fear and disgust in women. Why would she be any different?
She deserves a prince, and I’m a beast, and while beasts have happy endings in fairy tales, life proved to me a long time ago that there is no such thing for us mortals.
My hideousness is incurable, so I’m destined to be alone.
Besides, my possessiveness is built on my insanity because emotions are a foreign concept to me.
“Octavius, we appreciate the dramatic silence, but we need answers.” Remi glances at his watch and kicks his legs up on my desk. “I have a meeting in an hour.”
I walk to the bar, grabbing a glass and putting a few ice cubes inside. I watch them melt a little before I pour whiskey into it and shake my drink, the ice cubes clinking against each other akin to a storm ready to erupt on us all the minute I tell them the truth.
The storm all of us thought had passed, yet it still has the ability to destroy us all. “The Church Killer is alive.” The tension falling on all of us is almost palpable, fury cracking on the edges of it while they all sit straight, and unreadable expressions cover their faces as they probably calculate all the consequences after my statement. “Five years ago, the police found a body, but it was unrecognizable. He did have a familiar scar, though. I thought we put it behind us.” They stay silent, not that they would care one way or the other how often and in what manner I kill.
We all have our methods, and we don’t interfere with each other when it comes to our dungeons and vices, allowing each other to thrive in our own darkness without any shame or judgment.
Sometimes we even let each other watch on the rare occasion when we are either in great or sour moods.
“If he’s alive and faked his own death, tricking you in the process, he must be out for blood.” Florian takes a large sip, rubbing his chin over the rim. “He wishes to end us.”
Santiago drums his fingers on his knee. “He can’t do it without exposing himself. Everyone thinks he’s dead. One of the reasons all the unsolved cases got closed.”
“There has been another mass murder during a wedding in a church.” They freeze at this. “I thought it was a copycat.”
Months ago, he wiped away an entire family in the small, quiet town, and the wedding reception consisted of twenty-five people. He spared no one, letting their blood drip on the floor while they screamed in agony. The fucker recorded them and left the video for the police.
Classified information that I’d managed to get due to my connections.
Remi flips the lighter through his fingers again, clearing his throat. “Serial killers like him don’t stop. If he laid low, it means he was getting off on something else. But whatever sustained his desires no longer works. So he went back to his modus operandi.” He frowns, dropping the lighter on the desk. “It’s been thirteen years since he was most active. That year was hell because they could never predict when he’d show next, and that’s why a lot of people stopped having huge weddings back then. He must be in his fifties now. He can’t have the same strength as he used to.”
“Not to mention that security got better over the years. There are cameras everywhere. The level of control this requires speaks of a very cunning man with unlimited resources or a team,” Florian concludes, which makes sense on the grand scale of things.
We never understood how one person could so viciously kill the families inside the church without any help. Such plans require thoughtful preparations, good physical form to control everyone around him and catch them in his net without anyone suspecting anything for hours.
Even the most skillful profilers couldn’t figure him out. His motives had no sense, and none of the families had anything in common. Everyone just assumed he picked them at random in his psychotic states, except psychotic states indicate mass madness.
