It Ends With Her

by Brianna Labuskes

  “What do you want from me, Simon?” she asked, though she knew what he wanted. What he’d always wanted.

  “I just want you to realize I can make you happy,” Simon said, coming to kneel on the mattress. She shuffled backward until her spine came up against the wall. She tucked her knees to her chest. “So happy, Adelaide.”

  The intensity in the way he moved, the way he looked at her, told her everything she needed to know.

  “Simon, don’t do this,” she said.

  “Don’t do what? Love you?” he asked, shifting closer.

  “You don’t love me.”

  “I do,” he said, this time moving so that he hovered over her, and she flashed back to those moments on the roof. “You’re the only one I ever have. You’ll see.”

  He reached out to catch a strand of her hair. “You’ll see,” he said again, so quietly she didn’t know if she was even supposed to hear.

  He wrapped his other hand around her upper thigh and pulled her so that she was lying flat beneath him against the mattress. A spring dug into her rib, but the pain didn’t register. She knew what was about to happen, and there was only one way to get through it.

  Don’t think. Don’t think. Just breathe.

  Rough, chapped lips slid over her mouth, over the tops of her cheeks, over the tip of her nose. They caught the single tear that slipped down her face. His tongue lingered as if savoring the saltiness of it. She shuddered against him.

  Don’t think. Don’t think.

  Even just those words were too much to hang on to when his teeth sank into her neck. The letters turned inward, ripping at themselves, until the only thing that remained was a vague memory of where they’d been.

  There’d be more bruises tomorrow. There, at her neck, and other places, too. At her hips, where his thumbs dug into the fat that cushioned her pelvic bone. At her wrist, which he kept pinned against the comforter. On her thigh, where his knee pressed into her femur to keep her still.

  He fumbled at his jeans, and she could do nothing to stop him. And it didn’t matter, because then there he was, in her mouth. He had shifted so that his legs straddled her shoulders, and his hands were buried once again in her hair, tugging at it so that it pulled against her scalp. It stung and brought tears to her eyes as much as the feeling of him against the back of her throat.

  Everything started fading at the edges, and she fought it.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and then all of a sudden there was air again. Blessed air.

  He’d pulled away, murmuring, “So gorgeous for me,” before moving lower.

  Hands. She felt them everywhere. Did he have only just the two? It didn’t seem like that. They were on her ankles, on her breasts, on her upper thighs, pushing them apart.

  She didn’t know what to do with her own, so she left them at her sides, letting the tips of her fingers take comfort in the softness of the blanket. She didn’t know what to do with her eyes, so she left them to stare at the ceiling, which was blurring behind the veil of unshed tears.

  But then his fingers were on her chin, making her meet his gaze. Not allowing her to look away.

  There was lust there. Pure and unadulterated. But what was scarier, what made her toes clench against the bed and lifted the hairs on her forearms, was what she saw behind that.

  Love.

  Jesus.

  Her stomach heaved, but she swallowed back against it.

  It didn’t take long for him to come. A few strokes and it was all over. He was collapsing into the crook of her neck, muttering endearments that felt like needles against her bruised psyche.

  She shifted and he rolled off her, gathering her in his arms as he did. The movement dislodged him from her, and she wanted to cry in relief at the empty feeling he left behind.

  She wouldn’t close her eyes against the darkness of the room. If she slipped off, just a little, her opportunity would be totally lost. This was her window.

  So she stayed there, wrapped in his arms and the smell of sex, and counted the lengths of his breath until it evened out. Even then she didn’t trust it. How long was too long to wait? The red numbers on the big digital clock slid into the next hour without any acknowledgment from either of them.

  It was only when he snored that she dared to act.

  Smooth movements were key. Hesitation would be fatal. Keeping that in mind, she slipped from beneath his arm and rolled to the edge of the bed, pushed to her feet, then froze.

  He shifted, coughed, and then resettled against the pillow.

  Fear clawed at her, an angry beast holding her paralyzed.

  There was no time for panic. There was no time.

  Move.

  Somehow her feet listened, even as her mind swam in a blind haze of terror. She grabbed her shorts from the floor, slipping them up to settle at her hips. Then somehow she was by the door. She didn’t remember crossing the room.

  Simon was just a lump of body in the shadows when she turned back to check. He didn’t move at all, but this would be the hardest part. The door would make noise no matter how quiet she tried to be.

  One more deep breath gave her the push she needed. Shaking fingers found the doorknob, and she let the cool metal beneath her palm ground her. It turned, and the hinges protested.

  A rumble lifted into the air. Every muscle tensed, but she didn’t look back. She just waited for the next breath. Once she heard it, she cracked the door just wide enough for her to fit through.

  She was out and running down the carpeted hallway in the next heartbeat. There was someone in the kitchen, but it didn’t matter. He was too far away to catch her anyway.

  Two more strides and her fingers were fumbling at the gold chain lock on the door. Out. Out. Out. She wasn’t trying to be quiet anymore. Didn’t think she could be.

  The locks finally gave, and she was on stairs.

  Then she heard it.

  A shout.

  She was dead. He was going to kill her, and she knew it with such a sudden certainty she almost stopped right there. Halfway to the final door that signaled her freedom.

  But she pushed forward, and her hand slapped against the beveled glass, slipping through into the cool night air. Her feet hit the rough sidewalk, and she had a split second to decide. He was only moments behind her, ready to wrap thick arms around her torso and drag her back into the apartment. Back to hell.

  The street stretched out before her, beckoning her. She fought every instinct she had that screamed at her to just keep running and turned toward the giant plants on either side of the building’s entrance.

  Her toes curled into the mulch just as the swinging door slammed against wood. And there was Simon, naked and disoriented. He stopped just over the threshold, his eyes scanning the dark. Then he took off at a jog up the street. “Adelaide,” she heard him call, before he stopped.

  She willed every part of her to still. Her breath. Her blood. Her heart. The branches of the plant cut into her skin, but they hid her from view. Would he think to look behind them?

  She could see just the very edges of him as he spun in a small circle.

  “Adelaide?” He sounded like a scared little boy. He sounded like the brother she’d once known. “Why would you leave me?”

  A sob was wrenched from the depths of his chest as he sank to his knees right there on the asphalt. “Why would you leave me?”

  She used his distraction to slip farther back along the outer wall of the apartment building. The shrubbery had been the easiest hiding place, and he would definitely look there. She had to move.

  There was a corner up ahead. Once she skirted around it, she let herself move more quickly in the narrow alleyway. There were some woods ahead of her. She just had to clear the small backyard, and she’d be able to lose herself in the protection of the thick trees.

  She kept waiting for Simon to sound the alarm as she crossed the grass, completely out in the open and vulnerable, but the shout never came. Before she could even blink, the coolness of t
he forest swallowed her.

  Once the tears came, they wouldn’t stop. But she just kept running.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CLARKE

  July 16, 2018

  “They’re about me,” Clarke said, unable to swallow the revelation once it finally clicked into place.

  Sam somehow managed to tear his bleary eyes from the back of Roger’s head. Montoya was holding court in the interrogation room, having arrived not long ago with several other agents. They’d all set up camp at the police station.

  Clarke watched as Sam tried to focus on what she’d said, but she could tell the words weren’t making their way past the fog that had dropped over his normally nimble brain. Neither of them had slept.

  “The clues,” she said. “They’re about me.”

  They’d spent the night curled up in different corners of their rental, poring over the photos Cross had sent for Anna. At points throughout the long hours, they had yelled, triumphant, only to have the theory crash down around them. By 4:00 a.m., they’d gotten nowhere and had returned to pictures he’d sent for the past victims, hoping to uncover a pattern. There was not one.

  In Charlotte’s case, it had turned out that the numbers in the pictures came together to produce coordinates. In Eve’s, it had been rooted in the names of the people in the photos. Each one was different and maddening. They weren’t meant to be solved at the time, that much was clear. The clues made sense only in retrospect. They were meant as one more way he could provoke them, one more way to prove just how clever he was.

  As they chased down the path to nowhere, her mind kept flittering back to the Anna pictures. There was a niggling familiarity there. One she couldn’t pinpoint but that snuck up on her in the quiet moments when she’d be trying to concentrate on one of the other victims.

  It wasn’t until she was watching the rest of the agents worshipping at the feet of Roger that something dislodged and then clicked into place.

  “Do you know how many people would kill for this opportunity?”

  The memory of Sam’s voice was hazy, made so by both the years that had passed since then and the amount of alcohol she’d consumed before the conversation.

  It had been a thing in those days—threatening to quit, probably to get his attention. She straightened against the wall, grasping at the thought before it slipped away back into the recesses of her mind. Why was this important? Her heart pounded as if she were sprinting instead of standing completely still as she tried to remember.

  Before going to that bar to douse her liver in alcohol in the hopes of erasing the image of bloodied and broken bodies, she’d called Sam.

  She’d told him she was going to drop out of the program, that she was going to run off to become . . .

  Jesus.

  “They’re about me,” she said again now to Sam.

  He blinked at her, and she realized she wasn’t making sense. Her thoughts were spilling out almost unchecked as incoherent phrases while her mind skittered away from her tight control. She took a breath, trying to reel it in.

  “Remember—God, do you remember that night I had convinced myself I was going to drop out of grad school?” She turned to him fully, leaning in so that she could keep her voice pitched low to avoid being overheard by the small gathering on the other side of the dingy interrogation room.

  “Just that one, huh.” Sam poked, even as she saw his brain finally kick into action. It took a moment before it clicked. “Arizona. You were obsessed with the idea of moving there. Convinced you were going to drop out and become a waitress.”

  She hadn’t thought of herself as a quitter back then. No, it had been pure survival. An instinct to flee and hide and pretend the sunlight would chase away all the dark in her life. “A waitress in Arizona, Sam.”

  The clue from Tucson. It had been the back of a waitress’s head.

  And just like that, she had his full, concentrated attention. Something must have shifted in the atmosphere, because she saw Roger glance over. She, as subtly as she could, pivoted slightly to block them off from the group.

  “How would he know that?” Sam asked, his eyes searching her face.

  The connection was subtle. The careful allusion to her past would be easy to overlook. But once the thought latched on, it was impossible to shake. She needed to see the rest of the clues again.

  She caught her top lip with her teeth. “I don’t know. I think I told other people.” She paused. “I must have told other people.”

  “It’s a stretch, kid,” Sam said, running a hand through his hair. “Some offhand mention from years ago?”

  But why a waitress in Arizona? Out of all the millions of moments and places and people he could have sent, he sent that one.

  “But what if they are about me?” Clarke said. It made sense. Wasn’t it what they always said? This wasn’t about the girls. It was about Clarke. It was about Sam.

  He watched her now. They trusted each other’s instincts both because they had to and because they’d learned to. But he knew she didn’t always see straight on this case.

  It was then that Roger swooped.

  “What’s up, guys?”

  In other circumstances she might have been amused by how attuned he was to Sam, but now she just wanted him out of this town, out of their investigation, far away from her partner.

  But Roger Montoya would never stay away from Sam. No matter that he should. No matter that Sam would be better off without having to see him every day. And that’s why she hated him. Because if he truly cared even a little about what they had used to be, Roger wouldn’t have set Sam up as the head of a task force he oversaw.

  Her voice was ice. “I need to go check on something, sir. I’m sure you’ll be able to manage the press conference without me.”

  Annoyance flickered in Roger’s eyes, but it was just the briefest flash. He was too much of a politician to let genuine emotion show on his face. It was just that: as much as she hated it, she knew him so goddamn well she could read him like a book.

  “I would really like the special agents in charge of the investigation to be there,” he said. His voice was smooth, but it wasn’t a request.

  “I’m sure Sam can handle that,” she said. There were times she pissed Roger off just because she could, and it was fun to watch his carefully constructed blank expression pinch tight. This wasn’t one of those times. This was actually real. This was actually serious.

  “Agent Sinclair,” Roger started, and there was a warning following. She could tell by the way his breath hitched as if he were already preparing himself for an argument.

  She cut him off, the flash of temper a familiar friend. “Just think, with me not there, one less person to share the spotlight.”

  It was a standoff. It would be foolish to ignore that fact, just as foolish as it had been to initiate it in the first place. She was well aware she’d escalated the situation, and maybe in a different universe where the bastard didn’t exist and where there weren’t two girls missing and where every other thought didn’t flare across her brain, painfully weakening already-compromised self-control, she would feel guilty about it.

  “Roger.” Sam finally cut into the thick air between them. “You know how difficult this . . . she’s . . .” There was an apology there that he didn’t quite mold into words. It rested on his tongue, though, and none of them needed him to finish the thought. She’s being difficult for a reason. Cut her some slack.

  Maybe it was embarrassing that once again Sam was cleaning up her mess because she could never quite do it herself. Even when she knew she was wrong.

  Roger locked eyes with him, and something silent and heavy passed between them until Roger nodded. Just once.

  “It’s important,” was all Sam said then.

  A tiny muscle along Roger’s jawline bunched and jumped, but then he flicked his gaze back to her. “Keep us updated.”

  She didn’t respond, just raised her eyebrows at Sam.

  “Go,” he said
, and she headed for the door without a backward glance. She felt every set of eyes in the room on her.

  She didn’t care. She broke into a light jog down the empty corridors of the police station, past the puppy at the front desk, and out into the early-morning air. Only then did she pause to slip on sunglasses and dig for the rental keys in her bag.

  She wondered if Cross was watching her. She threw her middle finger in the air, just in case, and then made her way toward the piece-of-shit car. They had scanned and uploaded every piece of evidence from the case into a file on her MacBook, but she wanted the real clues in her hands. Where she could feel them and study them and imagine him picking each one with his careful deliberation, which sent chills along the blades of her shoulders.

  Her burner phone jangled just when she turned left onto the road that would take her out of town. She groped for it.

  “That wasn’t very nice, Clarke.”

  “Well, I’m not very nice,” she said carelessly, but her fingers gripped tight around the faded leather of the wheel. He had been watching.

  “Rush, rush, rush.” His voice was low and sensual. Amused. “Where are you off to in such a hurry, my love?”

  “You tell me,” she said. “Where should I be going?”

  “Ah, Clarke, you may want to start answering questions when I ask them,” he said. Her throat burned at his tone. It was no longer playful. His footfalls came through the line, but little else that she could pinpoint. He was on the move. But where?

  He’d seen her. It had been less than ten minutes between when she’d exited the station and when the phone had rung. He would want to be someplace secure before he called her. Was he on foot or in a car? If he had been walking the whole time, he couldn’t have made it far beyond the outskirts of town. If he’d been driving, he would be about the same distance as she was. She noted the next mile marker so she could map the radius when she got back to the cabin.

  “Don’t you want to know why you should answer my question, Clarke?”

  She didn’t want to know. She really didn’t want to know. Every cell in her body screamed at her to just hang up the phone. She knew that tone. That silky, pretty tone that was a cloying caress.