by Jenna Mills
His shoulders rose, fell. "You leave."
He made it sound simple. "Just like that?"
"Just like that."
Deliberately, I lifted the knife, letting him see the blade. "You really think I believe that?" There was only one way out of the carriage house, and it was behind him, through the door.
He blocked that path.
"I could destroy you." I wasn't a fool. I was—but I wasn't. "We both know that. If I write the truth about what happened here, the psychotic game you've been playing—"
He laughed. Cold. It was so cold. Empty. "It would be your word against mine."
The truth of that stabbed through me. "Just like with everyone else." Laurel. Danielle.
I'd believed him. Oh, God, I'd believed him.
"Kendall, Kendall, Kendall."
His voice was chillingly warm, almost identical to the one from before—soft, tender. But finally, I knew. Finally, I understood.
Everything. A lie. A script. And I'd followed it. Unknowingly—perfectly. I'd played his game, played into his hands.
"I had nothing to do with the others," he said.
His story.
"I merely used what you already knew, what you already wondered about me, to give you a story you would never forget."
Merely.
The dismissiveness of his tone rocked me to the core.
"Yesterday. The car," I gritted out before I could stop myself. "Running me off the road. You've got a strange idea of mere stories."
He stiffened. "That was an accident—"
"I believed you," I said, holding the knife up, holding it because I had to. Because I was breaking, and I didn't know how to stop. "I trusted you. I thought—" Memories slashed, the lies I'd wrapped so willingly around my heart, the way I'd let him touch me—take me. The way I'd given him...everything.
"You're sick," I realized. "You need help."
He smiled. "I was more than fine before you decided to come pick apart my life—and I'll be perfectly fine after you're gone."
Get out of there. It was all I could think. I had to get out of there, get away. I couldn't look at him—
—knew better than to trust him.
"Drop what's in your hands," I said, mind racing.
He glanced at the rod. "You don't think I'm going to—"
"I have no idea," I said before he could finish. "But I'm not willing to take that chance." With a calm I didn't come close to feeling, I repeated my command. "Drop it."
Surprisingly, he did.
I looked at him for a second, standing there in only his jeans, the first blush of the morning sun slipping in from the open door behind him.
One hour. That was all. Sixty minutes before I'd been in his bed.
"Stay where you are," I said, cramming together all the broken pieces inside of me, the ones with the sharp, jagged edges, that still wanted—
No.
No.
Mechanically, I gripped his big office chair and swung it in front of me, shoved it toward where he stood.
"Now, sit," I instructed.
Nothing. There was absolutely nothing in his face, not anger, not menace, not mockery.
"Kendall, really...you can just go—"
I lifted the rope from the box. "Thanks all the same, Nicky, but I don't make the same mistake twice."
He winced. Or maybe he didn't. Maybe that was only what I wanted to see, what I wanted so, so badly to see, some flicker or trace of reaction, the tiniest shred of a crumb that I could hurt him—
That was when I realized it—my imagination.
Aidan Cross didn't wince.
And he didn't hurt.
Or want.
He played.
That was all.
I stood there, knife in one hand, rope in the other, waiting. All he had to do was lunge for me. I knew that, and so did he. If he wanted to eliminate me—
He sat.
"Now spin the chair around," I instructed. "Back to me."
He did. "Really not necessary," he said. "Don't you realize if I wanted to hurt you, how easy it would have been?"
I stiffened.
Silence wound between us, holding us there, holding us in an invisible web of lies and deception and—
Truth.
The truth was there, right along with the lies.
The truth of who and what he was.
The truth of what he'd done.
The truth that yes, he had hurt me. Maybe not with his hands, or a weapon. Maybe not with his body. Maybe not to my body.
"Yes," I said coldly. Blankly. In a voice as devoid of emotion as possible. A voice...like his. "I do realize if you wanted to hurt me, I've given you every opportunity in the world."
And that there were many ways to hurt.
Many ways to destroy.
Not all involved the flesh.
No longer could I see him, not with him in the chair, his back to me. So I had no way to know if my words slashed with the precision I intended.
Except I did know.
I knew it was all a lie. Every touch. Every whisper. Every kiss.
And I knew my words could not touch him.
"Hands to your side," I said.
He did.
Wanting only to be out of there, I uncoiled the rope and looped the center around his chest, pulling him back against the chair.
He didn't fight me, didn't move, didn't say another word.
I wound the rope around him and the chair as many times as I could, over and over, until there was no slack and no way for him to move. Then I secured a knot.
Confident he couldn't follow me, I retrieved the knife and made myself walk past him, to the open door.
I had one foot in the courtyard when his voice, black velvet soft, cut through the quiet.
"Goodbye, Kendall."
I closed the door and kept walking. I made myself. I had to. There was no room for looking back. No time for feeling or emotion. I stripped all that away, allowing only what had to be done.
I went inside. I dressed. I shoved my things into my suitcase. And I walked out the front door.
The replacement rental car sat where I'd left it the night before, on the street out front. When I reached the door, I discovered what the metal rod Aidan had been holding was—a slim-jim for unlocking cars.
The matchbook sat on my front seat, next to another doll, this one dressed in a little black sheath.
I knew I shouldn't look. I told myself not to. But I flipped open the cardboard anyway, and stared at the words.
You should have listened.
Next time, you might not be so lucky.
Robotically, I curled my fingers around the message, tossed it to the ground, and closed the door.
The taxi arrived a few minutes later.
Before I slipped inside, I removed the small tracking device from my purse, and dropped it to the pavement.
Sanctuary
He saw me. I'm not sure how or why. I didn't call him. I didn't give him any warning that I was coming. But the second I stepped inside the Maison de R, Sloan was crossing the already busy lobby.
He reached for me. I remember that. I remember standing there and seeing him step toward me, the way the green of his eyes went dead black.
"You were right," I remember saying. But my voice. It wasn't anything I recognized. It was like gravel, rough and strained, shredding on the way out. "About everything."
Everything.
I was the one who'd been wrong.
About everything.
Everything.
His arms then. I remember his arms, closing around me. But I don't remember feeling anything, not safety or comfort, don't remember anything else, not until he led me to the quiet room upstairs and I slipped inside and locked the door.
I couldn't get my clothes off fast enough. Into the shower. Under the hot, hard spray. The soap. I ran it all over my body, scrubbing, scrubbing as hard as I could—but I knew it would never be hard enough to wash away th
e memory. That it couldn't be hard enough. Nothing could.
It was only there, naked in the small shower, with the water raining down around me, that I finally let go, and fell into so many little pieces, I had no idea how I'd ever pick them up.
Piecing it All Together
I came to New Orleans with my eyes open. I knew Aidan Cross would not roll out the welcome mat. I knew he didn't want me here, that he would not make my assignment easy.
I never imagined he'd seduce me under his spell.
I sat there, staring at the words, knowing, finally, the truth.
I walked into his house as prepared as possible. I walked in armed with every scrap of information I could find. I walked in believing I was ready.
But that was only an illusion.
A lie.
Because where I walked was into his world—his story.
And only he was author.
I wouldn't let myself feel. There was no time for that, for any emotion. Only to think, and write. To write everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours. To make sure there was a record. That felt important.
I was warned. I was warned how talented he was. I was warned about the others, the trap they fell into. The seduction of the fantasy of fixing Aidan Cross. But everything changed on my fifth night with him, alone there in the abandoned mansion. There lines blurred, vanished altogether. And I thought I found him. I thought I found who I came looking for. The man behind the mystery. Nicky. I thought he was still there. And I wanted to set him free. I let myself believe the pieces weren't too broken.
I let myself believe the lie.
I let myself follow the script.
His.
His script.
His story.
And only he wrote the end.
Except that wasn't true. I had another move to make, and it was that move—my move—that would determine the last act.
I don't know when the text arrived. I never heard the beep. I only know it was there, waiting, when I picked up my phone to call Detective Edwards.
Finally, the Beginning
I curled my hands around the warmth of the paper cup, but all the tiny streams of cold kept right on bleeding, exactly as they had for the past several hours. "Thank you," I said.
Anna had her hands together, prayer-like and pressed to her mouth. The look in her eyes, there was so much there, concern and alarm, maybe even the faintest haze of memory, but most of all, compassion.
"You sounded horrible," she said. "You sure he didn't hurt you?"
I'd already told her no. I'd told her no on the phone, when I responded to her text. And I'd told her no when I'd arrived, after she'd hurried out to greet me and rushed me inside as quickly as possible.
She was nervous, like before. But there was something new, too, a resolve, a steadiness that had not been there when we met in the small bathroom.
"He didn't touch me," I said carefully. "I don't think that was his intent."
Frighten.
Intimidate.
Those were more likely.
She frowned. "Or maybe you caught him off guard," she said, shifting to slide the long, side-swept bangs from her face. "Like I eventually did."
The memories tried to play. I refused to let them.
Lifting my cup, I glanced away, toward the grime of the front windows, and finished off my latte.
"I don't understand," I said, changing subjects. I didn't want to talk about him anymore—except that wasn't true. I did want to talk about him. I wanted to know every detail she'd left out the first time we talked.
What I didn't want to talk about was...me.
About how wrong I'd been.
"Why did you want to meet here?"
Here, at the old forgotten house in the Garden District where I'd spent my fifth night, where lines already blurred had first begun to vanish.
Between fiction and reality.
Reality and lies.
Lies...and fantasy.
But that was a lie, too. It was all a lie. Everything.
From the moment I stepped into his world.
Before then.
The moment I accepted the assignment.
Just an assignment, I'd told myself.
Nothing more.
But that was the very first lie.
My lie.
To myself.
Because it had never been Aidan Cross I was coming to find. But Nicky. Nicky Ramirez.
Except now I knew he no longer existed.
"There's more you need to know," Anna said. "Because you have to know."
I turned to look at her, and found her running a hand along the scaffolding against the far wall, the same scaffolding I'd seen Aidan touch a few nights before. "Know what?"
For a moment she said nothing, just looked at the wall. But I could tell she was seeing something, something far beyond the faded, peeling wallpaper.
"I haven't been completely honest with you," she finally said, and it was all I could do not to laugh. "I was too scared, didn't know if I could trust you." She hesitated, drawing her hands together again.
Pale. Her hands were so, so pale.
"But then I realized I was too late," she said, and her voice was quieter now, so quiet I found myself stepping closer. "You were already in too deep."
The quick swirl of vertigo caught me by surprise. I stumbled, instinctively reaching for the ladder to brace myself.
"This is where it all began," Anna said. "Everything."
Far away. She sounded so far away, as if she no longer stood only a few feet away, but had instead traveled elsewhere.
"Where what began?" I asked.
Something dark flashed through her eyes, a pain I automatically recognized—and felt. "She fell in love with this place the second she saw it," Anna murmured, and then she was moving again, like a slow-motion ballerina through the room, gently skimming her hands along the walls.
"Who? Aidan acted like this was some random old house...."
Anna laughed. "Because Aidan Cross only tells the stories he wants to tell," she said, twisting back toward me. "And the story about buying this house so his wife could bring it back to life was not the story he wanted you to know. About how much she loved this place..."
But Anna knew. Anna knew the story.
"She would come here day and night. She would dream here—"
His wife.
Oh. God.
"He told you that?"
Anna smiled. "No. She did." Sunlight streamed through the dusty, forgotten windows, casting her in an eerie spotlight. "And I should have listened to her and stayed away from him. But I couldn't. I...it was his eyes. His eyes that got me, spoke to me."
Turbulent.
Troubled.
Haunted.
I could see them, see them still only a few nights before, when he'd found me in the bathroom of marble—the same bathroom where I realized now that he'd found his wife.
Dead.
"...his eyes that made me reach out when every instinct screamed for me to leave him alone, stay away."
Cold. It just kept seeping through me, deeper with every breath I took.
I stood there with a hand to the ladder, stood there so very, very still, crazy still considering the world around me tilted, had been tilting for hours.
"Things changed so fast," she was saying. "He...changed. He...started scaring me. Just like Laurel said. And I knew I had no choice but to hide. And then after Taylor and Ashley..."
Spinning. It was all spinning, all the pieces I'd been trying to fit together, the familiar pieces, and now new ones, sharper, more jagged.
"We need to call Detective Edwards," I said, reaching for my phone. But my hands, they were numb, clumsy.
"I tried to warn them," Anna said, shaking her head. "I asked them if they knew what they were doing. If they really wanted to be next. I left them dolls...."
The words came at me, hovering in the shadows, just out of reach. There was something there, I knew,
something distorted, but familiar—important. I tried to concentrate, to reach for the pieces, to make them all fit, but the truth was closing in on me, closing tight and squeezing, suffocating, the full impact of the past twelve hours.
Because I could still feel him. For all that I could still see the box of matchbooks and dolls in his office and hear the dead flat of his voice, I could still feel his arms around me, the way he'd held me—and didn't let go.
I'm not going to let anything happen to you—I promise.
My throat tightened. Everything inside me hurt.
I'm not going to let this touch you, ever, ever again.
"Kendall, honey, you okay?"
Forcing slow breaths, I kept trying to knit the pieces together—but every time I tried, my thoughts ran in a different direction, away from the horror of Aidan's office, to hours before, when I'd opened my eyes in his arms on the side of the highway.
I'm here, and so help me God you're okay.
"I think I need to sit down," I murmured. "I..."
"It's okay," Anna said. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere." And then she was there, hovering beside me. "Because I know what it's like. I've been where you are. I've been you." Touching me. She was touching me then, her hands to my arms. "I know how well he can twist everything—"
His world.
Aidan's world.
Aidan the master storyteller.
Who could plot, and execute. Make you believe....
Anything.
Anything.
"Kendall?" Anna said, leaning closer.
Except then there were two Annas, both watching me—
I blinked, and she became one again.
"I'm here. I won't leave you..."
I blinked again, but this time the room didn't stop shifting.
"We need to call Edwards," I said, or tried to say, but the words ran together, blurred. Just like Anna did.
Just like everything did.
Aidan standing in his office.
Aidan cradling me on the side of the road.
Aidan in the penthouse.
In the moonlight.
The old mansion.