Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 94076 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 470(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94076 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 470(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
I’ve never been hunted before.
I always attend the funeral of a victim. Not just to study the grieving faces and watch for a killer but to honor the victim. Gregory Martin had friends—loved ones. He was a real person with real feelings.
I’m his only hope of justice.
Yesterday I identified the second man who attacked me, the one who called me a bitch.
His tongue had been cut out.
Lividity on his arms indicated that he’d been tied in the same way the other victims were. The same way Rex ties me.
The wind cuts through me, and I rub my arms, searching for a twinge of pain that will carry me through the oppressive energy of this afternoon.
With the new body, Jacobs and Diaz have more leads to follow. They acted cagily around me, but I could tell I was no longer their prime suspect. Once they establish the time of death, they’ll call on me for an alibi. Ironically, he might be mine.
And I might be Rex’s.
Godsdammit.
The funeral ends. Like so many funerals, it gives no real solace to the grieving.
I’m shivering in my leather jacket, but as the crowd begins to break up, I move closer. There’s a dark haze hanging over the tombstone. A miasma of grief. I grit my teeth to get through it.
Then, the light breaks through. I look up, and there he is.
Rex stands on the opposite hill, his hands tucked into the pockets of a heavy wool coat and head bowed, his expression sober as he looks down on the funeral guests. A watcher, an outsider viewing the activity but never a part of it.
Surrounded by gravestones and framed by the city skyline, he looks just like the picture in the newspaper of him, long ago, as a boy. He was so young, too young to lose everything. Vulnerable to the press vultures who fought for a photograph of him and used it to sell papers.
I recognize the bleakness in his thousand-yard stare. I’ve been where he’s been. Lost, wandering an empty world that no longer makes sense. Hoping that it’s all a nightmare and you’ll eventually wake up.
The back of my neck prickles, and I blink. Rex is staring my way as if waiting for me to notice him. He raises his chin, and the image of the little boy standing at his parents’ grave disappears.
Rex is the reason for this funeral. He’s a monster. He isn’t here to grieve. He’s here to gloat. Any sympathy for the boy he was should be drowned in the cesspit of his sins.
And yet. . . He turns toward me, and I want to go to him. Close the distance between us and find shelter in his strong arms. He’d open his coat and tuck me inside, covering me with his scent and protecting me from the wind.
I scrunch my toes in my boots and will my soles to take root. I will not go to him. Not even to accuse him of murder, to hear his deep voice baiting me. To study the shadow his eyelashes cast on his sculpted cheekbones.
More people are turning and noticing, whispering to each other to point him out. He has his own gravitational pull, but I’m keeping my distance, even if my calves tremble with the effort. I need all the space I can get to study him.
There’s a darkness in him. Why didn’t I notice it? I have to know more about it.
He certainly stands out in a crowd as a man so assured of his power and dominance yet with a terrifying calm. He has none of the softness I’d expect in a man who inherited extreme wealth. He’s harder, weathered by tragedy. But he’s gone beyond that, becoming stronger and more powerful than anyone on the planet.
Is he so powerful that he needs a new challenge? A bored little rich boy craving new depravities? The thrill of the hunt? The kill?
If I didn’t know anything else about him, I would make that profile fit. But I can’t reconcile the murderer with the little boy who watched his parents die.
All I’m left with is an ache. Because I know what it’s like to wake up into a nightmare that won’t end. How to breathe when the pain is like knives lining your lungs. How to survive with a hole where your heart should be.
The funeral is over, and the guests are leaving. Rex doesn’t make a move to approach, and for that, I’m grateful.
Instead, he holds his hand out to me.
I shake my head and turn away, hunching my shoulders against the cold. I both long for him to come after me and dread it.
I can’t face him with my heart flayed open like this. Because it’s occurred to me that if I know what he went through, losing his family, if I’m the only one in the world who understands his great loss, the reverse is true.