Page 22

TWENTY-TWO

Gabriel

I look up as rain hits my face. It’s cold, but there’s something calming about the frigid water hitting me while the world feels like it’s spinning around me.

My stomach was in knots coming here. I was frantic. I searched every inch of the buildings and then scoured the land, like I was just going to stumble on a whole field of unmarked graves. I feel like I needed something to reassure me that I’m not going to lose Liam because of a simple mistake.

But now that Liam’s here, I feel strangely at ease. I can tell he’s unsure of what to do. I can tell he’s anxious, more fixated on me than the man in front of him. He’s afraid I’m going to run. And maybe coming here was asking a lot of him, but I felt like I needed to be here. I’m not even sure I understand why.

The sound of the rain beating down around me is oddly calming. And when the door opens, Liam steps up behind me and slides his arms over my shoulders.

“I love you,” he says. “I love you so much.”

“Did you think I was going to be gone or something?” I ask as I reach up and grip his hands. A part of me questions if they’re going to be bloody, but they appear spotless.

“You’re too stubborn for that.” He lifts my fingers up and kisses the tip of each finger, even though the gloves hide my fingerprints that he seems so obsessed with. “You’re as stubborn as that cat of yours.”

“Maybe. Did you get me a number?”

“I did.” He draws me backward into the silo and I turn to face the man, unsure what I expect to see, but besides the sobs, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with him. No blood, no redness. The only thing off that I notice is a smudge of ink across his finger.

“She’s mine, you don’t fucking understand. She’s mine. She will always be mine,” he sobs out.

“If you wanted her, why’d you take her parents from her?” I ask.

Caleb shakes his head. “They were keeping her from me. She told me she wanted to talk to me, but they restricted her laptop! They restricted her! They were controlling her. And then they started turning her against me. I knew I had to save her.”

“She’s a teenage girl who thought you were the teenage boy of her dreams. When she found out you weren’t, of course she pulled away. Do you really fucking think her parents were the problem?” I ask, feeling weirdly thrilled that I can cuss at him, I can yell at him… there’s no restriction of laws inside this room. There’s nothing worse than dealing with a person who you know hurt innocent people and having to act civil and unbiased.

“I saved her from them.”

“You ruined her life,” I say. “You ruined everything for her. Of course she’d never want to be with someone like you.”

Liam hands me the phone and I click on the pictures. There are so many pictures of her—in her home, in her bathing suit, with her friends. The longer I scroll, the darker it all gets. The more the obsession deepens.

“You can’t take her from me,” he says, and then he starts straining against his binds. His muscles bulge and his face gets red as he screams and thrashes, but no one will hear him out here. “You can’t fucking take her from me. I will kill you. I will kill everyone who gets in the way of me being with my bride.”

Liam taps on an app on the phone. “Our buddy here likes to write.”

This seems to enrage Caleb. “I’ll kill you. I’ll rip you apart. I’ll cut you apart.”

I don’t know whether all the entries are like this one or if Liam found me the worst example because I can’t even get two paragraphs into it before I hand him back the phone, feeling sick to my stomach after reading the fantasies he has about what he’d do with her.

Liam steps up behind me and wraps his arms around me. “Laws prohibit so much of what we’re allowed to do, but when there’s nothing between you, you get to hear every dirty secret. Every single fantasy… every obsession. You can lay everything out and learn every secret. It’s fascinating seeing the depths of darkness that reside in a mind like this one. One where the world revolves around him and him alone. He is the main character of his world, but even main characters can die.” His grip tightens and he kisses my cheek. “In his ideal world, he steals this child from the safety of her family after slaughtering her mother and father. He believes it’s love he’s showering her with, but in reality, she feels nothing but fear for him. He takes her away and hides her from society to make her his own. If she’s lucky, someday she gets away, but most aren’t lucky.”

“This one is lucky,” I whisper.

Liam’s eyes shift off the man and onto me.

“Because she has you,” I tell him. “Please be careful. Please be so fucking careful. Please. I’m begging you. You’ve always shown me perfection, so don’t show me anything less.”

“Of course not,” he says as he smiles at me. It’s such an adoring smile. Like even in the room with this man, his whole world revolves around me. I was afraid of the Liam I’d see when I walked in here. I was afraid that I would always have to fear for his life, but he’s careful. He’s giving me everything I need.

He’s watching me… waiting… wanting to see what move I make.

I kiss his forehead and then head out of the silo. I hear the man screaming for me, trying to feed me shit, as if he thinks I could forget everything I saw on that phone. I get into my car, but I don’t start it yet. Instead, I wait as I listen to the sound of the rain striking the windshield.

I open my phone and hunt Leanne’s name before I find her social media page. I look at the smile on her face as she hugs a ferret who has a hold of a chunk of her hair. She’s just a teenager wanting to live her life. A teenager in her senior year of high school with a whole life ahead of her.

I smile as I drop the phone and start the car, heading back toward home feeling like a weight has been lifted off my chest.

And shouldn’t that be horrible? Isn’t that awful of me?

Yet, I don’t feel awful at all. I feel… relieved. I feel like I can breathe. When I get to Liam’s, I let myself in through the front door and head over to the couch where Lucille Pawl and Butter are sitting. She acts like she hates his very existence, but it’s rare to see her out of his sight.

Seeing me, Lucille rushes over, meowing her complaints. There’s quite the tale there, mostly about how irritated she is that I left her, and her story reaches its climax where she screams a bit about Butter eating her food.

Butter doesn’t mind. He just twitches his tail back and forth, looking like the definition of comfortable.

“Wow, all of that happened while I was gone?” I tease the cat.

She meows in reply. I think it has something to do with the fact that she likes the heated mat Liam got her that Butter is currently on top of. There is a second one, but of course she only wants the one he’s sitting on.

I carry her through the house as I look around it and wonder what my life would be like always having Liam in it. Or the fact that I’m okay with what he does, and I know that it won’t come between us.

I go into his bedroom and turn around, wondering if I feel ready to ask him more. Do I want to know what else he hides in this room?

I take a shower and get ready for bed, feeling exhausted. I flop down on the bed and Lucille starts kneading my chest like she needs a bit of blood to sate her since Liam’s not here for her to yowl at. All too soon, Butter joins us, and even as he snubs my pets, he lies down right up against my face. He doesn’t even flinch as Lucille smacks him a few times.

The door swinging open wakes me.

Liam watches me closely, like he’s scared any quick movements will make me run.

“Was everything perfect?” I ask as I look over at him.

“Always is,” he says, waiting for my reaction.

I sit up and he slowly comes over to me as Lucille and I scrutinize him. He looks absolutely perfect. Not a single blemish. Nothing marring him or his clothes. I reach for him, and he likely expects I’m going to grab him, but instead, I slip my hand into his pocket. Finding nothing, I search his left pocket before sliding my hand into his back pockets.

“Is this a new way of groping me? A bit unusual, but I’m game.”

“I want to see it,” I say as I hold my hand out.

“I’m willing to show you whatever you want.”

“Then let me see it.”

Liam hesitates before pulling out his phone. He eyes me for a second, like he’s questioning if maybe he’s gotten it wrong, but he pops his phone free of its case and slides out a small slip of white cardstock.

I flip it over and look at the ink from a fingerprint pressed into the stark white paper.

He’s probably analyzing every expression I make, but I’m giving him very little to work with.

“Do they all have one of these?”

“Most.”

“The guy who killed your mother?”

“I pulled it when I was older. It’s a copy of the print I’d found on the glass I’d handed to the police. But most of the rest.”

“You know something like this would destroy you,” I say, feeling anxious about it. Just because I’ve accepted him doesn’t mean I have to accept the way he does things when it could lead to him getting hurt or arrested. I’m afraid to lose him. I’m afraid of how hard it would be to move forward without him, so I must protect him at all costs.

“Of course I do.”

“If someone found this… it’d be the end. There’s nothing you or I could do to save you,” I say, the idea making my stomach tighten.

“I know.”

“Would you get rid of it if I asked you to?”

Liam freezes, and it’s the first hint of concern he’s shown. “If that’s what you want,” he says. “Do you want me to get rid of it?”

“No. Go get a shower.”

He hesitates, like he’s thinking about saying something more, but he can’t seem to think of what to say. Then he pulls back and heads into the bathroom. I really should make him destroy it. His… trophies could ruin his life. If he ever got caught, his trophies could tie him to multiple murders instead of just one. But I can’t seem to bring myself to make him get rid of something he so adamantly wants.

His shower is quick before he returns to the bed and gets in it. He’s a bit stiff, uncertain… he doesn’t immediately roll into me, and I realize he’s waiting for me. I roll onto my side and slide a hand up his bare chest before grabbing his waist and drawing him against me.

Liam quickly reaches over and grabs me, hand wrapping tightly around me as he buries his face against my neck. “I love you. I love you so much.”

“You better,” I say. “My last boyfriend’s dirty secret I was required to keep was that he hated his mom’s spaghetti that she thought he loved.”

“He sounds despicable.”

I grin at him. “Right?”

I close my eyes as I squeeze him against me. “You tell me all the time that you’d burn the world down for me… but I guess this means I’d help you burn it.”

“You’d be a sexy firefighter.”

“I think firefighters do the opposite,” I say with a chuckle.

He draws me down into a kiss as I roll closer to him, my leg sliding between his while I hold him tight.