Page 32 of Beyond Hate (Beyond #3)

Otto

M y entire front was splattered in blood, but it wasn’t doing a damn thing to alleviate the irritation pouring through me.

I’d been careful and meticulous—I’d made sure to completely cover my tracks when I’d cleaned up the house I’d been staying in.

I was still paying for it, so there was no reason for someone to have come in.

So how had they found Hudson? That was the only body they could have found that would have led them to London. There was no one else it could have been. And yes, two men dying with their throats slit was a bit suspicious… but…

Well, the man at my feet was absolutely not related to London in any way I knew.

He was just a stranger I’d found conveniently stepping into an alleyway.

It wasn’t hard to close my eyes and remember all the places I’d hurt London’s ex, every stab wound.

It felt good to do it again, if I was being honest…

because that bastard was still causing us problems, even in death.

It wasn’t hard to replicate them on the fresh corpse.

I was careful and meticulous, as methodical and quick as I could be…

and I was obvious when I dumped him. After all, they needed to find the body and realize it was so fresh that there was no way London could have been the one to do it, since he was at the station being questioned.

He’d been there for hours, but as I pulled out the man’s phone and dialed 911, his blood was still warm on the floor of the abandoned building I’d pulled him into.

I just had to be confident that my instincts were still on point, that I wasn’t accidentally leaving behind evidence that might implicate me in the crime. There weren’t any cameras—London really did live in a shitty, run-down town. There weren’t any witnesses.

And honestly… when this was all over and done with, I was going to take London and leave.

I was going to buy us new identities, and we were going to disappear. I was through with all of this. I was through with the weight of this place.

I just wanted London… and as soon as I killed whoever thought they could hurt him, I’d take him far enough away from here that I was the only thing he knew.

Like I’d summoned him up just by thinking about him, my phone vibrated. I pulled it to my ear with a sigh. “Is everything okay, London?”

“I’m getting a ride back to the house. Everything’s fine, Otto. They just found the man who tried to attack me at the club. He’s dead—his throat was slit. They wanted to know if I knew anything about it.” The implication was there, heavy in the air… but…

The man who tried to attack him at the club? My eyes narrowed.

“London, who are you with?”

I’d never found the man who attacked him at the club. It was on my list to hunt him down, but I hadn’t been able to tear myself away from London long enough to figure out who he was, let alone where he lived.

That man should have still been breathing.

“What? I told you, I’m getting a ride back to the apartment.”

“With who ?”

“Officer Renn, he—” I didn’t have time to tell him to get out of the car before the line went dead.

Dead… fuck. The word sounded more ominous than it should have.

I had a moment where my body wanted to panic, where a part of me felt wild and desperate, furious that something like this had happened to begin with.

I hadn’t wanted to let London go with the bastard when he showed up at the door.

I’d distracted myself by killing some poor asshole who didn’t even need to die…

Because it was obvious that the person who deserved my knife at their throat was the man who had London in his car right now.

Thankfully, he wasn’t so far out of reach that I couldn’t find him.

I pulled out the phone I’d kept after I dumped Hudson’s body, and carefully navigated to the same application he’d used to track London down when we’d been together.

I was going to tell him I’d kept it, but it hadn’t seemed all that important.

Now it was stopping the soft streak of fury and panic trying to rise in my chest. I didn’t know what was happening to London right now, but the little circle that was his face was still moving. His phone was still on, even if he couldn’t use it.

I just needed to catch up to him.

I stuffed the bloody gloves I’d been wearing into my pocket, and silently berated myself for parking so far away from the scene I’d made.

Fuck, if someone found the body, would it alert Officer Renn that something was going on?

There was no reason for him to take London. There was no reason for him to know how I’d killed Hudson.

I had no idea why , but he had to be the person who’d sent the note. It wouldn’t surprise me if Nathaniel West had his fingers dipped into the local police station. I just didn’t know what it could possibly benefit.

I didn’t understand.

It was a good thing that I didn’t need to have a reason to kill someone… because the man who had London in the car and was currently driving in the opposite direction from the house we’d been staying in was a dead man walking and he just didn’t know it.

I’d start tomorrow , trying to keep London from seeing me kill people.

I drove faster than I should have once I got into the car, but it didn’t seem to matter. The little dot of London’s face was moving just as quickly, and I didn’t realize I was biting the inside of my cheek hard enough that my mouth was flooded with the taste of blood until it was already happening.

I had to tell myself that while they were moving it was probably hard for anything to be happening to him… but I also knew I’d made plenty of things happen to people while we’d been moving when I was alive before. Nowhere was actually safe if a person was determined enough.

And I didn’t know if London had the knife I’d given him—I’d definitely not done enough to teach him how to use it.

The memories that tried to overtake me, the one that had led me to put my hands around his throat…

the ones that had made him open up to me…

they were coming back now to make the situation worse.

London knew to put the knife somewhere that bled a lot, and London knew what it looked like when I came. I wasn’t a very good teacher, because neither of those things would be helpful if he was stuck with a police officer who had training and a gun.

The word gun made me step on the gas. I knew what it felt like to have a gun pressed to the back of your head. I knew that blinding, hot moment of fear when it went off before everything went blank.

And I knew if I found London like that, there was nowhere in the world that would be safe from the bloodbath I would rain down.

The car stopped driving a few miles out of town, and I frowned. It was close to the husk of the facility, and for a few minutes, I tried to run scenarios through my mind that could make sense.

I’d never seen a journal from Nikki, but I wasn’t surprised that Nathaniel had kept things from me.

I’d never heard of him talking to the cops.

And I was pretty sure the only people who had a grudge against me were dead.

So why…

Why…

Why didn’t matter—all that mattered was getting to London.

I ditched the car a block from where his face was lit up on the screen, and followed the image of him to an older looking house set back in the woods.

It was the perfect place to bring someone if you wanted to do something bad to them…

and there was a police car parked in front of the gate, showing for all the world to see that this was where Renn had brought London.

It was a good place for someone to die—a good place to hide a body. Maybe he’d brought him here for that reason, but he didn’t realize it was his grave he was planning for.

There was no world where he got to walk out of here alive. I just had to remind myself that I needed to kill him slowly so I could make sure that he was it.

That there was no one else.

That the fucking demons from my past would stop rearing their heads and trying to ruin the only good thing I’d ever touched, the one pure thing that was mine.

By the time I got to the door and carefully glanced in through the window, I’d already talked myself into eight ways I could gut Renn while keeping him alive long enough to talk…

and every one of those thoughts left my head as soon as I saw him standing there with London on his knees and a gun pressed to the back of his head.

It was like it was on purpose.

Like this was the plan all along… and my mind circled back around to Nathaniel, to the secret smiles he always had when he looked at me.

“When it comes down to it, a man in love will always come for the person who holds his heart, even if he knows it’s a trap.”

Fuck. He’d said that to me, hadn’t he? I was an experiment, even now. Even though he was dead.

It was like every ghost, every memory from my past was finally manifesting into something real and whole… because standing beside Renn was a figure that I shouldn’t have recognized, but I did. A figure that should have been impossible, but I was proof that nothing was impossible.

I should have known this was Nathaniel’s end game, because it really was the perfect conclusion to his experiment.

She looked different… but the cold blue of her eyes was something burned into my memory, like little jolts of pain that would never heal over. A thousand cuts.

A thousand moments where she’d made sure to let me know what a disappointment I was. And then a thousand more where she let me know that there was no world where I could escape the punishment for trying to leave her.

Elizabeth Blythe was like a ghost from my past… and she was looking down at London like she’d won some kind of lottery, and he was the prize she’d been after all along.