Page 16

Chapter Fifteen

Nathan

May 24th

These damn tiny crystals of death keep showing up everywhere. Turbid and glossy, just like grains of couscous. They melt into oblivion in heat and water, and that’s when the games truly begin.

Lately, I’m no longer strong enough to resist. It’s so much easier just to let go and do what Dee says. Whenever Dee calls him, Black comes to me. It’s not real, but it’s so hard and painful to not believe it.

It’s all a game. A game of death. You find the crystals before they find you and you win. You don’t and you die.

I stare unblinking at the ring binder in front of me until my eyes hurt, but I can’t stop.

What the actual fuck?

A thought, too bitter to contemplate, yet an accurate one, begins to unfold in my mind.

I’ve been reading the journals every night since last week when Vause made me a copy, having realized that I seem to know a lot more about Mary than everyone else.

I am also desperate to find answers, perhaps even more than everyone else.

The detectives were right. Mary deliberately wrote in a way that made it difficult for anyone else except John and Ciaran, and by extension, myself, to figure out what she was talking about.

If John had any idea that she wrote in these things, they would have long been destroyed. He probably thought she was writing her cookbooks.

Two things are certain from the entries. One, she never calls Ciaran by his name, only Black, the nickname I gave to him. Two, Black never speaks to her. Dee does all the talking.

I don’t need an astrophysicist’s brain to know that Dee is John.

And those fucking crystals.

There have been several mentions of games and death, but this entry is the first time that she talks about the crystals.

I remember going to Ciaran’s apartment on the day his body was pulled out of Lake Orange. As usual, the place was in shambles, reflecting the state of my twin brother’s mind in the months leading up to his death.

Still numb from shock, I automatically started straightening the place, as if I was expecting Ciaran to show up later that evening.

I swept up what I assumed were grains of couscous in Ciaran’s bedroom, thinking nothing of it. Mary had lived a big chunk of her life with her grandparents in Morocco and must have rubbed off on him.

Now, after reading Mary’s journal, I realize that what I swept up may not have been the semolina grains. They were crystals. Some kind of drug? Maybe.

Both Ciaran and Mary died under very curious circumstances, and it seems as though both were exposed to the same crystals around the time of their deaths.

Mary seemed to have been well-acquainted with them, like she’d seen them many times before. She was thought to be schizophrenic within the last few months before she died.

Was someone gradually exposing her to them, making it so that she would appear to be mentally unstable?

If John lived in the same house and was not affected, he must have been the one peddling and planting those crystals and also knew how to protect himself against them.

Double fuck.

Could it be from the so-called “lab” that John spent so much of his time at? I need to speak to Tess to confirm my theory.

My chest tightens with excitement at the thought of talking to her again. As awful as arguing with her was, I was still left with a pleasurable buzz afterward just from being around her.

Spending time with her, even if we were arguing, gave me an euphoric high that couldn’t be rivaled by any other feeling.

I tell myself that my sudden need to talk to her is because of what I just discovered about the crystals, but really, I would have never lasted the entire weekend without squashing this shit going on between us.

I’ve never been into a woman this much before, never imagined that my sanity would depend on whether or not we were on good terms.

And because Tess is so damn stubborn, I suspect that she’s prepared to hold onto her grudge until Tuesday’s presentation, where I’d be tortured to within an inch of my life by being forced to watch her kill it in the conference room.

I, on the other hand, am already feeling like I might burst out of my skin with need.

A couple of months ago, the feeling wasn’t this bad, but the craving seems to be growing out of proportion, like a damned weed.

Could this all-consuming need be what Ciaran felt for Mary?

God, I hope not.

Still, I can’t stop myself from picking up the phone and dialing her number.

“Hi.” She sounds breathless when she answers after a few seconds.

When she says my name, the pleasure that rushes through me, ending in my cock, scares me.

I’m pretty much done for.

“Baby girl.”

However, by the end of our conversation, my euphoria has been completely replaced by horror, the likes of which I’ve never known.