Page 22 of In Her Fears (Jenna Graves #8)

Elias stood at his living-room window, his paint-stained fingers parting the heavy curtain just enough to create a narrow channel of fading light.

Through this sliver of connection to the outside world, he watched as the last hints of sunlight abandoned the overgrown lawn where, hours before, strangers had gathered with their accusatory signs.

ARREST THE KILLER.

JUSTICE FOR ALEXIS.

He let the curtain fall back into place, but the images he remembered remained in his mind. The angry faces. The shouting. The sheriff and her deputy, their expressions grave as they asked about his paintings.

Alexis. He didn’t know anyone named Alexis. The name meant nothing to him, yet they believed he was somehow connected to her death.

“I haven’t left this house in seven years, three months, and sixteen days,” he murmured to the empty room, his voice rasping from disuse. The words tasted like ash in his mouth.

His gaze drifted to the ceiling, where shadows gathered in the corners.

Had he truly not left? Sometimes, in the hazy border between wakefulness and the sleep that never came, he wondered if perhaps parts of him—the essential parts, the soul or consciousness or whatever one might call it—slipped free of his physical form and wandered.

How else could he explain the visions that came to him? The scenes that he painted?

The sheriff had shown him an image on her phone. One of his paintings—a man tied to a tree, staked through the heart. She said it had happened. A real death, exactly as he had painted it weeks before.

A cold dread seeped into his bones. What if he was responsible? Not his hands, perhaps, but his mind? His visions? Could he somehow be making those things happen?

Elias shuffled across the room, the floorboards creaking beneath his weight. Chronic Traumatic Insomnia. CTI. The doctor’s diagnosis echoed in his mind. Triggered by severe trauma—finding Lina’s body, still warm but irrevocably empty of the spirit that had animated her.

Seven years without proper sleep did things to a person. To a mind. Reality became fluid, time ceased to flow in a single direction. Cause and effect became tangled.

His hands trembled as he lowered himself into his chair by the dying embers in the fireplace. He couldn’t remember when he had last added wood to it. Hours ago? Yesterday? Time slipped away from him so easily now.

The paintings downstairs—dozens of them, each depicting scenes of violence beneath a full moon—had come to him unbidden.

Of course the settings were modeled on the photos Chris Ashworth brought to him, but what about the victims and their sinister poses?

They appeared to him in his waking dreams, demanding to be rendered in oils.

He had believed them to be manifestations of his grief, his guilt, his rage.

But what if they were more? What if they were windows, not to his subconscious, but to actual events—past or future?

The thought made Elias shudder. If his visions were coming true, if people were dying just as he had painted them, then the responsibility …

No. He couldn’t bear it. Not another death on his conscience.

The weight of Lina’s ending had crushed something vital inside him seven years ago. He knew all too well that his confrontation, his accusations—however justified—had driven her to that final, irreversible act.

Elias closed his eyes briefly, then forced them open as unwelcome images threatened to surface. He needed to do something. Something to stop whatever connection existed between his paintings and these awful deaths.

Perhaps that’s why he had said he would talk to Eric. After seven years of bitter estrangement, perhaps it was time to heal that wound. To let go of the anger he had nurtured far too long.

If his bitterness was somehow feeding these visions, these deaths, then perhaps forgiveness could end them.

The thought had barely formed when headlights swept across his front window. Elias rose with effort, his joints protesting, and returned to his post at the curtain.

A car had pulled up in front of his house. In the deepening twilight, he watched as Eric Edwards stepped out—older than Elias remembered, his hair more gray than black now, but unmistakably Eric. His former friend. His wife’s lover.

Eric approached the female police officer stationed at the bottom of the porch steps. They exchanged words, the officer gesturing toward the house. Eric nodded and continued up the steps, his posture tense.

A knock sounded, yet Elias hesitated, his hand on the lock. Then, with a decision that felt momentous, he turned each lock—one, two, three—and pulled the door open.

Eric stood on the threshold, his expression guarded. The years had marked him—fine lines around his eyes, a certain weariness in his stance—but there was still something of the young art student Elias had befriended decades ago.

“Elias,” Eric said, his voice carefully neutral.

“Come in,” Elias replied, stepping back to allow his visitor entry.

Eric moved past him into the dimly lit foyer, his gaze taking in the dust, the cobwebs, the general disrepair that Elias had long since ceased to notice. Neither man spoke as Elias led the way to the living room, where the last embers in the fireplace cast a feeble glow.

“Sit,” Elias gestured to the chair opposite his own. The same chair the sheriff had occupied earlier that day.

Eric lowered himself into it, perching on the edge as if prepared to flee at any moment. An uncomfortable silence stretched between them, filled with seven years of unspoken words.

Finally, Elias broke it. “What do they think I’ve done?” he asked. “These people with their signs. The sheriff. What crime am I accused of?”

Eric’s gaze met his, then flicked away. “They think you’re connected to two murders,” he said. “A man named Martin Holbrook in Pinecrest Cemetery a month ago, and a young woman named Alexis Downey, found this morning in an abandoned hunting lodge.”

“Alexis,” Elias repeated, testing the name. It meant nothing to him, yet something stirred in the back of his mind—a half-remembered dream, perhaps. “And they think I...?”

“They don’t know what to think,” Eric said.

“But your paintings—they match the murder scenes. Exactly. The one of the man staked to a tree with a pentagram carved above him? That’s how Holbrook was found.

And apparently, you have another painting showing Alexis’s death, but you painted it a week ago. ”

Elias felt something cold settle in his chest. “I see,” he murmured. “And I more than half-wonder if it’s not true.”

“What do you mean?” Eric leaned forward.

“I don’t know anymore,” Elias admitted. “What’s real. What’s dream. What’s memory. It all bleeds together after so long without sleep.”

Eric was watching him closely, concern in his expression. “That’s why Sheriff Graves wanted me to talk to you,” he said. “To find out if you can think of anything that might connect your paintings with what’s happening out there in the world.”

Elias considered this, his thoughts moving sluggishly through the fog of exhaustion. There was something important here, something just beyond his grasp. A connection he needed to make.

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “it’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“To forgive you,” Elias said, the words feeling strange on his tongue after so many years of bitterness. “For Lina. For the affair.”

Eric looked as if he’d been struck, his eyes widening with shock. “Elias—”

“I’ve been harboring it too long,” Elias continued, the words coming easier now. “This bitterness. This rage. Perhaps it’s poisoned me. Perhaps it’s leaking out into the world somehow, through my paintings. Through these visions.”

He leaned forward, his gaunt face catching the last light from the dying fire. “What if my anger is causing these deaths? What if my refusal to forgive has created something... monstrous?”

Eric seemed at a loss for words, his expression a complex mixture of guilt, grief, and astonishment. “I never expected—” he began, then stopped. “I’ve carried what happened with me every day for seven years, Elias. Not just Lina’s death, but knowing that I betrayed you. My friend.”

“And I’ve carried my part,” Elias said. “The confrontation. The things I said that night. The way I drove her away.”

A memory surfaced—the three of them in the clearing, moonlight filtering through the trees, the remains of their picnic scattered around them. His accusations, loud in the night air. Lina’s face, stricken. Eric’s guilty silence.

And later, finding her body. The note, simple and devastating: “I can’t live with what I’ve done.”

“I forgive you,” Elias said, the words unexpectedly liberating. “And I need to ask for your forgiveness as well.”

“Of course,” Eric replied. “Of course I forgive you. God, Elias, I’ve missed you. Missed our friendship.”

A fragile silence settled between them, no longer tense but tender, like a wound beginning to heal.

“There’s more,” Elias said after a moment. “I need to make peace with Lina’s spirit as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tonight,” Elias said, his voice taking on a dreamy quality, “I plan to go to the last place where the three of us were together. The clearing in the woods where we had that final picnic. Where I confronted you both about the affair.”

He saw understanding dawn in Eric’s eyes. “The old picnic area,” he said.

Elias nodded. “I’ve been haunted by that night. By the fact that she took her life just hours later. I need to go there, to that spot, and make peace with her memory.”

“I’ve been haunted by it too,” Eric admitted. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her. About what we did. About how it ended.”

He hesitated, then added, “But Elias, there are police officers watching your house. They won’t just let you leave, especially not after what happened today with that crowd.”

A smile ghosted across Elias’s hollow face, transforming it briefly into something that recalled the handsome, vibrant man he had once been. “You and I both know they can’t keep me here,” he said. “I’m freer to come and go than they realize.”

Eric nodded slowly, understanding dawning in his eyes.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Eric asked. “To the clearing?”

Elias shook his head. “No. This is something I have to do alone.” He paused, then added, “But thank you. For coming when I asked. For listening.”

Eric rose from his chair. “I’ve waited seven years to hear from you, Elias. I would have come running any time you called.”

They moved to the door, the walk through the dark house untroubled now by the tension that had marked Eric’s arrival. At the threshold, Eric turned back, his hand on the doorknob.

“Be careful,” he said simply. “And Elias? Thank you. For forgiving me.”

Then he was gone, the door closing behind him with a soft click.

Alone once more, Elias considered the time of day. Even though hours had long since lost their meaning for him, he knew that moonrise would happen very shortly. The September Harvest Moon, full and golden, would soon climb above the treeline.

The realization struck him as particularly fitting. Seven years ago, on that fateful night, the moon had also been full. Its light had silvered the clearing, even as their idyllic evening had shattered into recriminations and tears.

Ever since, he had been obsessed with the full moon. It appeared in every painting, every vision, watching over scenes of death like a cold, impartial witness.

Perhaps tonight, under its gaze, he could finally find some measure of peace. For himself. For Lina. For the nameless victims whose deaths were somehow connected to his tortured mind.