Page 74 of The Blood we Crave: Part Two

The wind howls, trees groaning with the force. A thunderstorm is on the horizon. The blue sky is turning a sickly gray, the crackle of lightning illuminating clouds in the distance.

I thought when they lugged Henry Pierson away to prison, that was the last of his game. He had no more control over me the moment they slammed the bars of his cell shut.

I was free of him. Of his rules.

Of course he’d dig his claws into me from prison. Find a way to invade my life from a distance. The narcissist needs to know he still affects me, needs to remind me who made me the man I am today. I am his marvelous achievement, his pet, the prodigy. He can’t just leave me unscathed.

Henry demands control, and he’d lost it once he went to prison.

This is his way of amending that power.

He refuses to rot without making sure I know that if not for him? I wouldn’t exist.

Roses.

The Imitator’s only distinct pattern difference from my father’s is the roses he leaves with the body parts.

The only person who knows what Henry Pierson did with the bodies of those women is me. The police never found them, never made him crack enough to reveal it.

It was just him and I.

Our final little secret.

I’d only kept it as leverage so that if something like this were to happen? I would threaten to expose where each woman was left to decompose. His burial, those bodies? It was his last thing he had over the police. Once he lost it, it would be over for him.

I’d been so blind. The answer had been staring at me this entire time, right in plain sight. The Imitator was playing games with all of us, but the flower? That wasn’t his doing.

My father knows exactly who the copycat killer is.

The body parts, the notes left in the skin, those were for the police. Those were for the boys.

The roses? Henry told him to leave those for me.

He knew I’d figure it out.

And now he has left me no choice.

It’s the last option I have if I want the people around me to make it out alive.

It’s time to pay daddy dearest a visit.

EXECUTION

TWENTY

Thatcher

*Rook removed Alistair from group chat.*

MIDNIGHT AND CRIMSON

TWENTY-ONE

Lyra

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

Did this help motivate you in your pursuit of me? Or is it highlighted only because you think it sounds important?—T.