Chapter 9: : Chapter 9

“We’re at the Drunken Duck. Come for karaoke. Brad is just finishing I Kissed A Girl,” Joy says. She must be just outside the doors of the pub, because I can hear Brad belting out the lyrics without his booming, off-key enthusiasm overwhelming Joy’s voice.

“Christ, that means he’s only a few Tequilas away from Bohemian Rhapsody,” I reply.

“Exactly. And you love his rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody.”

“Only because I relish the secondhand embarrassment.”

“I’m not sure if that makes you a sadist or a masochist.”

“Probably both,” I say, and Joy laughs on the other end. “But in all seriousness, I can’t leave yet.”

“Aww come on, what’s so important that you have to be at the lab at eight on a Thursday night?”

“Turds.”

Silence.

“Animal turds.”

“Kyrie—”

“No really,” I say with a laugh. “I’m just about done writing up the findings on a fecal matter analysis I spent all morning completing and if I finish now then I can take tomorrow off. I have no classes.”

“Bummer. Get it?”

I snort a laugh and Joy cackles as Brad’s song ends in the background to an uproarious cheer.

“Are you there on your own?” Joy asks.

I rise from my office chair and make my way to the shelves where my photos and accolades rest, glinting in the dim light from my desk. “No, Sorensen is here.” I pick up the Brentwood award as I glance in the direction of his lab. He’s bent over a set of skeletal remains, his back facing me. “If I wind up murdered you know where to look.”

“Oh please. As if. You should put all that dramatic diva energy to work on the stage to some Céline Dion,” Joy says as I huff a laugh. It would never cross her mind that the words I’ve just spoken could be possible, let alone likely.

“Listen, I’ll come down if I finish quickly enough. Text me when Bradley is getting close to Queen.”

“Will do, sunshine.”

I smile as I lower my phone and scroll through text messages from friends and colleagues, opening the message from Jack as I contemplate sending a question mark reply to the chess and skull emojis he sent shortly before he arrived, only to close his text once more. My attention is on my device as I move to replace the Brentwood award in its position next to the grainy photo of my mom.

Except I miss the shelf.

My heart plummets faster than the heavy teardrop of glass. I fumble to catch it but it slips from my fingers, and all I can do is watch as it hits the cold tile floor and shatters into a thousand glittering shards.

The blackness of my impending flashback is immediate. It eats the periphery of my vision, consuming the present, hurtling me toward the past.

I place a palm on the wall. My heart riots. My blood heats. I try to turn away from the broken glass littered at my feet to keep myself here but I already know it won’t work. And worst of all, I’m not alone. I’m about to be at my most vulnerable with a wolf in the shadows of the room across the hall.

The last thing I see as my vision narrows to a pinprick of light is Jack straightening, his head turning, his deadly gray eyes meeting mine.

The next voice I hear is the demon who haunts me.

The Silent Slayer.

“Shh, shh. Quiet now, baby.”

The sharp tip of a blade rests against my skin, its point steady between my ribs. I’m lying on the cream carpet in the living room of my childhood home. My body quakes as I press my lips shut between my teeth until they bruise and bleed. I know what’s coming. My lung already rumbles in protest of every breath, the first blade lodged deep in its spongy cavern. It shudders with each blood-filled inhalation. “You know what happens if you make a sound,” the man whispers.

He pushes my head to the side, my cheek tear-streaked and burning as he presses it to the carpet. I meet my mother’s lifeless eyes. Her blood still slips from her parted lips, her severed tongue a dark horror in the shadows of her mouth.

My stomach roils. I choke down a sob, swallowing bile and fear and despair. When I press my eyes closed, the image is still there. Mom’s unseeing eyes. Terror etched deep into her flesh as though it clings to her bones like a phantom, lurking beneath her slack features.

I open my eyes as the man’s hot palm slides across the sweat coating my skin. He presses my cheeks between his fingertips until they ache against my teeth.

He turns my face to the other side.

My dad struggles where he lays on his stomach next to me, his hands bound behind his back and to his ankles, the gag in his mouth wet with exertion and distress. There’s fury in his eyes. Panic. He tries to worm closer to my side but the man who holds me in his grip kicks my dad away.

“Now, now,” the man says, letting go of my face to pull an ancient camcorder from his jacket pocket. “Don’t make a sound or you know how much worse his punishment will be.”

The red light of the camcorder blinks on, its soulless glass eye indifferent to my suffering as it curates every expression on my bruised and swollen face. My breathing quickens. My heart thunders. I try to focus on those three little letters beneath the flashing red glow. I pour every drop of my consciousness into them. Rec. Rec. Rec.

The knife slips between my ribs.

I don’t make a sound. Not as the blade slices through every filament of muscle and flesh. Not as it pierces my lung. Not as this man slides it in a slow procession to bury the steel to the hilt. I swallow every desperate urge to scream and beg, to plead for the pain to stop. I will not let Daddy down like I just did Mom.

But my dad, he can’t stop himself from fighting for me.

For every scream I swallow, my dad begs around his gag. He thrashes against his bonds. His muffled words are a desperate chant. Please, not my girl. Over and over, his pleas repeat like flashes that echo the blinking red light of the camcorder. And when the second blade is sunk into my chest and the man sits back against his heels to record the handle quivering next to its twin, I look at my dad, his tears so much worse than my own.

The red light blinks out.

The scent of blood and cheap drugstore body spray floods the hot air between us as the man leans close to my ear. I struggle to trap my silence in the heat filling my throat. “You did so well, baby,” he whispers, his breath and his words a sticky film that layers over my muddled senses. “Such a brave girl to stay so quiet.” Stubble scrapes the angle of my jaw as the man drags his lips across my skin to press a kiss to my cheek.

The man’s weight lifts from my body. I shake my head violently, my only sound the rumbling breath in my injured lung as I beg him with nothing more than a desperate, pleading look.

He smiles.

“Daddy though…he was not such a good boy,” he whispers as he straddles my father’s back. My dad struggles to buck him off and manages to unseat our assailant for just a moment. But that moment is nothing more than a breath of time, no longer than the beat of a heart.

The man whips a hammer free from a frayed leather loop on his belt.

It’s this exact moment when I learn an important lesson, that time is so very cruel.

Time will slow at will, forcing you to remember every detail of something you would give anything to forget, like the worn patch of wood on the handle of a hammer, or the desperate cry of your father, or the shine of the tears in his eyes. It forces you to witness the flash of the living room lights on the burnished metal of the hammer’s blunt head. You might not be able to remember the last time you told your parents you loved them, but time will be there to make sure you recall the sound of the sickening thud as the hammer strikes your father’s temple, or the color of the blood that sprays across the cream carpet.

Time slows to ensure you never forget how powerless you truly are.

And I am utterly powerless. Powerless to do anything but to absorb every detail of the vicious assault until my mind finally starts to shut down.

The images and sounds blur and distort until a wave of cold air coats the sweat and blood on my skin. When my vision clears, it lands on the vacant expression on my father’s dying face. There’s a wet, rhythmic gurgling as my father’s last breaths spasm in his chest, his severed tongue discarded on the carpet between us. But there’s another sound, one on the other side of me, a choking, gasping plea beneath a menacing whisper.

“You are sloppy. An amateur. Unworthy. And this is my domain.”

It takes a monumental effort, but I turn my head toward the sound.

My assailant is on his knees between my mother’s body and mine. He struggles to pull a wire away from his neck. Another man is behind him, dressed in black, leather gloves tight against his knuckles as he pulls the wooden handles of a garrote back toward his chest.

He’s beautiful. So beautiful. Older than me but still young, maybe mid-twenties. Dark hair, high cheekbones, a subtle smile on full lips as he watches his prey struggle in his grip. He’s a fierce angel. Focused and determined. A savior, delivering the justice I can’t.

He tightens the garrote further and whispers again to the man in his grip.

“Your bones will be nothing more than a substandard trophy on my wall, but I will take them all the same.”

My assailant fights back harder at those words. The angel moves with him, a fluid grace inhabiting every mirrored motion. His sole attention is on the throat trapped in his unrelenting grip. He doesn’t even seem to register my existence. It’s like he doesn’t hear my labored breathing or feel the weight of my watchful gaze.

He doesn’t notice the tiny piece of paper that escapes from his pocket.

He doesn’t see my bound hands creeping across the bloodied carpet to grab the fallen receipt.

He doesn’t watch me read it, doesn’t see me close my eyes to remember every detail. He doesn’t know I drag it down to my side to put it in my pocket.

Arley’s Campus Restaurant & Bar. Revery Hall University. Cash paid. Pellegrino. Chicken Caesar Salad. Cappuccino.

I close my eyes for what feels like only a moment, reciting those details over and over in my mind until they’re burned into my brain.

When I open my eyes, my angel is gone. My assailant is gone. My father’s severed tongue, the camcorder, the hammer, all gone. All that’s left are the knives in my chest and my parents’ cooling bodies on the floor. We’ve been discarded, left to chill in the draft from an open door or window somewhere in the house. But that kiss of cold air spurs me on, laying across my wounds like a whisper that tells me to keep going. Despite the pain and weakness and fear and despair, it pushes me to my hands and knees, demanding that I crawl across the broken glass to find my mother’s phone. I drip a bloody trail from my mouth and wheeze past the pain of a collapsed lung and still the cold draft clings to me, imploring me to keep going.

“Kyrie.”

That word is familiar enough to be real, and unfamiliar enough to drive a wedge between the past and the present.

I blink. My breath comes in rapid pants. A phantom pain sears my lung. I see the glass on the floor beneath my hands. One moment, my palms are on the carpet of my childhood home, the soft pile a caress between the sharp bite of pointed shards. But when I blink again, my palms are on the shining gray tile of my office. The only tether between the two worlds is the sound of my distressed exhalations and the shimmer of shattered glass.

“Kyrie…You can let it go.”

A hand wraps around my shoulder. The skin beneath my damp shirt relishes the cool touch. I’m sweat-soaked and shaking as though fevered. My head throbs with a steady hum as the past peels away and the present claws itself free of its suffocating grip.

“It’s just a memory,” Jack says, his voice quiet as his other hand curls around my wrist. His fingers rest over my hammering pulse. When I pry my gaze from the glass and look up, Jack’s eyes shift from his watch to meet mine, his lips set in a grim line. “It’s not real anymore.”

I want to tell him he’s wrong, that every memory leaves behind something real in its wake. Real scars. Real repercussions. But I don’t have the energy to battle him right now.

I drop my focus to the glass on the floor, to the blood that seeps from beneath my right palm where it’s pressed into the shards. When I close my eyes, Jack only leaves me a few shaky breaths before he lifts my wrist from beneath me and grips my bicep with his other hand, pulling me to my feet. Glass crunches beneath our shoes as he guides me to my desk, his touch a steady anchor that never lets me go, not even when he prompts me to lower into the chair.

When I’m settled, Jack kneels in front of me as he takes my bloody hand and turns it over to examine a jagged, deep cut on the pulp of my thumb. A crease appears between his brows in a flicker of movement that’s gone by the time he’s reaching for the box of tissues on my desk.

“This needs stitches,” he says as he presses tissues to the wound. The muscle in his jaw tics when I shake my head. “It wasn’t a question. It’s a statement of fact.”

“I can’t go in,” I reply in a whisper. Jack’s eyes narrow when I shake my head for a second time. “It will happen again if I go to the hospital now. I can’t.”

Jack glances toward my office door, a thoughtful frown ghosting across his face before he lifts the soaked tissue to look at the cut. The frown deepens as though he’s just confirmed his own assertion about the stitches and is dissatisfied with the result.

“Hold this and don’t move,” Jack says. His grip tightens around my injured hand until I press the tissue down on my own. He backs away as he rises, every movement a choreography of restraint, his assessing gaze penetrating my skin. When he’s straightened to his full, commanding height a few feet away, he turns and leaves the room.

The silence that bears down on me in the buzzing aftermath of my flashback isn’t frightening this time like it often is. I can’t even hear Jack, wherever he’s gone. But knowing he’s nearby is surprisingly comforting. And if I had more willpower right now, I’d be punishing myself for feeling that way. I know I should be slinking off to find another way to close this cut up on my own, without Jack’s unsolicited help. I’m sure there are supplies in Brad’s lab that I could use. Superglue maybe. He’s always breaking his shit and trying to fix it.

But I don’t move from my chair.

It’s a few minutes before Jack enters my office from the shadows of the corridor, and even though he was just here, seeing him stride in with a bottle of iodine in one hand and medical supplies in the other ignites a long-forgotten ache in the core of my heart. It’s not just the spray of dark stubble on the perfect angle of his jaw, or his full lips that often curve in the faintest smirk like a practiced mask. It’s not the black suit that’s tailored to fit his athletic frame, the top buttons of his black shirt open to reveal a glimpse of skin that I want to taste. It’s knowing what he is, what he’s capable of. What I know he’s done, because I’ve seen it. It’s the mystery of why he makes the choices he does. Why did he leave me alive the first time we met? Simply because he thought I would suffer and die anyway? Why does he seem to want to help me now, is it only because of the threats that I’ve made?

I’ve been watching Jack Sorensen since I was seventeen and as he slows to a halt and drops to a knee to take my injured hand, I feel like I don’t know this man any better than I did when I started.

There are no words shared between us as Jack gathers more tissues and holds them beneath my bloody hand. He nudges my fingers away from where they press the wound closed and then he douses the cut with iodine. Jack glances up to watch my reaction to the sting of the undiluted brown liquid, but I deny him any whisper of pain in my expression. To my surprise, something about the way the tension lifts from his brow makes me think he’s relieved.

“Are you sure you’d rather not go in to see a doctor?” Jack asks as he shifts his attention back to my wound, his eyes a slash of dark silver in the dim light before they leave mine.

“I’m sure.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll sew it in my initials?”

I pause a beat. “I am now.”

Jack huffs a laugh. An actual, real, breath of a laugh. One that lights his skin with a flash of a vibrant smile, that crinkles the corners of his eyes. I’ve never made him laugh before, not in a way that was genuine at least.

He doesn’t look up at me but I wish he would. I want to capture the nuances of his expression and study them, right down to every microscopic detail.

There are snips of comments I want to make that seem to catch on my tongue. You wouldn’t want to mark me as yours, I think. I definitely should not want that either, despite the vibration in my chest that says otherwise. I swallow to dislodge it, and Jack glances up from where he’s about to start the stitches, perhaps misreading my tension as nerves in anticipation of pain. “I’m surprised you would do this,” I whisper instead of unleashing my darker thoughts, smothering a wince as the curved needle pierces my skin near the raw edge of the wound. “You could just leave me to my own devices.”

“You did say your well-being was in my very best interests,” Jack replies without looking up. “Perhaps I also take solace in the fact that mending living tissue is not really my specialty and I don’t have any freezing to provide, so I know this will hurt.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

I swipe the mascara from beneath my eyes with the clean edge of the tissue crumpled in my free hand as Jack guides the needle through the other side of the wound and pulls the thread taut. His short, dark hair is swept away from his forehead but somehow looks more disheveled than usual. A faint crease lingers between his brows as he focuses on tying the knots of the first stitch. When he glances up from where he kneels before me, something darkens in his gaze. He looks across the desk and nods toward my bottle of water.

“Drink,” Jack commands, and though my expression sours a little, I realize at that moment how thirsty I really am and I do as he says. He waits for me to finish a long sip before he pierces my skin for the second stitch, his interest flickering between the needle and my reaction. When he receives only defiant silence in reply, his brow furrows, and I can’t tell if he’s relieved or annoyed.

“Where did you learn to do this? Stitching wounds isn’t really in the practical labs for forensic anthropologists,” I ask as Jack pulls the thread through the raw edge of the cut and pierces the other side with the curved needle. He could be rough with it, or sloppy. But he’s not. He’s precise. He’s quick, but in a way that lessens the pain, not exacerbates it.

“No, I didn’t learn it in labs,” Jack replies as he keeps his focus down on my hand. “Let’s just say I didn’t have your childhood. I picked up some necessary skills along the way.”

Oh, I know all about his childhood. Or at least, I know enough to understand how he became the killer he is now. I think about that in silence as he ties the knots of the stitch, looping the black thread around the needle puller and closing the severed skin tight. He takes a fresh tissue and wipes the blood away with gentle strokes.

“Dreams?” Jack asks when the silence seems to stretch too long, even for him. His voice is deep and quiet. It’s like shadows in a pine forest, somewhere safe to hide beneath the boughs. I tilt my head as I watch him, though I already know he won’t meet my eyes. “Nightmares?” he adds when I don’t respond.

Jack starts the third stitch in a mangled section of my wound. Pain slides down my throat as I swallow my surprise at his unexpected interest in me. I try to hold on to all the things he’s done over the past three years to make me feel inferior. Unwanted. But when he holds my sticky, stained hand in his cool, steady one and he stitches me back together, I find it hard to recall all but the very worst moments with him. And I find I don’t want to.

“Glass breaking,” I say, my voice little more than a whisper. Jack says nothing, just continues drawing the thread through the tiny hole he’s made in my flesh. “Red blinking lights. The smell of a hospital. Hammers. I really hate hammers. Cream-colored carpet. That one is inconvenient. It seems like such a simple thing. It’s so common you’d think I’d become desensitized, but it’s one of the worst…for me…”

The motion of Jack’s hand slows to a stop and he meets my eyes. It feels like the whole world could crumble away and we would still be stitched together with an invisible thread, one hewn from secrets shared, from vulnerability, from the things we fear will weaken us unless we hold on, until the moment we let them go. And I know Jack could take these secrets of mine and forge them into the deadliest blade to cut me down. But the way he leans back just a little, the way his gaze drifts over my features with a crease between his brows, I know he won’t.

“The lives you’ve taken, do they ever bother you?” he finally asks, his eyes latching on to mine.

“You mean, in this way? Where the past infiltrates the present?” Jack gives a single nod and I shake my head. “Never. I guess because the power is in my grasp. The control is mine. And the things that happened to me, maybe I’ll keep them from happening to someone else. I feel… I feel many things about the lives I take. But never regret. You?”

“No,” he says, and it’s a long moment before he drops his attention back to my wound. “I can’t feel regret, Kyrie.”

We say nothing more to one another as Jack finishes my stitches, twelve in total, dousing the cut with another splash of iodine before he bandages my hand. When he’s done, he leans back, his attention shifting to my shirt. I look down and notice for the first time a smear of blood across the champagne silk right above where my scars lay hidden.

“I guess this one is destined for the trash,” I say with a sigh as I take in the speckled dots and long slashes of blood and marks of drying sweat. When I look up, Jack’s focus is on the window of my office that looks toward the labs. A muscle tics in his jaw as he frowns at Brad’s workspace. We both know Brad keeps a few changes of clothes there for the days when he cycles into work.

“Wait here,” Jack says, and I watch him rise and walk away.

But the lights don’t turn on in Brad’s lab. No lights turn on at all, in fact. It’s just the dim emergency signs in the hallway, casting dark shadows beyond my door. And a few silent minutes later, Jack emerges from their depths, a bag of ice in one hand, a folded black shirt held aloft on his other palm. One of his shirts.

“Try not to shred it, would you? I like that one,” Jack says as he nods to the shirt he lays on my desk. He bends to kneel before me once more, checking the bandage one final time before he places the ice against my hand.

“I won’t shred it. No promises I won’t bury someone in it though. If you’d like to leave your business card in the front pocket, that would be most convenient.”

I give Jack a faint smile that he meets with a dark look, but he’s not fast enough to hide his grin when he glances away toward the door. When he finally meets my eyes, the levity in both our faces fades away, until we’re simply watching another.

Jack reaches forward. His thumb brushes my cheek in a caress as light as a whisper across my skin. Those slate gray eyes follow the movement of his hand as it passes toward my lips before it drifts away.

And time is yet again so cruel, because Jack’s touch is gone before I can sear it into memory, before I can be sure it was even real.

I watch as Jack strides away. But I call to him before he reaches the door.

“Jack.”

He stops, his head bent. It angles toward the sound of my voice, but he doesn’t turn around.

“Thank you.”

He nods once, but he doesn’t move, as though he’s torn with the direction he should take. One of his hands folds into a fist and squeezes. It feels like it chokes my heart in its grip. And I know there’s one thing I can give him in return, a repayment. Something I know he would want.

“Thunderdome. This doesn’t change anything. As soon as you leave my office, it’s back on.”

The tension leaves Jack’s fist. I can almost see it loosening from his shoulders, spiriting away like gas.

Jack nods once more, and then he’s gone.

I leave him enough time to disappear from the building, and then I clean up the mess of glass and blood before I go home.

When I arrive at my office on Monday morning, a replacement for my broken Brentwood award waits on my desk.

There’s no card, no note.

But this one is made of brass.