FIVE
Evan
It was like everything inside me shut down at once.
My brain just blanketed, blocking out every thought except one.
No.
Just... no.
He was lying. He had to be lying.
There was no way my father, my good, giving, gentle, loving father was some piece of shit serial rapist. No freaking way. That wasn't possible.
This was a man I had been beside daily my entire life. I had never seen him even catcall a woman before. He didn't leer. He didn't threaten. He didn't grab-ass, or make unwanted advances. In fact, I had only seen him dance or share a drink with a woman before. Everything was always friendly.
Was my father a 'good' man in the traditional sense? Well, he killed people. So no.
But I absolutely refused to believe he was some evil monster like Luce was suggesting. He had to have the name wrong. He had to have been mistaken.
"Can't help you accept the truth if you are going to slip right into ignorant denial."
"I'm not ignorant," I spat immediately, feeling my pulse start to pound in my throat and temples, making me immediately feel overheated even in the cool basement. "You're mistaken."
"If you did any research at all into me, Evangeline, you would know what a ridiculous thing that is to say. I am never mistaken. I don't ever pull somebody in unless I know with one-hundred-and-ten percent certainty that they did what was accused of them."
"Your math was off this time."
"Get me a phone or laptop, and I can prove otherwise."
The crazy thing was, even through the layer of denial, I heard nothing but a confident sincerity in his tone.
But that being said, he thought he was fighting for his life. He would say anything to save his skin. And being that he was a lifelong criminal, it went to follow that he knew how to lie well. It wasn't like he could just walk around his life answering the typical 'hey, whatcha up to today' with the truth. Oh, hey Bill. Just dismembering some bodies with a hacksaw. Then maybe some Chinese takeout. You know, the usual.
He was playing me.
Case closed.
And, hell, I couldn't even blame him for that.
He probably lied about the cyanide too.
True, my father did always carry it. And, yes, it was hidden in his rosary. But that was for situations where he was caught by a cartel and tortured or whatnot. Luce probably found out about it after he killed him, when he was going through his personal effects. He was almost scarily observant; he would have noticed that the one bead wasn't shiny and smooth like the others. He likely just cataloged that information and spewed it back at me to try to make me think twice about keeping him captive and, eventually, getting my vengeance.
"Right. Like I would trust you with a laptop. The man who could make a weapon out of tinfoil."
"While true, any laptop connected to the internet can be turned into an incendiary device, you need another device to activate that. So, what am I gonna do with it? Knock you over the head? Get real."
Being a prisoner, he was supposed to be begging for my mercy, kissing my ass, trying to get on my good side.
But was he doing that?
No, of course not. Because I had to have the cocky, condescending, know-it-all, jackass prisoner.
"No?" he asked, watching me with those deep, fathomless eyes in a way that I swear seemed to see right through me somehow, see into all my dark, cobwebbed corners, see all the things I wanted to keep hidden. And why that thought made a shiver of not discomfort, but anticipation, course through me was wildly beyond my comprehension. "Well, do yourself a favor, and power up a laptop, and do a quick search. It really won't take long to send you back down here to me. For some real answers. There are a lot of blanks I can fill in."
"Because I should trust anything you have to say. You would do anything to try to save your own ass right now."
"Would I?" he asked, lips quirking up ever-so-slightly. "You know, you ran out of here in such a hissy fit the last time that you forgot to make sure I threw out the tinfoil. But as you can see," he said, waving a hand toward the floor outside his cell where the foil could clearly be seen, "I tossed it out anyway."
"Probably part of your grand plan," I grumbled. I was losing my argument and I knew it.
"Right, because I could have anticipated exactly how this conversation would go. I must be a fucking genius."
Honestly, I was starting to think he just might be.
And that was a bit terrifying.
Some two-bit brute, some mindless muscle, I could handle that. I had been around that a lot in my life. It was easy to outsmart someone who thought more with his dick than his brain.
But Luce, this elusive, lethal, intimidatingly observant so-called vigilante was not a mindless brute. In fact, he wasn't brutish at all. A little abrasive? Sure. Maybe kinda cool? Yeah, that too. But in the brain department, I was pretty sure I was out of my league.
I didn't like that at all.
"Hardly," I said with a dramatic eye-roll. "Well, why don't you go ahead and get nice and cozy," I offered sarcastically, waving a hand to the cold, unyielding cement floor. "We can talk some more when you decide to stop being such a smartass."
I stooped and collected the tinfoil in case he had some elaborate plan to use his hood pulls and shoelaces to retrieve it, believing he was entirely capable of that, turned, and walked calmly up the stairs.
Where I promptly began to freak the hell out.
I mean, what else could be expected of me?
That whole interaction was just... surreal.
Surreal.
Unreal.
That was what I kept telling myself as I poured some more birdie kibble into Diego's food dish on his play stand where he was happily preening his feathers, getting ready for sleep after his calls to wake up the neighborhood. I also told myself that as I stripped and showered, feeling like the entire day was a layer of filth and slime over every inch of skin that I needed to scrub at until it was red and just shy of raw.
I was even still trying to tell myself that as I dressed in a tee and PJ pants, sat down on my bed, and reached for it.
My laptop.
I wasn't going to do what he said.
No freaking way.
Because I knew who my father was.
I was totally just going to check the weather, my email, new stories. I had missed out on a lot internet-wise being off the grid like I had been. I had used it before, of course. My father didn't want me to be a complete Luddite. But my usage was just a couple minutes here and there every month or two.
I had no idea how useful it could be in all kinds of ways. I could order groceries online. I could have my home insured without ever speaking to another human being.
It was no wonder Americans were so damn unhappy. They never interacted with one another.
I mean not once, in my entire life, did I have a dinner alone until I moved back to the States. Often, it wasn't even just my father and me either. Meals were a communal thing. They were for sharing of riches, for sharing of stories, of wisdom, of mutual enjoyment. It was always my favorite time of day, dinner. It never mattered that these people often didn't have a clue who we were, they welcomed us with open arms and hearts.
Hell, I went to a bar a few months back, and the people sitting almost shoulder-to-shoulder with each other were steadily looking ahead at the TVs.
No one interacted anymore.
It was all digital.
And while it was good that it was a way to bring people together who would never be able to know one another any other way, it was still lacking.
Nothing compared to sharing actual face-to-face interactions.
Just yet another thing I missed from my old life.
But I would adjust.
If there was one thing being a nomad your whole life taught you, it was how to seamlessly go from one extreme to another, to accept things as they came to you.
I exhaled hard at that, shaking my head.
If I believed that, if I believed things came to you, that you must accept them at face-value, why then was I being so reluctant to open a new window and do the search Luce challenged me to?
Was it because there was a part of me - albeit a minuscule part of me - that wondered if maybe there was even a slight chance of him being correct?
I wasn't sure, but with oddly numb fingers, I started typing.
Just his name.
Just Alejandro Cruz.
Not rapist.
Just a man. One of many.
There was nothing even relating to him for a long time, just other men by the same name who had done more public things with their lives.
Ten pages of the search in, my shoulders relaxed, my chest loosened enough to allow me to draw in a proper breath, my jaw unclenched, making me realize for the first time how much it hurt.
And it was right then, right that second, as I was wiggling my lower jaw around to loosen it up, that my eyes caught it.
The Rapist of Papua New Guinea.
That was the headline, making my heart plummet, and my belly twist painfully as I forced my eyes down below to read the blurb under it.
And that was the first shred of proof that Luce wasn't lying.
Because there was his name.
Alejandro Cruz was the rapist of Papua New Guinea.
I scanned the article even as my mind wandered back to our first trip there. I remembered the serious talk we had as we landed, before he would even let me get in the car. We were standing in the suffocating heat, the sun beating down relentlessly. At seventeen, I had been annoyed from the long travel and anxious to get somewhere to bathe and eat and get some sleep that wasn't interrupted by turbulence or someone else's too-loud speaking. But something in his eyes stopped me mid-grumble.
My father wasn't often serious with me.
So I knew it was time to listen.
"This is a very diverse land," he started with.
I had rolled my eyes at that. I knew that. I had learned that from the book he threw at me while we were still in Chile, telling me it was our next stop, and that I needed to brush up on the country. That was very much my father's homeschooling technique.
Papua New Guinea was one of the most diverse places in the world with over eight-hundred known languages, large amounts of 'un-contacted peoples,' and because it was one of the world's least explored territories, it was thought to be home of many undiscovered animals and plant life.
"Don't give me that look, mija," he scolded, tisk-tisking me for being a pain in the ass. "This is serious."
"What is so serious? They can't be worse than those cartels in Colombia, Papi."
"You didn't finish the book, did you?" Again, there was the tisk-tisk in his voice. He didn't often need to tell me how disappointed he was; it was in his very tone.
"I read most of it. I glazed over in the law chapter."
"And that law chapter is what has me standing here warning you, Evan." And then he went ahead and said something that, as time would prove it seems, was completely ironic. "Papua New Guinea is ranked the number one country for human rights violations against women. Fifty-percent of women in this country will be raped. Sixty-percent of that fifty-percent happens before the age of eighteen."
I felt my stomach twist at those facts.
Even at seventeen, even as white as a lily sexually, that word had a painful effect through my system. And it no longer felt like it was a hundred degrees in the shade. Because I was cold all over.
"Do you understand what I am telling you?"
I had to swallow before speaking, choking back the bile that seemed to work itself up my throat. Because this was never a topic I needed brought to my attention before. Not because it was not an issue. There were perverts, child molesters in every culture. Human trafficking was a very real and growing problem. But it had never really been on my radar. My father protected me. My father was feared by most. He had never needed to put fear in me because it had never been necessary.
So, if he was telling me, then the issue was serious.
And that was terrifying.
"Yes."
"You have me most of the time," he comforted me, touching my shoulder.
I always had him most of the time. Work always took him away from me, often leaving me in the company of some local group of women who promised to keep me company and, it went without saying, safe.
But this was a country where half of the women weren't safe themselves. They wouldn't be able to protect me.
"And this," he said, reaching into his bag and pulling out a small rectangle of thick leather material, tied around the center loosely. "Is what you have when I am not here," he told me, flipping the top flap open to reveal eight pointed, slightly shiny, thin as matchstick pieces of wood. "One scratch and they will be dying within seconds. So you keep this on you at all times," he said, reaching back into his bag to get a long leather strap which he threaded through two holes in the satchel, then moved to tie it around my waist. "And you use it even if there is a hint of unwanted advances. Yes?"
My stomach turned over at the idea.
It was one thing to learn about poisons, to know their effects in a detached sort of way. It was a whole other thing to be willing to inflict them upon a living being.
Even if said human being deserved it.
But I nodded with certainty, even though I felt anything but.
It was four days later, in some remote village where women went bare-breasted, something that wasn't unusual to me since I had seen it in countless places and had recently grown a pair of my very own, and was kinda happy with them, and the men wore nothing more than loincloths. It was a practice I used to find almost charmingly wild, but in this new place, in this women's rights violation capital of the world, all my brain could seem to wonder was if they wore them so they had easy access to their offending cocks when they wanted to take a woman by force.
My hand had gone down and stayed on the pouch as I watched my father disappear.
I had no idea at the time that he wasn't off to do business.
No, according to this article, this very in-depth, very well-researched article by a known and respected investigative reporter, he had been out committing a chain of gang rapes with other men like him- foreigners, looking to cause terror on a different continent and get away with it.
What better place than a country where the women were so subjugated, so accustomed to the abuses of men?
I scrolled a little further, my stomach tightening into knots.
And that was when I saw the worst thing I could imagine seeing.
I saw my father, clothes only half-fastened, standing beside a group of other men similarly dressed, all from different regions by the looks of them, smiling.
That wasn't the bad part.
Oh no.
The bad part was what they were apparently smiling at.
A group of naked native women laying on the ground several feet away, clutching one another, and crying.
I flew off the bed, running so fast out of the room that my hip collided full-force into the doorway, sending a shooting pain up my body. But there was no time to think about that.
Because the bile wasn't just bile anymore.
I dropped down onto the cold tile floor and let it all purge out.
The vomit, sure.
That was first. Violent. Seemingly never-ending.
Then after there was nothing left in my stomach, as I blew my nose, and rinsed my mouth, the tears started. The pain started. It was a clawing, a ripping sensation, like something was trying to burrow its way out of my chest.
And, I realized with a loud whimper, I knew exactly what was trying to free itself from my body- my heart.
The love of my father.
Because you couldn't or, more accurately, I couldn't love a man that vile. I couldn't be that piece of shit, spineless family member standing there saying 'but he was good to me' meanwhile the bastard brutalized other women.
Fuck that.
Evil is as evil does.
And evil was something that lived inside my father, was a big enough part of him to have him traveling the world, not to expand my horizons, not to give me a childhood that many would envy, but to get away with serial rape while wearing the mask of a doting father.
I refused to be his beard.
Because there was no hiding anymore.
I refused to be his defense attorney too.
Because his actions were indefensible.
I lowered myself back down on the floor, pulling my knees up into my chest, wrapping my arms around them, and pulling tight.
There was this strong, almost overpowering sensation of falling apart, that if I didn't physically hold myself together, I might genuinely just break into little pieces. There would just be splinters of myself that would be too small and jagged to glue back together.
I couldn't tell you what the drive was that pulled me up onto my feet, moving silently through my house, then, oddly, into the garage, and down the stairs, the cement floor frigid on my bare soles, making goosebumps work up my legs, and my nipples tweak.
"You alright?" Luce's voice reached me from his position sitting against the back wall, wide awake still. His deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes looked even more set back with tiredness.
He was supposed to be the enemy.
I had no idea why the words tripped from my tongue, but they did.
"The Rapist of Papua New Guinea?" I croaked, eyes stinging again, hinting at a fresh stream of tears, and I knew the sound was heavy in my voice.
He watched me for a long second seeming to show no reaction at all to the mess I knew I must have been in that moment. Which was weird to me. Usually, there was some reaction- namely discomfort, a strange fear, a helplessness, something. Not in Luce. He was just as blank as ever.
"Is that as far as you got?"
"Before my dinner decided to come back up, yeah," I admitted as he slowly rose from his seated position, and moved across the floor to reach up and grab the bars only a foot or so from me. He could have reached out, grabbed me, and slammed my head against the bars in a heartbeat.
But he didn't.
"I was with him on that trip," I admitted, unsure why I was saying it. Maybe I just needed to purge it, and he was the only one who would understand. "He warned me about how chronic assault against women was, and gave me a satchel of poison to keep on me. You know, while he went off and attacked women himself."
"What's this for?" he asked oddly, but then his hand moved between the bars, his finger gently swiping the tears off of one of my cheeks.
"Because my father is a disgusting rapist."
"Well, you're both right and wrong," he said, making my brows draw together.
"What do you mean I'm wrong? You're the one who told me he was a rapist in the first place."
"True. And he is that. Worse than you realize too, unfortunately."
Ugh.
That hurt.
I didn't think there could be a worse feeling in my chest than there had been half an hour before, but I was obviously wrong. There was always more pain, new pain, deeper pain. Always.
"Then what was I wrong about?"
"Ever look at your father, doll face?"
"I looked at him every day of my life," I said, eyes squinting.
"Ever look in a mirror?"
"What are you trying to say here?" I asked, feeling my stomach tighten.
"I'm not convinced that fuck was your father."
Okay. So we didn't exactly look alike. That was definitely true. My features were more delicate, my eyes very dark, almost black. My father's features were very wide, almost burly. He was tall, wide-shouldered, broad-chested. And his eyes, well, they were hazel.
But it took two to tango, as they say.
I always figured I must have just looked like my mother.
"Didn't notice it right at first, but the longer I look at you, the less likely I think it is you two share any DNA. I mean, your skin is a completely different shade than his. He had olive undertones. You're warm."
"I had a mother at some point," I reasoned.
"Hazel eyes versus almost black. You're long and lean, but hold your weight in your hips. He held it in his chest and belly. His hair was at least five shades lighter."
"That's all circumstantial."
"He had that giant fucking cleft in his chin too. You don't have a hint of it."
"The only way that would prove anything was if my mother had a cleft too, and I don't. Again, I don't know anything about her."
"It's a lot," he said, shaking his head. "I like when things add up, and something is off with the math here."
"So I should just... bring you a laptop and let you poke around in my life some more?"
There was bitterness in my tone, the origins of which I wasn't sure of. Why be bitter? It wasn't his fault. Don't shoot the messenger and all that jazz. But that being said, I couldn't confront the source of my anger, resentment, and pain. He was gone. There would never be closure there.
Also, in one internet search, every plan of perfect vengeance just... disappeared.
I had no right to keep Luce anymore.
He hadn't done anything to me.
He had tried to do something that I actually found commendable.
In the process, he had set me free.
Sure, it hurt. It might always. But that was the price you had to pay for the truth at times.
And, truly, I had to set him free.
I turned away without anything else, going back up the stairs, and into my bedroom where I grabbed the key, then made my way back down again.
"Where's the laptop?" he asked, brows drawing together.
I moved over toward the door, pressing the lock, and turning, hearing the click, then the groan of the un-oiled joints.
"At your home," I answered, moving slightly to the side of the doorway to allow him to walk past.
"You're just letting me out," he half-asked, half-declared, leaning against the bars of his prison, crossing his arms over his chest, watching me like I had lost my mind.
"I can't keep you here. You didn't do what I thought you did."
"And if I had?" he prompted.
"Even if you had, I would probably let you go. Now that I know the truth."
"Gotta say, I'm liking the ability to be rational about this shit."
"Gee, thanks," I mumbled.
I wasn't exactly sure it was healthy to be rational about it all. Wasn't love supposed to trump all? Shouldn't a daughter be able to forgive the sins of the man who loved and raised her?
I didn't know about should, but I knew I didn't.
Because being good to me didn't undo all the bad he did to who knew how many others. If your bad outweighed your good, then you were bad. It was simple math really. And maybe if his crimes were just more murders of deserving people, I could have looked past it.
This was different.
This was horrific.
There was no excuse for his level of evil.
And knowing he had done it to other women while protecting me from the same fate? Yeah, no. The bastard.
"Look, I think it's good to be able to compartmentalize things."
"Says the robot," I agreed, wincing at the snarky tone, not liking that I was being cruel to someone who didn't earn it.
"Imagine how much shit I had to learn to box away in password protected files on an external harddrive, so the motherboard didn't fucking explode, Evan," he said, tone almost a little... sad?
It was right in that second, gone before I could fully appreciate the depth of it, that this strange vigilante, almost robotic guy showed me what was underneath.
And what was underneath was a well of hurt so deep that it made what I was feeling seem positively uplifting by comparison.
I didn't know the man.
I doubted he would want me too.
But regardless of all of that, I had the almost overwhelming urge to know what made him how he was.
Why?
I had no idea.
Maybe it was as simple as the fact that he knew all my darkness now, and I wanted things to be more even.
Though, a part of me thought that perhaps it was more than that, that maybe this enigmatic loner intrigued me now that I finally understood his motivations.
"Don't pity me, doll face."
"I'm not pitying you," I shot back immediately, shaking my head. That was as far from the truth as possible.
"What then?"
"I don't know. It's... curiosity, I guess," I admitted, shrugging, trying to seem casual.
"About me?" he asked, smirking, and it did wonderful things to his dark eyes. "I'm figuring that if you were able to track me down, that you already did a fair amount of research." His smile went wicked then, making the skin beside his eyes crinkle up slightly. "Tell me, did you come across all that fanfic erotica written about me?"
So, I had a tendency not to blush, but show discomfort somehow in my features. I wasn't sure exactly what the combination of changes were, but everyone I had ever met could read right into me when I was embarrassed.
And, seeing as I had not only come across, but read said erotica extensively, I was freaking embarrassed as hell.
I hadn't meant to read it, I swear!
But I saw it on some site called "Luce's Lovers" and I thought there might be information about his whereabouts. There wasn't, but there was a section for writing which I had opened in case it seemed like one of the writers had met Luce personally and could, therefore, point me in a direction if I was looking for him.
Then I started reading.
This woman, whoever she was, actually got pretty close description-wise to how Luce actually looked. Except she made him heavily tattooed and green-eyed. Personally, I preferred the real Luce. I was always a sucker for brown eyes. But aside from the slightly inaccurate physical description of him, yeah, she, well, she wrote a convincing anti-hero. Those sex scenes, too, yeah, they were, um, realistic.
Oh crap.
I shouldn't have been thinking about them right then.
Because a bright, vivid image of one of those detailed scenes flashed in front of me. But instead of the green-eyed, tattooed fictional version of Luce taking the lead, it was the real-life, flesh-and-bone version instead. Bending me over a sink in his killing room, hands clutching my breasts, fingers tweaking my nipples, hard cock pressing against my ass. And then...
"I'll take that as a yes," Luce's voice cut into the scene in my mind, pulling me backward out of it so fast I'd swear I got whiplash.
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
That did not just happen.
I did not just have a vivid sexual fantasy about the man who had planned to kill my father. A man I had been holding as a prisoner.
And I totally did not have that fantasy whilst standing in front of said man who happened to be the most freakishly observant person I had ever met in my life, and likely picked up on how my breathing went uneven, my skin flushed, my eyes hooded.
"Don't be embarrassed," he went on, his voice sounding closer. As I forced my head up, I realized that was because he had silently closed the distance between us, and was standing in the small space of the opened doorway with me.
"I'm not embarrassed," I insisted, trying to pull myself together, knowing I was failing epically seeing as there was a dull, but insistent, throbbing sensation of need between my thighs.
"No?" he asked, head tipping to the side slightly. "Then explain this," he said, running a finger across my cheek that felt heated. "And this," he went on, his finger gliding upward to stroke near my eye that did feel heavy-lidded. "And this," he continued, his finger moving lower, brushing over my lower lip. Hand to God, that motion sent a shiver through my system. And it was not a subtle one. No, it was one that shook my entire body. One that Luce not only saw, but felt. "Thought so," he said, voice deep. His eyes seemed deeper as well suddenly, something I couldn't quite peg for what it was until what happened next, well, happened.
His hand slid across my cheek, whispering over the column of my neck, then curling around the back of it. Gentle. It was all so gentle. That is until he yanked me forward, sending me colliding into his chest as he kept my head angled up by slipping his fingers into my hair and pulling.
And his lips crashed down on mine.
The shock of it sent a jolt through my body.
But the shock was replaced by something else entirely, something deeper, something clawing, needy, indescribable. It worked its way up from the base of my spine and slowly flowed outward, slipped into my very veins, warmed me in a way I wasn't sure I had ever experienced before.
So without thinking how warped it was, without questioning my sanity in doing so, my hands moved up and curled into his upper arms, holding his body close as my breasts pressed harder into his chest, as my hips lined up to his.
His teeth nipped my lower lip, dragging a ragged groan from me as they slid apart and his tongue moved inside to claim mine, his hand tightening in my hair. His other arm moved around my lower back, holding me ever-more tightly to him as his tongue raided, owned, then retreated, allowing his lips to sear into mine again.
My heart was a desperate pounding in my chest.
The pulsing between my thighs became almost overwhelming, an acutely painful unsatisfied need that had my hips pressing harder into his, feeling the outline of his cock, and there seemed to be an immediate hollowness within that needed fulfillment.
In response to it, there was a wholly uncontrollable whimpering noise from deep within my chest that pushed out from between my lips, making an equally needy-sounding growl rumble through Luce's chest.
I was sure the torment would come to an end, that his hand would slide between us and work me with his fingers until the pain became pleasure that became something else entirely.
But that wasn't what happened.
One moment, he was kissing me like the war was over.
The next, his lips tore from mine, his hands loosened their hold so I went back on my flat feet, and his forehead pressed into mine.
"Fuck," he huffed, somewhat out of breath.
It was the first time I really got to be so close to him without thoughts of sticking poisonous needles in him clouding my senses with a sulfur-scented, bone-deep hatred.
He smelled good.
I couldn't quite peg what it was, but it was outdoorsy, woodsy, a hint of pine, and dirt, and fresh air.
It shouldn't have been, but absolutely was, one of the most intoxicating things I had ever smelled on a man before.
Then he was no longer pressing his forehead to mine. His hand was no longer in my hair. His arm was no longer a reassuring anchor around my back.
One second, he was almost fully supporting me.
The next, he was a full foot away, watching me with those dark eyes, but there was a shutter down over them, making it impossible to read anything in their depths.
There was a pause, him seeming lost in his own thoughts. And me, well, I didn't seem capable of speech as I tried to shut down the live wire known as desire coursing through my system.
Then he nodded at me, shrugged, and declared, "Well, this has been a lovely detention. I am going to head out."
Of all the things he could have said, yeah, that was maybe what I would have anticipated the least.
"What?" I asked, my breath a husky imitation of itself.
"I have some sick bastard to look into. I got contacted about him right before you abducted me. Need to finish that job. Thank you for your hospitality," he added, moving toward the steps, then pausing at the bottom one. "Oh, and if you want to know who is trying to kill you, come find me."
With that, and not so much as a glance backward, he was tearing up the stairs.
Before I could even make it to the bottom one, I could hear the door to the outside slamming.
He was gone.
And I hadn't gotten the chance to tell him that the 'sick bastard' he was looking for was actually me. See, I never did track him down myself. But I tracked down someone who was a bit loose with their cell phone locking and was in contact with Luce. I cloned his phone, and had all the information I needed to page him, then created a robotic phone voice to tell him about a fictional serial killer who targeted girls.
But that wasn't what had my heart flying up into my throat.
Oh, no.
What the hell did he mean someone was trying to kill me?