Page 136 of Kept in the Dark

“I figured out that he was your son. I thought he may be my best chance at winning you over. Until I realized his paternity was a secret. I thought: if I couldn’t have you, then I could have something that is a part of you. But it was never enough.”

“Is that why you killed Morgan?”

She smiled. “Darling, I killed her to free you. I knew you would never leave her, and you would be miserable unless she was gone. Honestly, I hadn’t planned to kill her that night, but I saw everything through the window. You left the front door unlocked so I let myself in to see if she was really dead.”

She had stood over Morgan for ten minutes before doing anything. She wanted to savor this woman’s death, to have it engrained in her memory. But then Morgan started to make soft noises.

Lauren had felt for a pulse and found that the woman’s heart was still beating. She couldn’t let her live. So, she wrapped her hands around Morgan's throat and squeezed the life from her.

Lauren could still feel Morgan’s body going limp as her life left her.

Lauren shivered, delighting in the memory. Morgan had been so confused to see that she had been the one to take her life from her.

“And everything was fine until Hailey started poking around. But you already know about all that,” she said with a wink.

David didn’t react and that angered her. He always loved when she winked at him; he found it sexy and seducing.

Why was he upset with her? This had all been for him, for them.

She tilted her head. “Darling, I did all of this to protect you. You’re the one who came to me when Hailey started snooping and I was the one who convinced you to get Ryan to do your dirty work, to silence anyone who knew about your secrets. I even gave you an alibi for that night.”

“He was only supposed to scare them,” he growled. “Now you’ve made more of a mess for me to clean up. And having Ryan kill Eli was flat out stupid, Lauren. He was in so deep with me he never would have ratted me out.”

She shook her head and smiled. “I killed them, not Ryan. I knew you’d never agree to it, so I did what was necessary to protect us, to protect what we've built and the secrets that needed to be kept hidden. Ryan merely helped me clean up the mess and I knew he’d make the perfect fall-guy, better than Sara.” She cursed. “I just wasn’t expecting him to go rogue, and by the time he did, I couldn’t get him to stop. His hatred for you was more than I accounted for. And Eli…” She waved her hand. “He was on death's door anyway. He was a liability, whether you want to see that or not.”

“Why didn’t you have Ryan kill them if you wanted him to take the fall?”

“I learned early on that if you want something done right you need to do it yourself. Plus,” she beamed, “I wanted to do it. There’s something so thrilling about taking someone’s life, playing God. Didn't you feel that way when you thought you’d killed Morgan?”

He didn’t answer, but he couldn’t mask the hint of joy that flashed through his eyes.

She giggled. “I knew we were soulmates. Our souls bonded over her death. There’s a darkness in us, David. It’s unique and very few people understand it, but it bonds us together.

He simply nodded and said, “What about Hannah?”

Lauren was getting bored with all these questions. Who cares about Hannah?

She rolled her eyes. “She was snooping, too. She saw me talking to Nicole a few days before I killed her and started following me. She confronted me when Nicole ‘disappeared,’ so I went to her house, claiming that I would tell her everything. Little did she know she’d turn up dead too.

“Thankfully, I was able to strangle her and didn’t have a mess on my hands. Then, I created that shrine in the back of her closet. It was easy to find photos between our house and Genevieve’s old scrapbooks. I even paid a stranger to take photos of us through the window. Plus, I had my own stash from before I killed Morgan. From there, it was easy to have Ryan hide Nicole’s body at Hannah’s house and pin everything on her and Ryan.”

A vein in his temple throbbed. “Why did you kill Nicole?”

She stiffened at the jezebel’s name. Filth. Whore. Lauren hated Nicole more than anything, even Morgan.

“Don’t you ever say her name to me,” she hissed. “She was coming between us.”

“What are you talking about?”

Lauren tried to go to him, her hands still chained to the table. She screamed and pulled at the restraints, her eyes bulging from her face as she tried to break free so she could go to him.

Realizing she'd lost control, she stopped and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply to steady The Beast that raged inside her.

After a moment, she said, “I never planned for any of this to happen. I only wanted to kill Nicole. She was vile, a seductress. Even Ryan wanted her dead.” She laughed. “Can you believe that? Even her own son wanted her dead. And she would have been the only one, if Hailey hadn’t started snooping around. Then more people had to die.”

David yelled, “Why did you kill her?!”

“Because you were sleeping with her again!” Lauren screamed back. “Even after all I did for you, you still couldn’t break away from her spell and I wasn’t going to become like Morgan.”

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