Page 93 of Beautiful Prey

I placed my hands on either side of his mask. His hands shot up to encircle my wrists as if expecting me to snatch the maskaway. His grip was tight, almost painful, a warning, but I ignored it and leaned forward.

I caught his hiss of breath as my lips touched the surface of his mask, just between the two front teeth of the grinning skull. I held there even as my heart skipped a beat. I teased across the mask and down his jaw before I pulled away to tip my head back and look at him.

Yes, there he was again. The Emery I knew.

“Will you let me go?” I asked.

He studied my lips before meeting my gaze again. He started to tilt his head to the side as he did when listening to his sister or the smiling woman, but I jerked it back into place. His eyes narrowed, another warning.

“I want your answer, Emery,” I said. “Not theirs.”

He watched me for a second longer before taking his hands from my wrists. “No,” he said.

I searched his eyes and concluded that was his true answer and his alone. I dropped my hands from his face. “What are you going to do?”

He didn’t answer. So I continued with, “You can’t keep me here forever.”

His glare said otherwise. “Maybe not,” he said. “But I’ll keep you with me until…”

“Until what? Until someone finds us?”

A shadow passed over his gaze. “They won’t.”

“They will. You know they will.”

“They’ll be too late...”

That worried me. “What do you mean?”

He looked away, staring past me to the TV. I peered over but the video feeds were the same as before. I went to reach for him again, and he moved so quick I yelped. He took hold of me by the waist and raised me up, then turned me around and pulled medown on his lap once more, pressing my back against his chest. He gripped my jaw, forcing me to look at the monitor.

“You think I put those cameras up just to watch your boyfriend and his cop buddies come in here to take you from me?” he whispered harshly in my ear. “Oh no, sweetheart,” he purred. “Think again.”

I stared up at the screen, brows furrowed. I saw nothing at first. Then I looked closer. There, just out of the corner of one screen from one of the forest cameras, a line passed in the grass like a thin wire. I looked at the camera by the gate and saw a wire passing above the wrought iron.

“See them yet?” His hand that had been gripping my jaw dropped down to cup my throat. “I feel your pulse quickening.” I felt his mask graze against my shoulder. “No, they won’t get far. I doubt they’ll see anything coming, not in time. And those traps will maim if they don’t kill. And, boy, would I like to see that blond fucker get torn apart. I really, really would.” His hand squeezed a little, making me tip my head back, a small whimper escaping me. “You're so clever with your little words, Evee. You have a way of getting under my skin. I’ll give you that. You certainly know how to make my blood burn with something more than just murderous rage, you know that? You surprise me at every turn. It almost makes me want to give in, to fall right at your feet. You make it very hard. The thesis was good. The crying was even better. And then a kiss? Be still, my cold dead heart.” I struggled against him, but he kept me in place, kept me close, his mask pressed against the side of my face as he held my throat.

“But then a memory pops into my head, reminding me of why it might not be such a good idea to trust you,” he continued. “Yes, I did an awful thing. But I can’t let go that you never knew. That none of your family slipped what they were doing. Because every one of those fucks lived here with you, just you.” He let go of me abruptly, pulling me off him and throwing me down on thecouch as he got up and went over to the desk. He took my laptop and set it on the coffee table in front of me, then brought up his folder on my hard drive. He brought up a photo of him, one that I had only briefly glanced over when I had first looked over his files.

In his early teens, he looked much younger, smaller, and clearly malnourished. He was sitting on the floor of the classroom with some kind of puzzle before him.

“Look close, do you see?” he said, standing practically over me. “Here, let me zoom in closer for you.” He focused in on his shoulders and face.

I looked over his face but still didn’t understand. He was wearing something around his neck. A beaded necklace clearly made by a child, likely his sister. At the end of it was a heart pendant with the letter E in the center.

I stared at the necklace and my blood turned cold as realization hit me.

“Look familiar?” Emery said, tilting his head.

I couldn’t speak.

“How about I reanimate your memory,” Emery said when I didn’t respond. He minimized the photo, then went into my pictures folder. He hovered over a file folder named Old Childhood Photos. Uncle Wes had sent them to me when I started my second year of college. Photos taken from my dad's old phone. He clicked on it and scrolled down. “Forgive me for stalking your photos. I had a lot to think about after reading your thesis and I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to see your life, how beautiful it was. It tugged at me, it really did. Then I saw this photo.” He clicked on one of me and my brother out on the deck by the river. My brother had draped his arms around me in a hug, both of us grinning at the camera.

I saw it right away. Emery’s necklace around my neck.

“So imagine my surprise,” he went on, “seeing the necklace my sister made me, made with her sweet little hands with such joy because a nurse took pity on her and let her play with something other than a fucking Rubik’s cube. It was torn off my neck by your brother when your father told me I couldn’t keep it. That it was a choking hazard.” He shook his head. “What a joke. I fought to keep it and I was beaten for it. Then your brother took it and tried to comfort me by saying he’d tell his sister—that being you—that it was for her. I forgot that part since getting slapped around kind of became the core focus of that memory, but the words came back real quick once I saw this.”

He was getting visibly angrier again. And I couldn’t blame him. Maybe a person with a sound mind would have tried to come to some sort of conclusion that it was a crazy coincidence. That my brother had just gifted me the necklace without telling me where it had come from—which was the honest truth.

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