Page 69 of Fallen Petal

Chapter 34

J

“You were right. He’s not taking her to the station.”

Carlos’s eyes are fixated on the tablet in his lap, watching a green dot moving along the street at a good distance before us.

That dot represents Petal, and our distance to her is just as far as I’m comfortable with, far enough so Christopher won’t notice that he’s being followed, but close enough to ensure her safety.

“Didn’t call the station either, nor her father,” Carlos adds, as he checks on Christopher’s phone activity on another screen. “You’d think that’s the first thing they’d do, right.”

I nod. “I don’t think Christopher plans on reuniting Robert with his daughter any time soon.”

Carlos throws a look back to me, his eyebrows arched in question. “What do you think his plan is?”

I sigh, shifting on the backseat as my gaze wanders out to the window.

“I don’t know,” I respond truthfully. “If he plans on hiding her somewhere, he’ll have to go into hiding himself.”

“And you think he already has a place in mind?”

“If he is who I think he is, yes,” I say. “He’ll take her to the same place as the others. But after that...”

I break off, shaking my head, while Carlos turns his focus back to the tablet in his lap.

I don’t think Christopher is going to kill her. Not like he did with the others. Petal is special to him.

I can relate to the bastard in that regard. He doesn’t want anything other than I do. He wants to have her all to himself, he wants to own her.

The only difference is, she doesn’t want to be with him. She never has. His unwelcome advances were the reason their friendship fell apart. She thought she had a friend in him, he thought she was meant to be his girlfriend, insisting that the whole town agreed. And her father. He may have been right about that part, but what does it matter?

He never considered her wishes. No one did.

And that includes me.

I pushed her away, denying her something she wanted, just like they did. And telling myself that I did it for the right reason doesn’t make it any better.

I thought my own pain was proof enough to tell that I was indeed doing the right thing. I sacrificed, I suffered for her. I lived in anguish so she could have the life she wanted.

When she came back to town a few months ago, failure casting a black shadow over her as she tried to finally put her own dreams to rest and live the life her father always forced on her, I was no longer able to silence my own yearning. I never asked her to come, but I did show up at her flower shop, hoping for two things, none of which were present.

I hoped the magic had gone. I hoped that four years of not seeing her would finally bring some sense into me.

And I hoped to see her happy. I hoped to see her smiling, emitting the confidence of knowing that she chose exactly what she wanted for herself.

Neither of the two were true when I saw her that day. That’s why I stepped inside. That’s why I showed myself to her, knowing that she’d come to me.

I didn’t expect her to come with a demand this strong. I didn’t expect nor want to erase her memory to the extent she asked me to.

But I was intrigued right away. Some people call me a freak, a lunatic, a psychopath even—and they’re not entirely wrong.

I have a taste for the twisted, as does she. And this time, I didn’t deny either of us to act on that desire. I took her by the hand, leading the way as she dived into the darkness.

I didn’t know where it would lead us, but I certainly didn’t expect to end up here, in a police car, chasing the man whose experience of being rejected by Petal has turned him into a killer.

I can’t say the latter for sure, but the suspicion has been there for a while. When I talked to him at the police station for the first time, asking about possible relations between her disappearance and the legendary Bridgewater murderer, I could see his mind working, but not in the way one would expect. He rejected the idea, but formed another as he saw me in front of him.

It was just a bad feeling back then, not enough to alarm my connections at the station. A man like me, with wealth and a name to himself, never has to worry about a lack of insight into things regular civilians are not supposed to see. I have good friends at the station, most of them older, more experienced and more influential than young Christopher.

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