Page 49 of Prey

“I saw tattoos,” she said, and I knew she was hinting at me taking my top off to give her a tour of my ink. I patted my upper arm, checking that the bandage was still there, covering the tatt of Annika, which I couldn’t let her see.

“I have a few,” I answered.

“Can I see?” she asked bashfully as fear clouded her eyes, expecting me to turn her down.

I hesitated before pulling my sweatshirt off again, and her mischievous green eyes ran all over my naked chest, arms, and back as she licked her bottom lip, and the heat rose in my pants again.

She leaned forward, still hugging the sheets, and I could see her naked backside making an hourglass curving up to her waist. There was a mole on her left shoulder blade in the shape of a tiny heart, and I remembered Annika having one similar. I saw it on various occasions when we’d go swimming in the backyard pool or when she wore a singlet top and tied her lustrous hair up into a ponytail.

Even though I liked Riley’s hand moving over my arms, inspecting my ink, my focus kept returning to that heart-shaped mole.

“Is that a new tattoo?’ she asked, referring to the bandage wrapped around my bicep.

“No,” I lied, because if I were going to continue to see her, I’d have to keep the Annika tatt covered. If she thought it was a new tattoo, she’d want to see it, and then I’d have to think of another reason. “It’s a scar from the same accident.”

“Oh?” her lips parted as those eyes and hands kept traveling all over my skin. “But I don’t see any other scars.”

“No,” I replied as I wound her hair around my finger, yet still, my obsessive gaze kept returning to that heart-shaped mole, trying to remember if Annika’s mole was on the left shoulder blade, like Riley’s. “It mostly got my face.”

Replaying those memories of Annika brought back the bad stuff - my father’s murder and my foster sister betraying us, the family that took her in, and the look on my mom’s face when we heard the gunshot.

A cloud of darkness draped over me, sucking the air out of this small room, and I needed to leave.Now.I needed to inhale fresh air and let my angry, fermenting thoughts settle before I did something stupid I might regret. I pulled away from her and slipped my sweater back on, ignoring the disappointed expression on her face.

“I have to go,” I urged, eager to free myself of her environment.

“Okay,” she breathed, shuffling under the covers.

“I’ll message you,” I told her, without looking back as I stepped to the door.

“Sure,” she murmured, and it was obvious that she didn’t believe me. However, I couldn’t explain that I had to distance myself from her to protect her.

“See you around,” I told her, still not looking back. I couldn’t look back at her because it would make everything worse.

A long-winded sigh replied, “Another one bites the dust,” as I closed the door on her.

While running down the stairs to the main entrance, that heart-shaped mole haunted my brain, but once I was outside in the cool morning air, I started to feel better. The mask drove me fucking insane.Shedrove me fucking insane.

As soon as I was behind the wheel of my car, I pulled the ski mask off, cranked the engine, and drove back to the frat house. Nothing sat right with me. I hated living in the frat house, hated being at college, hated school, hated every fucking thing, but I liked Riley, and that’s a problem.

My growing fondness for her might impede my incentive to find Annika, and the impending thought I had was that if Rileyturned out to be Annika, how the fuck could I possibly drag her in front of the firing range to be destroyed by Mikky and Ronan.

Once back in my bedroom, I shut and locked the door behind me and took a key from under my mattress to unlock the bottom drawer of my chest of drawers. Inside was every memory I had collected of Annika.

I kept every picture until she betrayed us when she was sixteen, every letter she wrote me, and every gift she gave me. I told Mikky and Mom I lit a match to her stuff and let it burn, but that was a lie. I kept some items.

I tried to do it. When I dragged out all her clothes from her closet, threw all her cosmetics and toys, piled them up in the backyard, and had a bomb fire. But when I tried to throw the letters, birthday, Christmas, and other gifts on the flames, I couldn’t do it.

The photographs of her as a little girl show her with bright blond hair, a smiling mouth, and plump cheeks, but her eyes were empty and devoid of warmth—a reflection of the horrors of her life before she came to us. Slowly, with love, attention, and consistency, we noticed the warmth coming through in her nature, but it took a while, and I guess that was why I struggled to let her go.

I kept these things because I never gave up on her. I always had her back, and it was my arms she ran to when nightmares haunted her sleep. I never gave up on her, but she gave up on me.

I unfolded a letter she wrote me shortly after she came to live with us at eight years old. She was writing at the level of a five-year-old. She was always smart but wasn’t given the chance to thrive, so Mom and I spent every day after school working with her to increase her writing and reading skills, and it worked.

The first letter she wrote me was the most precious because I remember how proud she was. I kept that letter at the back of mydrawer and brought it out a year later as proof of how much her literacy skills had improved.

All the letter said was GUNNER IS MY BEST FRIEND AND WE PLAY GAMES. But the spelling was all wrong, and the letters were all mixed up, but reading it became my go-to therapy when life fucked me off. The little pink butterfly at the top left corner was the cutest.

As she got older, she continued to write me letters. Many held secrets that she couldn’t say to my face, and I swore I would never tell another living soul what she confessed in the letters. Some of the information was about the way she was treated in foster care and the way she was treated at school, which was hard to read.

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