Page 109 of Two for Joy

“Yes, I’ll find you both.” Romeo let go of her hand, and slowly pulled the drawer of the bedside table. “We’ll see each other again, but you need to go to him first. It was you two first before me, before I was born.”

“Before you joined our family.”

Romeo frowned at her odd choice of words, but didn’t comment. “Yes, you and him, and you loved each other. You were happy.”

“Yes.”

Romeo found his father’s old cigar box in the drawer.

“Always love him.” She wheezed.

He opened the lid, ran his fingers over the six cigars, then picked one out. He used his father’s lighter kept beside the box, held the cigar in one hand, and his mother’s hand in his other.

“He’s waiting for you, he’s right there. Can you see him?”

The room filled with the familiar scent. It had been years since his nostrils had twitched with it, and when he turned to his mother, he saw her lips lift at the edges.

“Rupert?”

Romeo didn’t speak, he let whatever medicine induced fantasy his mother was having play out. She hadn’t smiled in weeks, but she was smiling, and her eyes beneath her lids were twitching, as if she was looking at someone. More and more smoke filled the room, but it wasn’t horrid, it was familiar for both of them, pleasant in a comforting way.

“Go with him.”

The scent and memory of her husband broke her determination to hold on for him.

“I’ll be okay.” Romeo whispered, squeezing her hand for the final time.

The moment was peaceful, the most peaceful moment Romeo had experienced in his life. The monster went quiet, mute, and he sat in the room in silence, breathing in the smell of his father, holding his mother’s hand. The room darkened, the in and out wheeze of air slowed, then a short while later, stopped altogether.

Peace for a single second for him and his mother.

Then the monster had pushed forward in his mind, broke free of its chains, and took center stage of his life. He was free to kill, free to satisfy his dark desire, free to be himself, and the relief made him weep, made him gasp and quickly let go of his mother’s hand.

Romeo listened to the waves smashing into the rocks. The drop that would surely kill him. He wouldn’t end up in the place that good people went like his mother and father. He’d drop into the depths of hell, no less than he deserved, but he wasn’t ready for it yet. He was determined to fulfil one promise to his mother.

Romeo searched the dashboard finding a pen and a notepad. He hovered the pen above the page, dwelling on how to start his supposed manifesto, then he just wrote the words, ‘I am Romeo Knight, AKA the Countdown Killer’.

He knew his words would be picked over, analyzed repeatedly. He had to hint at his suicidal end, but not push it too hard. The car at the edge of the cliff, and Holly’s article on him would be the final pieces of the puzzle, but he needed to make sure it made a real picture, not a fake one.

Romeo closed the notepad, then placed it on top of the passenger seat. He climbed out, leaving the driver’s door hanging open, a clear suggestion that he may have exited the vehicle, and thrown himself over the drop. He took off Neil’s clothes, folded them neatly, then placed them on the passenger seat with Neil’s shoes pinning them down.

He wrapped his newly acquired coat from Marc around himself and slipped into Marc’s smaller trainers.

The edges of the cliff were rock, and he left no print as he moved as quickly as he could away from the car. The rock wouldn’t last, he hoped the prints he left behind would be discounted or overlooked.

For the second time in two days, Romeo relied on the cover of darkness to get away. He heard sirens, another helicopter, but instead of coming from everywhere, they stayed in one spot, and he moved further and further away from the Porsche, and the sight of his apparent suicide.

He remembered what Will had told him in prison. Sixteen-century John Nevison who faked being dead to escape. He’d done the same, but unlike John Nevison, Romeo wasn’t going to be caught a second time, not unless Chad wanted him to be.

Chapter Twenty

Whether the police believed it or not, his suicide still made it to the papers. Romeo found one discarded in a bin three days later.

Romeo didn’t puff up with pride like when his countdown had been recorded, he sagged with a slow sigh. Holly’s featured article supported the whole “I finished what I set out to do, and now I’m uncatchable” theory.

Even if the police believed it had all been a ruse to escape, they’d assume he’d run away. Disappeared into the shadows and fog like a Hollywood monster.

He wasn’t lurking in the shadows, but he might well have been.

---