Page 27 of The Obsession

I smiled sadly at her. “Yes, Delilah. This is a video of you killing Detective Brandon Jackson.”

Chapter Nine

Delilah

I could only stare, frozen, as the screen showed me the garage—my garage—Brandon’s legs sticking out from under the Camaro. The sight of him was so wrong, so eerie. Then it got worse. The back door opened, and I saw myself walking in, my hands cupped around my elbows, my shoulders rounded, my head low, trying to make myself as small as possible. Bile burned through my esophagus.

“That’s—stop the video,” I croaked.

Logan didn’t answer.

“Logan, stop the video.”

I watched as I walked around the car and bent over to squeak at Brandon in my impotent, small-person voice. Oh god. In less than a minute, I would watch as I stalked back toward the house and stopped, pondering, calculating, and then, and then—

“Stop the video!” My voice came out in an animalistic scream. I swiped at the phone but Logan jerked it out of my reach.

Then, to my surprise, he tapped the Delete button and said, “I’m deleting this copy. I can’t risk anyone coming across this on my phone. But I’m keeping a master copy somewhere safe.” Even as we stared at each other, chests heaving hard, part of me wondered if Mom might have heard me scream. Or maybe my neighbors. I couldn’t let any of them find us, not like this. We had to talk about it. I had so many questions. But where could we talk? Inside his car? A full-body shudder ran through me. No way in hell was I getting back in there with him. I gestured to Logan to follow, and we briskly walked down the street. Only after we turned the corner did I stop walking.

“How do you—I mean—why—” Coherent sentences were beyond me. I didn’t even know where to begin with my questions.

Logan took a deep breath and tugged at his necklace. When he finally spoke, his words came out in a rush, his eyes shining with fervor. “I did this for your sake, Delilah. That time I talked to you, when you were on your way to the supermarket to get ice, I got the impression he was doing something bad to you, and I wanted to protect you. Obviously if you were being abused, you couldn’t report it because he was a cop, so I thought: What if I catch it all on video? They wouldn’t be able to ignore it then. They’d have to take him away. I went to your house whenever I could and recorded a couple of instances of him beating you and your mom. I thought I should gather as much footage as I could, over multiple occasions, so he couldn’t claim that it was a one-time thing or whatever. I was recording him working on his car that day, and…”

My head was a whirl of images. I thought of Logan skulking around the house—my house—with his camera phone brandished in front of him, trying to capture the worst moments of my life tosave me, and I wanted to scratch him, feel his flesh peeling under my nails. “Why are you showing this to me?”

“Delilah, when I said I love you, I really meant it. This isn’t some shallow teenage crush. I love you, and that means I love everything about you, even this part of you.”

I gaped at him. Everything was going too fast and too slow and I didn’t—couldn’t—understand anything. “I don’t understand.”

“We’re meant to be together,” he said, with so much passion and belief, like a pastor making an announcement to his congregation.

“You don’t even know me.” But even as I said it, I knew what he was going to say. How he’d spent the last few months observing me, and—god—following me, picking up information about me to add to his sick collection.

“I do know you, Delilah. I know you better than anyone else. This video proves it.”

“This video proves nothing. Aside from me—” Even now, I couldn’t say it. “Brandon’s death,” I finished lamely.

Logan’s face was shining with sincerity as he leaned close to me. “I know everything there is to know about you, and I still love you. Can anyone else say that?”

A black pit of dread had yawned open deep in my stomach, a feeling that wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to me. It was the way I’d felt after the first time Brandon hit me, the sensation of standing at the lip of a crevasse, knowing monsters lurked in the deep and the dark. The sensation that things were about to get a whole lot worse. “What do you want, Logan?”

“I want you to know that we’re meant to be together.”

“So you’re blackmailing me,” I said flatly.

He looked scandalized by the statement. “Of course not. I’m not a monster. I wouldn’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”

Despite myself, I allowed a flicker of hope to come to life. Maybe he really didn’t want anything. Maybe… I shook my head. “Then why show me the video?”

“To show you we’re soul mates. I don’t want the love of my life behind bars.”

“And if it turns out I’m not the love of your life?”

He shook his head forcefully, looking more earnest than ever. “There’s no possible way we’re not meant to be together. I was meant to protect you. Look how Detective Jackson hurt you all this time and I was the only one who noticed it. I was the only one who thought of a solution. You have no idea how many bad guys are out there. The world is a fucked-up place. You need me. If you left, I’d have to find you, and if I have to get the cops involved, well… I’d do anything to keep you safe, Delilah.”

The hole opened up and swallowed me whole. It was hard to breathe. I sucked in a lungful of air, but my chest still felt like it was being crushed by an iron fist, as though I were drowning. I knew what drowning felt like because Brandon had once pressed my head into the pool for knocking a glass of water over his keyboard. The expression “my skin crawled” was more than appropriate here; I could practically feel my skin try to walk off my flesh just to get away from Logan. I tightened my hands into fists. I couldn’t spiral back into my shell. Being trapped with Brandon, living under the crushing weight of his badge… I couldn’t go back to living under someone else’s thumb.

“That sounds like blackmail to me,” I hissed.

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