Page 76 of Beyond Hate

And I knew if I found London like that, there was nowhere in the world that would be safe from the bloodbath I would rain down.

The car stopped driving a few miles out of town, and I frowned. It was close to the husk of the facility, and for a few minutes, I tried to run scenarios through my mind that could make sense.

I’d neverseena journal from Nikki, but I wasn’t surprised that Nathaniel had kept things from me.

I’d never heard of him talking to the cops.

And I was pretty sure the only people who had a grudge against me were dead.

So why…

Why…

Why didn’t matter—all that mattered was getting to London. I ditched the car a block from where his face was lit up on the screen, and followed the image of him to an older looking house set back in the woods. It was the perfect place to bring someone if you wanted to do something bad to them… and there was a police car parked in front of the gate, showing for all the world to see that this was where Renn had brought London.

It was a good place for someone to die—a good place to hide a body. Maybe he’d brought him here for that reason, but he didn’t realize it was his grave he was planning for.

There was no world where he got to walk out of here alive. I just had to remind myself that I needed to kill himslowlyso I could make sure that he was it.

That there was no one else.

That the fucking demons from my past would stop rearing their heads and trying to ruin the only good thing I’d ever touched, the onepurething that was mine.

By the time I got to the door and carefully glanced in through the window, I’d already talked myself into eight ways I could gut Renn while keeping him alive long enough to talk… and every one of those thoughts left my head as soon as I saw him standing there with London on his knees and a gun pressed to the back of his head.

It was like it was on purpose.

Like this was the plan all along… and my mind circled back around to Nathaniel, to the secret smiles he always had when he looked at me.

“When it comes down to it, a man in love will always come for the person who holds his heart, even if he knows it’s a trap.”

Fuck. He’d said that to me, hadn’t he? I was an experiment, even now. Even though he was dead.

It was like every ghost, every memory from my past was finally manifesting into something real and whole… because standing beside Renn was a figure that I shouldn’t have recognized, but I did. A figure that should have been impossible, but I was proof that nothing was impossible.

I should haveknownthis was Nathaniel’s end game, because it really was the perfect conclusion to his experiment.

She looked different… but the cold blue of her eyes was something burned into my memory, like little jolts of pain that would never heal over. A thousand cuts.

A thousand moments where she’d made sure to let me know what a disappointment I was. And then a thousand more where she let me know that there was no world where I could escape the punishment for trying to leave her.

Elizabeth Blythe was like a ghost from my past… and she was looking down at London like she’d won some kind of lottery, and he was the prize she’d been after all along.

Chapter 29

London

Everythinghurt.OnesecondI’d been talking to Otto, and the next there was a sharp pain in my temple and my vision swam to darkness.

I came to with a gun pressed to the back of my head and a woman I didn’t recognize glaring down at me with the coldest eyes I’d ever seen in my life.

“Officer Renn?” My head tried to swivel, and I felt metal bite into the back of my skull. It made me freeze.

A gun.

Of course he had a gun, he was a cop. I just didn’t understandwhythat gun was aimed at me. I didn’t understand anything that was going on.

“So glad you’re finally awake, Nicholas.”

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