Page 104 of Vengeance of Childhood Proportions

Those pictures weremine, and I was too much of an asshole to offer them up as evidence.Iwould be the one to discover who my little owl really was, not some Facial Recognition Software…

I blinked, and something clicked inside my head. It wasn’tknowledgeor even suspicion. I’m not even entirely sure what it was. Instinct maybe, or some subconscious comparison.

I pull out my phone. Why was I even contemplating this? It was crazy. It would mean… It would mean my life was fucked up beyond anything I could have even imagined. Because there was noway, no fucking way, that she had been right under my nose, right underme, this entire time and I hadn’t known. I hadn’t suspected.

But why would I? What logically sane person would think that the girl who is supposed to be dead is the same girl he’d been sleeping with for the past month and a half? Why would that thought even cross my mind?

And yet, it was now.

I didn’t know if Dr. Robinson had studied the pictures before he emailed them to me. Natural curiosity hinted at likely. But he didn’t have anything to compare it to.

I did. I knew every inch of my little owl, with the exception of what color her eyes were. Another memory came forward as I pulled up my email.

“Her mole.”Jerome Roberts had said to me as he reached his left arm over his right shoulder and tapped around his shoulder blade.“I keep seeing it. Every time I close my eyes, every time I try to sleep… It’s all I see, every fucking day.”

My little owl had a mole on the back of her right shoulder. But that wasn’t proof. A birth mark would have been, but a mole? People had moles. Hell, I had one on my ass cheek that was so close to my crack that it had been mistaken as a smudge of shit on more than one occasion.

It wasn’t proof. It was just…coincidence.

Both Carr and Dr. Robinson were sitting opposite me at the table. Neither could see what I was doing or had an inkling as to why.

The email was big. There was a reason the FAS the government used was more advanced and expensive than anything available to the public. The system didn’t just give one rendering of a person. As fun as those free apps were to see what you or your friends would look like in fifty years, they were not so accurate that they could hold up in court. The FAS we used at the Bureau gave six to twelve, sometimes fifteen, different images. The more pictures you had of a subject, the better the renderings. I had only emailed Dr. Robinson Holly Marteen’s ninth grade yearbook photo because that was all I had. There was no picture above her name in her tenth grade yearbook, the school year in which everyone believed she’d committed suicide. There were eleven possible renderings, including one with possible cosmetic surgery to change the shape of her nose.

Had she meant to kill herself or had it been a ploy the entire time? Had she known that she would need to disappear in order to exact her revenge with such precision?

“I’m so sorry. I never meant for you to find out like this.”

I stopped on the eighth picture. I’m not sure what my feelings were in that moment. Logic would dictate that I would be shocked, angry, betrayed, maybe even disturbed. I couldn’t say. I was honestly too numb to really remember. I do recall barely excusing myself from my audience before rushing out of the interrogation room in search of some privacy.

I did not want anyone to see what I was looking at, to guess what I had just discovered. I wanted no one to know that I now knew the color of my little owl’s eyes.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Holly

Emmet’s long,curly hair was greasy in my grip. I’ve had some shit days in my life. Some god-awful days, and one specifically hellish day that ended with a rope around my neck. I don’t know where the last three days fall in the lineup. I felt…empty. I was going through the motions—breathing, eating, sleeping—but it meant nothing. There was no purpose, no motivation.

I’d spent the past two days being lectured by Jason on how foolish I’d been, how he trained me better, how he’d warned me not to get involved with Master Mal… I listened to it all, taking it in silence. Because he was right. He wasbeyondright.

I had no business getting involved with Master Mal. It was selfish and stupid and reckless. After everything I’d suffered through in my life, I’d wanted the escape, the sanctuary, he offered. Hadn’t I deserved that? Didn’t I still deserve it?

But it wouldn’t matter. It couldn’t. I’d killed someone in front of Master Mal. It was over. My stupid ‘experiment’, as Jason called it, was a failure.“This is why emotions are for fools, Hols,”he kept saying.

I’d fallen for the last person on this planet that I should have, a man who was unknowingly hunting me. I should have run from him the moment I turned on that barstool and saw himcrowding over me. Looking back on it, I hadn’t been out for love, never even thought the emotion possible for me. I wasn’t twisted like Jason, but certainly broken. All I’d known in that moment was the feeling of safety around Master Mal. It was intoxicating, and too hard of a pull to ignore.

I felt like I had a boulder sitting on my chest. I couldn’t breathe whenever I thought of Master Mal or remembered the fear on his face the last time I saw him. I couldn’t even talk to him because I knew what he’d say and do. He was a cop. I was a killer. There was no other option, no alternative route. He’d likely put the cuffs on me himself.

Jason was right to call me a fool.

Now I wasn’t just broken, but a broken fool.

Time wasn’t helping. I’d destroyed my phone within minutes of killing Dominique. I saw Master Mal being stopped by the police and knew I had limited time to get back to his house to retrieve my things. There was nothing I could do about my owl mask that was still in Master Mal’s car. I knew better than to be sentimental towardsthings, and I never had been before this, but there was an overwhelming amount of sadness in my soul every time I thought about the fact that I’d left that mask behind. I wanted my mask back.

I was done in Alaska. I wanted a new start, wanted to forget this entire fucking state and create a different life for myself. Everyone on my list was now dead. There were only two more men who owed me their lives. Jason’s car was packed with his new toy secured in the trunk. The fishery was burning now as I walked inside the hospice facility on Douglas Island.

For the first time in a long time, I was out in public without a disguise. No wig or contacts, no mask or glasses. I was wearing jeans, boots, and a long sleeve turtleneck sweater. I knew the cameras would catch me. Iwantedthem to. This wasn’t reckless, though. I’d always planned on making the former sheriff seeme.

No one was at the receptionist desk. Jason had hacked into their computers and was wreaking havoc on their alert system for over an hour. All the staff were running around trying to see which alarms were real and which were glitches.

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