Page 2 of A Love So Deadly
A small laugh breaks free.
No one’s ever mentioned virgins of course or actual sacrifices.
Not out loud.
VMR’s just soaked in rumor and wrong doings, and it’s so big and protected that nothing can touch it. Sometimes I think it really is not of this world.
I’d tried to investigate it a few times when I was fresh-faced, out of college, determined to put the name Elliot Montague on the map, any map, but the doors VMR had didn’t slam, they slid shut, sealed me out, and…my name was spelled M-U-D, apparently. I got blackballed. Couldn’t even get a job in the mail room of a paper. Do they even have mail rooms anymore?
I gulp in some air, and someone almost runs me down on foot. “Watch it, sister!”
“Not your sister, you bag of dicks.” Assholes are everywhere. I swear.
They probably breed them in the bowels of VMR. Then I growl.
VMR didn’t like questions. The only journos they liked were the glossy ones they employed, and the limp ones who wrote the kind of stories that were about as hard hitting as a feather.
I hate the hold VMR has over Tenebris. I should probably move, I know that. Get a job somewhere far away in journalism, far from VMR’s reach.
How far is far enough? Another city? Another country? Because VMR has a monstrous hold.
Tenebris is its home city. And the mysteries behind their doors make all my journalistic instincts flare. I want to know everything that happens there. I want all the secrets.
And I want to find my friend.
Besides I loved Tenebris, and working in journalism somewhere else, or online still wouldn’t allow me to poke about in the secretive world of VMR Media.
And now my best friend is missing.
Even if I wanted to, I’d never leave here now.
Not until I find out what’s happened to Kayla.
I worry about her because everyone low-down knows the rumors.
People get jobs at VMR. Some of them go missing. And missing, when it comes to VMR, it means never to be seen again. It means dead.
She changed and then she disappeared.
I think she’s dead and it breaks me in ways I hate.
Dead or alive, I need to know. I need to know what happened to my friend.
Kayla’s dream was to be an anchor, and VMR is the top job to have.
Her internship should’ve been a step on a path that rocketed her to fame under the VMR banner. Not sent her straight into no man’s land.
Now it’s like no one’s heard of her. My failed visit to the idiotic cops went nowhere. They told me she probably just moved.
As if.
Where would she go? Why? Like me, Kayla was born and bred in Tenebris. She didn’t just decide to run back to some ranch in the middle of nowhere, or to live with a rich aunt. She didn’t go into Narnia or run off with a lover to live a life of adventure. She didn’t suddenly jump on a rocket and fly to the moon.
Every single one of those things are just as stupid as the other, and there’s only one thing that bears focusing on: where would she go? The answer’s obvious.
Nowhere of her own free will.
A car horn blares, and I realize I’m in the middle of the road. I throw the driver a look, but he just swerves, spraying me with a puddle of filthy water.
