Page 151 of A Smile Full of Lies
Me.
I peeled off at the next turn and headed back.
The house was still and quiet when I stepped inside, but the second I crossed the threshold, something shifted. The air stretched tight. The walls held their breath.
She would feel it when she finally walked in. The moment. The presence. The inevitability.
I didn’t turn on the lights. I didn’t need them.
The moonlight mingled with the glow of street lights filtered through the blinds in thin silver slashes, sharp enough to cut with. I took off my jacket and rolled my shoulders. My nerves were electric, twitching under my skin.
She was out there, dragging her feet, buying herself time she didn’t have. I knew her well enough to understand the pattern — this delay was her version of bracing for impact. But it wasn’t going to save her.
Nothing would.
I sat in the chair facing the living room entrance. The one with the best vantage point. The one she’d see first.
And I waited.
I let the silence stretch long and tense around me. Let the shadows move across the floor like hands reaching for her.
I was done being patient. Every minute she made me wait added heat to the hunger already coiling in my chest.
I’d given her time. Twenty-one fucking days of it, to be precise. She was out of grace now. She just didn’t know it yet.
Her location hadn’t moved in twenty-two minutes.
I stared at the blinking dot on the map, glowing like a middle finger on my screen, hovering just off the waterline where the overlook curved out above the delta.
Still sitting. Still stalling. Still pretending like she had a fucking choice.
I leaned forward, elbows braced on my knees, phone clutched so tight in one gloved hand I could feel the pressure building in my knuckles.
The part that killed me?
She wasn’t running from me. She didn’t even know she should be.
She was trying to gather herself. Catch her breath. Convince herself she hadn’t destroyed everything between us with that wire, that idiotic gamble she took with her life.
Maybe she thought I’d take pity on her. Maybe she thought I’d wait another night. But she was wrong, so fucking wrong.
Because I was done waiting.
I watched the screen for another minute, another breath, another heartbeat — and when she still didn’t move, I sent her a screenshot of her location from my burner phone and stood.
My phone hit the table with a dull thud. I turned, walked down the hall, and opened the locked desk drawer in my office.
The mask was waiting.
Slick black, smooth as sin, with those glowing neon violet lines stitching out an eerie, monstrous face with x-shaped eyes and a too-wide mouth reminiscent of her stitched-up scars.
Nox Obscura.
The name she whispered in the dark. The handle she clung to when her thighs were shaking and her breath hitched and she thought no one would ever know how badly she wanted to be hunted, cornered, caught.
I pulled the mask free and ran my leather-gloved thumb down its edge, then flicked the switch to light it up.
Tonight, she was going to learn the whole truth.
