Page 114 of Little Deaths

Gripping his shoulder in a white-knuckled grip, he struggled his way out to his father’s Mercedes, heedless of the blood he was getting on the upholstery. A light drizzle was falling, swirling everything in mist and shrouding the streetlamps in fuzzy halos. Individual beads caught by his headlights flared like a curtain of diamonds.

(Someone knows.)

The road unfurled like a black tongue before him, leading to the jaws of an unknown monster. It was the dark mirror of the drive he’d taken almost three weeks before, when he had first come to town and driven past all of his old haunts.

But something else was haunting him now.

It was late enough that Black Oak Road was mostly empty. During the day, commuters used it to travel to work through surface streets when the freeways were all backed up. But at night, it was eerily quiet. The gravel factories stood sentry in the distance like the carapaces of ancient alien machines. Rafe could barely see the old gauging station, since there was so much fog from the lake, but he could see eerie lights winking through the misty shrouds.

His good hand tightened on the wheel and he drove a little faster.

He’d lost her once; he wouldn’t lose her again.

???????

Johnathan.

Her terror was so great that she felt the hot rush of it like bile in her throat.

Lost in the violent, churning wake of this paralyzing fear was a disorienting sense of déjà vu. As if she were eighteen and afraid again. All alone. Completely at his mercy.

No. It’s not possible, she thought wildly.I killed him!

And she had . . . hadn’t she?

Dizzied as she was by the lights and whatever drug was fogging up her mind and turning her blood to sludge, she was slow to realize that the man across from her wasn’t Johnathan. Even if he were still alive, he would have been in his sixties. This man was at least two decades two young, with a softness in his jaw Johnathan never had, and eyes that were the wrong shade of blue.

It’s like he’s been frozen in time, she thought sickly.But he looks all wrong.

“What’s the matter, Adonica?” he said mockingly. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Who . . . who are you?”

“Janus Staal,” he said, smiling nastily when she flinched at the name. “Or Jason Steel.”

Steel. She reeled inwardly. Johnathan was related to this man?

Apparently too impatient to watch her figure it out, Jason spat, “I’m his son, you brainless bimbo. Janus was the two-faced god of beginnings—and endings. Which seemed fitting, since I’ll be the one responsible for yours.”

Endings. The word reverberated inside of her brain like a tolling bell. Jason Steel. She remembered the name, vaguely. He’d done an interview about her, questioning the competence of the coroner who had performed his father’s autopsy. He had thought it was murder.

Donni stayed on her feet with effort, staggering past a picture of her standing outside Red Cypress Estates, applying her lipstick.I wasn’t insane, she thought, staring at the image of herself.Someonewaswatching me. Someone was watching me this whole time.

A man with two faces.

A man in a mask.

As she looked at him a little more closely, she realized that she recognized him. He was the dark-haired man she had seen Opal arguing with at the funeral. And though she wasn’t sure, she thought he might have been the delivery man who had brought that food to her door.

The one who had told her, knowingly,Enjoy, Donni.

Johnathan Steel’s son had been the one following her this whole time.

“You disappeared quietly,” he said, staring at her face as if he might forget it if he looked away. “I’d half-forgotten about you until your husband’s scandal went public and I saw that picture of you in the article. And then I thought, ‘Isn’t that the little cunt who tried to ruin my father?’ And of course it was. You’d moved on by then, and gotten your venomous claws into another man. But it was you. I would have rememberedyou.”

Donni bit her tongue, afraid of arguing with this obviously delusional man.Your father got involved withme, she wanted to say. But she was too afraid of what he was going to do to her.

He’d already hurt so many others, including Rafe.

---