Fear snatches my breath. “Let me leave.”
“We both can’t carry your secret around, London. That is, unless we can work through it during our sessions.” He traces his knuckles down the curve of my breast.
“What are you talking about?” I have to angle my head back to meet his eyes. The closer he gets, the smaller I feel in comparison.
He cages me in against the wall. “It might be difficult for small towns to be open-minded enough, to be objectionable about one of their own. No one wants to think a killer hides among them.”
My back flattens against the brick as he towers over me.
“But you knew the truth, and you did what you’re so good at doing. You lied. You’ve been lying ever since. Even to yourself.”
I swallow. “I’m going to scream.”
“Go ahead,” he dares. “I’ll snag the first reporter interview I can to announce that your father was a monster that you put down.”
The air in the room is sucked out. The florescent lights flicker and buzz, my breaths too loud as I gasp past my constricted lungs.
He licks his lips, his body pressed close to mine. “The puzzle pieces were all there…they just needed to be linked together.”
“You’re mad. You’re delusional. You’ve built an alternate reality around me that is as far from the truth—”
His lips capture mine, silencing me. The kiss is hard and carnal and raw. I moan into him before I brace my palms high on his chest and push, breaking away.
“I wanted to taste the lie on your lips,” he says. “Tastes bitter. Nothing like that sweetness I experienced yesterday.” Then he backs farther away, allowing me to breathe and straighten my blouse.
He takes his seat again, his gaze never leaving my face. “All those missing girls. Did you see them? Witness their torture? How long were you a part of it before you decided to kill your father?”
The walls of the white room waver in the corner of my vision. Red seams the edges. I seal my eyes closed. The ink on my hand burns. I cup my palm, rub at the searing flesh. “Three months.”
A sense of relief crashes over me with the admission. The pressure in my head eases a fraction. I open my eyes. I expect to see the arrogance on Grayson’s face, having stripped me down to my black and tarred marrow, but he’s somber. Looking at me with a frightening wonder in his eyes.
“Lucky for you the coroner was a drunk. Couldn’t tell the difference between peri- and postmortem injuries. That car crash didn’t kill your father. He was already dead when you decided to take out a tree.”
I glance at the door, anxious. “Nothing you have is fact.”
“It doesn’t need to be. The speculation alon
e will be enough to destroy you.”
He’s right. An investigation into my father now, with advanced technology and police procedures, may prove that he was the Hollows Reaper. A bogyman rumored to have stolen young girls in the middle of the night. What mothers told their daughters to keep them from roaming town.
“What did he do with the bodies?”
“What did you do with the bodies?” I counter.
A brutal smile slants his face. “I buried them, of course.”
My hands tremble. My family home is still in my name. I kept an abandoned house with a dead garden and barren cornfield. Rotting down to the foundation. I own the deed to a graveyard.
“You should tell the families where their loved ones are located, Grayson. The court would be more prone to clemency if you did.”
He cranes an eyebrow. “I will if you will.”
I push off the wall. Shove my hands in my hair. “This is crazy. I won’t be threatened.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving.”