Swim Deep - Page 120

I won’t say here that Noah Madaster’s superiority, cruelty, and narcissism were an act. He was all that, and more. But at that moment, his arrogant façade seemed to melt away.

I realized what had caused his transformation. Fear. But something else, as well. Disbelief?

Hope?

He clutched at his chest, his eyes bulging wide. I saw movement in my periphery and realized Wes had stood and moved behind his chair.

Madaster gave a shaky breath, still holding my stare warily, as if he thought I’d run at him at any moment. Or disappear, like a ghost.

“Can you see her?” Madaster rasped.

I realized he wasn’t speaking to me, but Wes. I glanced at Wes, who looked bewildered.

“Elizabeth?” Madaster whimpered in a tiny, childlike voice.

“Is that what you think?” Although I’d expected this reaction, his self-centeredness infuriated me. “You think that your precious Elizabeth has come to pay you a visit? You actually believe she’d seek you out in the afterlife, after what you did to her?”

“Anna, what—”

I put up my hand, halting Wes’s question. I stepped toward Madaster, holding his stare. He appeared unaware that Wes had spoken. He seemed utterly transfixed, gazing at me. I knew what he saw. What he thought he saw. He saw a woman who looked exactly like Elizabeth Madaster on the night he’d murdered her—Elizabeth’s face, the shoulder-length hair, the identical wetsuit. He imagined his daughter had finally come back to him, in the way of his Madaster ancestors.

“You smug son of a bitch. You thought I was Evan’s tool. You thought you’d made me yours. But I’m doing this for us. Elizab

eth and me. She guided me here. Do you know, I think she might have somehow maneuvered this whole scenario? She wouldn’t let Evan forget her. She wouldn’t let Evan forget you. We both know how persuasive, how powerful, Elizabeth could be. Who’s to say she’d stop being who she was, even after you murdered her? Who’s to say she didn’t somehow manipulate all the events that led me to stand here in front of you right now?”

I saw realization spark in his bulging eyes. His mouth gaped open in his cavernous face. He clutched tighter at his chest with his right hand.

“Anna,” he growled.

“I heard you just now,” I said, pointing at the swinging door where I’d eavesdropped. “Elizabeth comes to me. She’ll never appear to you, because she knows how much you’d want it. She knows how much you’d gloat over controlling her, even in death. Hearing her… seeing her, that’d validate all your insane ideas about the superiority of the Madasters, wouldn’t it? And Elizabeth is fed up to the end of the earth with giving you what you want. Never again. Even after you die, you can seek her out to the ends of hell, buy she’ll never let you look on her face again.”

“You little bitch,” Madaster muttered, spittle oozing from the corners of his mouth.

“I found her body. Elizabeth led me to the tunnel,” I continued, ruthless, even in the face of his vulnerability. “I’m going to show the police. You’re going to prison for murdering her, Noah. It’s going to be all over the news, how you raped Elizabeth when she was a little girl, how you brainwashed her into a sick, incestuous relationship for most of her life, and how when she finally got the support she needed to leave you for good, you murdered her. All of it is going to come out, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. How does it feel? To know you’re trapped? Helpless?” I asked. I’m ashamed to say I heard that familiar gloating in my tone, that eagerness to witness suffering. It was his tone. My father’s. My grandfather’s. I hated it, but I have to admit.

In that moment, it felt fantastic.

Madaster jerked his stare off me, looking to Wes.

“Stop her. If you let her talk to the police,” he said in a thick, clotted voice, “I swear to God I’ll tell them everything you’ve done. That you’re a morphine addict. That you helped me the night Elizabeth died—”

“I had nothing to do with Elizabeth’s death,” Wes defended himself, looking at me with panic in his gaze. “I only helped Noah move her boat that night. She’d anchored just offshore from the South Twin. He told me that he’d have my license to practice medicine revoked if I didn’t do it. I had no choice.”

“I’ll tell the police how you caused that landslide, and locked Anna in the sauna—”

“Again, because you insisted I do it,” Wes shouted. He looked at me pleadingly. “I never meant to cause you any real harm. I wouldn’t do that, Anna. He said it was all just to scare you, make you feel uncomfortable and unhappy at Les Jumeaux.”

“You did those things, Wes?” I asked.

“Noah wanted you scared.”

“Was Valeria in on it with you?”

“No. It was just a convenience, that she could… ”

“Act as an informant in the North Twin,” I stated grimly, not even bothering to tell Wes that Evan had been using him for something similar in the South Twin.

“He wanted you to leave Les Jumeaux… at first, anyway,” Wes said. “When he thought you were just some random woman who resembled Elizabeth, recruited by Evan to torture him. But then he spoke to more and more people, researched who you were, and how Evan had met you, and he started to suspect—”

Tags: Beth Kery Romance
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