Even better. The devil’s spawn would never darken this world.
Anderson grinned. “It’s a going away party now.”
On the other side of the glass door, panicked voices rose, their words jumbled, too many people talking at once for Anderson to clearly understand.
“You made me miserable, Ellora. Mocking me.”
She was crying hard now. “Anderson, please.”
He pulled her the rest of the way, reached the railing, and peered down at the fountain. “It’s off-center.”
“What?” She sniffled, her arm going slack as she followed his gaze.
Behind them, someone was banging a chair against the glass. The chair he’d wedged under the door’s handles moved an inch, the metal against concrete screeching through the air.
“The fountain. It’s closer to this side than the others. A fountain that big should’ve been easy to center.”
Her frightened blue eyes widened, and she tried to pull her arm back from his grip once again. “You’re scaring me.”
“You’re going to be surprised. All those times you said I’d be better off dead. You’re going to see. I’m a man of action.”
“I never said that, Anderson. Never.” Her body shook with tremors, and her bottom lip quivered, but she still managed a reassuring smile. “I think you need to see a doctor. You need help.”
The hate for her that Anderson had learned to chomp down on for so long rose up, making his head hurt. He leaned in close, whispering in her ear, as the shouts of their coworkers grew more frantic by the second. “I did see a doctor.”
The metal legs of the chair screeched again, and people’s shouts grew a little bit louder. He was running out of time.
“Anderson, you’re sick. You need help. Please, let me go.” The vitriol in Ellora’s voice drew him back into the fog, where there was just the two of them.
His lips turned up in a slow smile. “You’ll be so embarrassed.”
Show them you’re a man of action.
“I said, let me go.” She was clawing at him now. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you, Doctor.”
“What are you—”
“They’re going to know what kind of monster you are.” He snaked his arm around her waist, which was much more protruded than he remembered—the spawn—and lifted her.
As he did, he saw a friendly face on the other side of the glass. Brianna looked terrified. Her fear bounced off him. “Help me,” he mouthed, just as Ellora’s elbow caught him on the side of his head.
What had he been thinking?
He was a man of action.
Renewed in his mission, he lifted the struggling woman higher.
Her legs kicked at the air as she screamed.
Hands grasped at his shoulders. The railing.
Grappling.
Catching hold.
She screamed again, loud and high. A scream of absolute terror.
Good.
Smiling, he plucked her hands free of the railing, and with an ease that surprised him, flung her over and into the wide expanse of air.
Her scream was cut off seconds later by the gratifying thud of her body hitting the concrete edge of the fountain’s reservoir. Cut short, her voice was now silent, but Anderson was already climbing onto the railing, balancing on the beam with his arms out for balance.
He smiled as he looked down at her twisted body, half in the water, half out. Her hair floated around her, giving the illusion that she was still alive.
He knew better.
Shouts rose behind him, but the only words he could hear clearly came from the inside.
Go. Don’t disappoint me, Anderson.
“Yes, Doctor.” He bent his knees and flung himself forward, jumping as far out as he could, aiming for the middle of the off-center fountain, arms out in a graceful swan dive. He smiled as he took a deep, calming breath.
I was wrong. You can breathe on the way down.
It was his last thought before his head broke the surface of the shallow water.
Then the world went dark, and Ellora couldn’t hurt him anymore.
2
Today…
Detective Ellie Kline adjusted the vent on the passenger side of her boyfriend’s Cayenne, turning the warm air so it hit her bare shoulders. She wrapped the soft turquoise shawl tighter around her arms until it hid the scar from where Tucker Penland’s bullet had grazed her skin.
That was a night she wouldn’t soon forget, one that had turned out well after she found his hostage, Valerie Price, and they beat him at his own game of hunting humans as prey. She shivered again, though this time it had nothing to do with the temperature.
She caught Nick watching her and flashed him a quick smile. “I’ll be so happy when it’s spring.”
Nick Greene smiled back. “Only a few days left.”
She gave a decidedly unladylike snort and pulled the shawl closer. “Just because the calendar says spring officially starts in March doesn’t mean I’m buying it.” Sighing, she took in the majestic old buildings with hand-carved details as they passed through Charleston’s historic district, each as unique as the next. “I was meant to be a summer baby.”
She’d had a hell of a winter, having witnessed the man she held responsible for allowing her own kidnapper to remain free blow his brains out. Not to mention she’d been under suspicion for his death until it was ruled a suicide.
Being put on leave from the Charleston Police Department for having witnessed Detective Roy Jones’s self-destruction and also for being shot by a serial killer—or nicked by the bullet of one—might’ve been procedure, but for her, there was nothing worse. A break was the last thing she needed, with so many cold cases waiting. So many families who wouldn’t know what happened to their loved ones until she cracked the case. And the evidence locker was full of cases, so many that she’d often been tempted to haul in a cot and camp out there.
Still, she’d promised herself this night out. This one night away, where she could forget the horrors humans wreaked upon one another before she began to make her way back to some semblance of normalcy.
Nick chuckled, the soft tick of the blinker syncing
