I should have some common sense and at least try to be afraid of his attempt on my life, but all I feel is an exhilarating freedom I want to drown myself in. Just like that first night we met...I feel alive.
And I intend to stay that way.
Let the games begin, killer-boy.
Chapter 6
Carter
“This just won’t do,” I say to myself with a long sigh as I watch the city’s CCTV cameras on two of the six thirty-inch monitors fixed on the wall above my desk. The others hold the brief information I managed to find on the wretched kitten.
Her largely undocumented life surrounds me on these screens.
They’re fixed on flexible brackets I’ve adjusted so that the outside monitors are on a slight diagonal angle. They immerse me in whatever research or work I’m doing, but there’s nothing useful to be immersed in now.
Scarlet lives on the same estate as her father, at the edge of Queenscove where CCTV is sparse or non-existent and the houses are pulled away from the road. In their case, according to satellite images, they own enough land that the buildings I can see might as well be in different neighborhoods, separated by hedges, fences, and thickets of trees. I can only guess which belongs to the woman I’m looking for. Probably the smaller cottage-like building on the northeast side, next to a large pond. I have no idea why that one seems most relevant out of the three houses, but it does.
This is what I’ve been doing, watching Scarlet’s property, or trying to, since I woke up from the best sleep I’ve had in months, though that might not mean much, since I’ve been sleeping like shit.
Regardless, it seems pointless. I checked the two cameras that come close to the property boundary, but all they see are the roads leading to the estate. No house, no drive, no nothing. A distant, tall hedge and nothing else.
I need more. I need to see her house. Her windows.Inside...
I woke up with an itchy need scratching through my veins. A frustration that demanded satisfaction. It didn’t get it last night. Not for lack of trying, but I just couldn’t get myself in the mood at Metamorphosis. I still played, but I could not fuck. It felt wrong, somehow. I can’t find a rational explanation for it, and that is simply unacceptable.
To make matters worse, Margo could tell something was off. It’s one thing to be off my game, but it’s another for it to show. I can’t let any cracks reach the surface. They might embed, and I can’t allow that.
This, though—the inability to have eyes on Scarlet—doesn’t just frustrate me. It downright angers me.
For some reason, my brain finds it important to lay eyes on her. These days, it seems to be working on its own accord. Finnigan would call it intuition. I call it ridiculous distractions from the norm.
I lie back in my thickly padded computer chair, clutching the mouse in one hand while rubbing the hem of my T-shirt between my index and middle finger.
A strange habit.
The feel of the hem between those digits pleasantly tickles a part of my brain that finds comfort in that particular texture. So, I carry on, as always, while I switch between different cameras, hoping that a new feed will magically appear. No such luck, of course.
I move to the only photos I found of her online. Nine in total. A shocking amount, considering the age we live in. It’s almost suspicious.
Fuck,it issuspicious.
Two photos aren’t even of her. They’re of someone else at an event, and she appears in the background. Only, there’s something about Scarlet. The way her walnut-colored waves flow down to the middle of her back. Her creamy skin against the dark-green dress. Her sweet smile, even as she looks away from the camera, hiding a wickedness the lens doesn’t manage to capture. She may be in the background, but she stands out.
I wish I hadn’t noticed that.
The third photo is from a sealed record. Black eye and burst lip, the same pixie grin shining in her gaze and the curve of her lips. She beat up someone in school when she was sixteen. Badly enough that they ended up in the hospital with three broken fingers, a fractured arm, and a broken nose. And there is no remorse whatsoever on her face.
I’m intrigued. Thoroughly.
The last six photos awaken a masochistic sense in me that I sometimes forget exists. I have no desire to see the pictures. They infuriate me for reasons I fail to understand, yet I keep fucking looking at them, regardless. They’re from her wedding with Bernard Camora a few years back.
She looked happy.
Searing heat melts beneath my skin at the images that have wrongness to them. Unexplainable, infuriating wrongness. Mostly aimed at Camora.
Yet, I keep staring, allowing the images to burrow deeper into my nerves.
I have to get to her.
