Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake #5) - Rachel Caine Page 0,122
die. It’ll probably take a while. Her painkillers will run out soon, and her blood supply. It’ll be an agonizing way to go.”
I don’t know what to say. The tide of horror runs deep here, and I feel I’m being swept away. I finally manage a response. “You said there was a choice.”
“I left you the choice.”
I look around. There’s nothing, other than the speaker. The cord that connects it to the wall. The power outlet.
“You want me to electrocute her? Strangle her?”
He sighs, like I’ve missed the point. “No. That would be cruel.”
I lift a shaking hand to my mouth to stop another scream, or a wild, mad laugh. That would be cruel. He’s insane. He’s utterly, batshit crazy.
“I left you the gun,” he says then. “There’s one bullet. You decide what to do with it.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I gave Sheryl choices,” he says. “She was good at killing people, but you already know that. An old lady here, a husband there. But I needed to know how far she’d really go. Not every killer is worthy of my time. I told her about the lottery win. I told her I’d marry her, no prenup agreements. That I’d fly her to Paris in my private plane. But I wasn’t going to do any of that if she wasn’t free. That’s all I said. I didn’t tell her what to do. I gave her choices.”
I feel the floor falling out from under me, and I have to brace myself against that clean, clean wall. “You . . . you . . .”
“I told her to meet me,” he says. “When I got there, she was standing there, alone. No car. No children. She made her choice, Gina.” He sounds disappointed. “And she kept on making them. I suggested that there might be video of us in the house you visited, and that would be a problem. She took a gun and . . . corrected it. I suggested that Prester might be able to track us down. You know what happened; she was actually disappointed that he had a heart attack before she could kill him. I didn’t tell her to do it; she made her choices. Everybody does. And now it’s your turn.”
“You’re a fucking monster,” I whisper. “No. No.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll let you think about it.”
He stops talking. So do I.
I sit down against the door again, staring dry-mouthed, dry-eyed at Sheryl. At a woman who, if I believe that smooth, calm voice on the speaker, deliberately chose to drown her two little girls so she could run away with someone who could make all her greedy dreams come true.
Some people deserve death. I know that. I believe that. Melvin did.
But not even Melvin deserved this.
I put the gun down. The weight of it doesn’t comfort me anymore. I put my hands over my face like a hiding child.
But there’s no hiding. Not from this.
I have to make a binary choice. Let her die horribly, in agony, screaming, or end her suffering quickly.
I let my hands fall away, limp, to my knees, and raise my face toward the ceiling. I can’t see the sky. I don’t know if God is up there. But I pray.
And then I say, “What happens if I kill her, Jonathan?”
He doesn’t answer. Maybe he doesn’t do anything at all. Maybe he leaves me locked in here with her rotting corpse to make even more horrible choices. Maybe I can hang myself with that electrical cord, at the last. Or maybe he wants me to believe something even worse: that he’ll let me out to live with it.
The speaker finally says, “My dad always used to say that crisis reveals character. You’re Gina Royal. You helped murder defenseless young women.”
“I didn’t,” I whisper. I feel so tired. So very tired. “I didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Crisis reveals character,” he says. “So we’ll see.”
When I call his name, he doesn’t answer anymore. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. Who I am. What he wants.
I just weep and desperately, desperately wish that I’d told Sam I loved him one more time, that I’d kissed my kids and told them that they are my reason for living through the hell of my past. I want to tell Kezia that I’m so, so sorry.
Just do it, I think, but the voice in my head isn’t right. It isn’t mine. And I know that the voice, just a whisper, is Melvin’s. A cool,