Voices reach me as if I’m at the bottom of the sea and they’re somewhere at the surface. Distorted, far away, and barely audible.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my dry mouth and it takes me a considerable amount of energy to swallow.
My pupils move behind my eyelids, but I’m not seeing anything… I don’t think. It’s like I’m back in that grave. My side open, blood pours from me and I can’t lift myself to come out.
Tears pool at the corners of my eyes. No. I’m not that sixteen-year-old girl anymore. I said goodbye to my nightmare. I mourned him.
Slowly, too slowly, my eyes open. The walls are turning and I’m about to fall.
Only…I don’t.
I’m bound to a chair by thick ropes around my torso and others strain my arms behind my back.
Blinking twice, I start to register my surroundings. The counter, the clean white flooring, the table in the middle.
The kitchen. I’m in the kitchen at home.
My eyes widen when I make out the man behind a camera that’s sitting on a tripod. The man who has a mask falling around his neck. The scratch marks I left earlier run diagonally across his face.
The man who stabbed me eleven years ago and attacked me a few weeks back.
Tom.
The reason I haven’t picked up on the dragon tattoo is because he has hair now. He was bald back then — eleven years ago, I mean.
Despite the taste of acid and fear at the back of my throat, I hold my ground. I have no doubt that he plans to hurt me, and that camera is probably a way to record it.
Shit.
Fuck.
During my stay here, I thought he was silent because it’s a part of his personality. He’s actually grown on me for his kind nature, but I had no clue he’d been plotting my demise.
But he wasn’t the one who drugged me earlier…right? I scratched him and was running…then I somehow got punctured by a needle and fell back into his arms.
Someone else was there.
“The princess is finally awake.”
I jolt at the voice coming from my right. My eyes nearly bug out of their sockets as she joins Tom.
“M-Margot?”
“Yes, Miss?” Her tone is flat, her green eyes stone cold.
“B-but how? Why?” I stare between her and Tom. “He was the one who attacked me.”
“With my help.” Her Irish accent becomes more prominent. “As for why, maybe you should’ve asked your father during today’s visit.”
“Y-you’re a victim’s family member?” It’s hard to speak, and it’s not because of who’s standing in front of me. My tongue is heavy and so are my limbs — probably due to the drugs.
“The first one,” Margot says. “The forgettable one because she didn’t get suffocated and buried in a grave. My sister, Megan, was the Duct Tape Killer’s first victim, but it happened more than twenty years ago. She was kidnapped, but since she had issues with drugs, the police categorised her as a runaway. Your father made her death seem like an overdose and dumped her under a filthy bridge. He never admitted to that murder, and when Shelby, my sister’s boyfriend at the time, went to prison a few years ago, he asked him if there were any women he’d never mentioned. Maxim said he never talked about the ones who happened before his muse came along. Those were forgettable, mere practice, as he called them. The ones who happened after he met Bridget and Alicia were his real masterpieces. He didn’t even remember her name. My sister and only family was a nobody to him. He called her practice!” Margot’s voice raises at the end before she releases a breath and smooths it.
“So Tom and I decided to make him pay in the best way we knew how. Tom is my nephew and I raised him after Megan died when he was only ten. We’d already tracked down Maxim before you turned him in. We learnt his patterns and his obsession with his pretty little muses. Bridget had already killed herself at the time, so we paid extra attention to you and Alicia. We were going to make him suffer, and killing him wouldn’t have sufficed. He had to lose the two people most precious to him.”
I gasp as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. “Y-you…you’re the one who poisoned Alicia?”
“Her mind was fragile anyway. It was a piece of cake to slip her something here and another thing there. In no time, everyone, Jonathan and Aiden included, believed she was losing it. The bitch even thought Jonathan was poisoning her since she decided to be smart and test the tea he brought her. She never suspected me or how I made her think she was losing track of everything. Her hallucinations were mostly caused by elaborate plots Tom and I concocted over the years. We recorded whispering voices and made her think she was hearing things. A lost book here, a missed item there, and she started talking to herself in order to remain sane. Which, of course, only made her more insane. It was her payment for being Maxim’s willing muse.”
Angry tears fill my eyes at the thought of what Alicia went through. That must be what they did to me, too. Those voices I heard the morning after I thought I was suffering from hallucinations were hers and Tom’s doing. These monsters made my sister believe she was insane. “She did that to protect me.”
“Yawn. And what’s so special about you, Clarissa? Aside from the fact that you’re the final chink to Maxim’s armour? I admit, you’re not as easy to break as Alicia was. Shelby paid your previous building concierge to turn a blind eye on all the packages we sent, but you still wouldn’t give up.”
Fuck. Shelby. I should’ve known there was something off about the standoffish old man who used to live next door to me.
“Why didn’t you kill me eleven years ago?” I glare at Tom. “Does she have to answer that for you, too?”
“You didn’t suffer enough,” he says in a monotone voice. It’s probably the first time I’ve heard him speak, and his tone is as quiet as his silence.
“Besides, no offence, but you’re not important. The role you play in Maxim’s life is.” Margot clicks on the camera. “We’re going to record you being killed by Tom. It’ll be live and an insider will show the footage to Maxim. Once he loses his final muse, it’ll be his downfall and the best revenge Megan could’ve gotten.”
Despite the heaviness of my head and my tongue, I meet both their gazes. “I’m sorry you lost a sister and a mother, but that doesn’t give you the right to blame it on me. I’m a victim, too. I turned him in, even though he was everything I had.”
“Shut up.” Tom reaches me in a few steps and slaps me so hard, I reel in my chair. “She was my world. He took her and I will take you.”
“Use the knife, Tom.” Margot motions at the glinting blade on the counter and he retrieves it.
My chin trembles, and I start seeing the ending, but I don’t lower my gaze.
I did nothing wrong.
But as he brings the knife to my throat, a shudder goes down my spine. Regrets rush to the forefront of my mind. Most of them are about how I haven’t really lived, and now that I’m ready to, it’ll be taken away.
It’s about how I can’t say goodbye to Lay, her family, and my family. Because, in a way, Aiden, Levi, Elsa, and Astrid have warmed their way into my life and become my family.
But most of all, thought, it’s about Jonathan.
I regret not saying the words I’ve felt for so long but have denied or thought I was no longer worthy of feeling.
There’s a need to close my eyes, but I don’t. I’m going to die with my chin held high.
A tear slides down my cheek as I realise it’s over before it even started.
It took eleven years, but it’s finally over.
Just when I’m about to surrender to my fate, the door barges open.
