12. Deniz
Chapter 12
Deniz
C lara leaves the door open as she backs into the hallway, and as soon as she’s out of sight, I turn toward the screen and quickly navigate the cameras in the house. There’s one in the hallway behind the pantry—the one whose motion sensor notified me someone was sneaking through my walls. The night vision lens tracks Clara as she carefully walks backward, keeping her eyes on the door to my surveillance room the entire time.
Once she returns to the kitchen, I switch to the cameras embedded in the appliances. Her back is to the one in the oven, still as a corpse, staring into the pantry. If she wasn’t standing on two feet, I’d think she wasn’t breathing. Light from the moon spills over her through the skylight, painting her skin in a soft blue. She’s so close to the camera that I can see the raised hairs on her arms.
Maybe this will put us on even footing. Maybe this will drive her to the edge of sanity, like every interaction we’ve had has done to me. I watch her take a deep breath and move away from the door, her steps light and soundless as I track her through the entryway and the living room. I catch the look in her eyes through the camera in the sound system above the sofa, the same as it was when she had her delicate fingers around my throat.
Wild, unmoored, out of control.
Good.
She keeps her head on a swivel as she passes the bathroom and opens the door to her bedroom. There are no cameras there, so the last image I get is a sliver of her face as she shuts the door.
Every plan I’ve made to infiltrate The Syndicate is out the door, and I can’t force myself to care. She doesn’t know why, but at least she now knows how we came to be. The apex predator has realized that her prey has teeth.
I don’t know what I’ll do moving forward, but for tonight, I revel in the knowledge that Clara is on her back foot. That the clear, simple image of me she once held has been shattered into fractured, complicated fragments. It’s only fair, as she ruined me in the same way.
She was a villain. Yet she so easily showed me how one man’s evil can be the unavoidable side effect of another’s altruism, and how easy it is to become the thing you claim to hate.
My emotions can no longer be explained—hate, respect, lust, envy, empathy, wrath. Each one tied with the other to form a terminal growth in my mind, driving me out of my mind with every thought of her.
She may know she is not safe with me. But at least now I am not alone in my delirium. I will drag her into this mania with me, even if it kills us both.