Shadowface

Chapter 40

CHAPTER

FORTY

SUMMER

B lood.

Lots of it drips down my arm as I run as fast as I can out toward the dark night into the thick woods. I’m too full of adrenaline—and freezing—to register any pain. I’m not sure it’s my blood; it must be a mix because I got him. I remember the glass in my hand digging into his chest, using the weapon he gave me against him.

All I know is I finally had the urge to run.

A heavy mist develops over the switchgrass, causing a ghostly light to bounce off the trees. I don’t look back; I push forward, sliding on the wet ground and fall foliage at my feet. I spring into tall grass and don’t dare look back, and eventually, I stagger and fall behind a large tree stump, pull my knees into my chest, and just…hide.

The insidious sickness builds in my stomach, causing me to convulse.

I think back to all the reading I’ve done on this condition, trying to understand Mikael and what happened to him.

This creature that emerges within him must be an emotional fragment in his mind. These fragments can split off and create sentient beings. These splits know no boundaries and have no fear. They have no consciousness, no identity, and only have one memory, one emotion.

A singular purpose.

They can, however, quickly gain substance the longer they are left to grow. In the beginning, this split only had a slight flash of sentience, but the longer it remains untethered, it grows, pulling the entire system into a frenzy. Without Lincoln holding it all together, this split is taking over.

It is the driving force behind why Mikael kills. It must be the opposite of Lincoln in terms of its function. And it’s been here the entire time, hiding in the contours of his mind. Festering, growing, pushing forward.

The night is silent, and I tremble, holding my breath, too afraid to exhale in case he hears me.

I can sense his presence as if it lives inside me.

His footsteps surround me, and a cloud moves across the sky, causing the moon to cast a heavy, ominous glow, as if the night is truly on his side.

A gust of wind rustles the leaves.

He’s toying with me. He could have easily captured me, but he let me escape. A pulsing sensation hits my arm, and I instinctively cover the wound, only to see my palm covered in blood.

A clicking sound, like he’s ticking a clock with his tongue. Counting down…

Click. Click. Click.

“ Summer …” he sings in a haunting voice, and his footsteps crunch in the night. “It’s me, baby. It’s Lincoln. Where are you?”

Lincoln…

But his dark, malicious tone sends shivers down my spine.

His voice sounds so calm, so much like Lincoln—and nothing like the voice I just heard in the warehouse. A sharp pain settles in my chest. I stay still, unable to move because I doubt it’s really him.

Emotionless prick.

There’s a long pause before he says in the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard, “Come on, Summer, I thought this is what you wanted?”

Despite my best efforts to be quiet, I release a deep breath, and it’s all he needs to discover my hiding spot. He steps around the tree and gazes down at me, blood dripping from his arm. A cruel smile forms on his lips through the mask he’s wearing.

I stare up at him, and his eyes, shining through the black slits, no longer hold any semblance of humanity. The evil within him seeps through his skin, as if it lives within the fibers of his mask.

My frightening fragment is gone; he’s back to normal, yet I still don’t recognize him.

“Please,” I whimper, curling into a ball on the ground in front of him.

With his head tilted and eyes flaring, it seems like Mikael is slowly gaining control. “Please, what?” he responds. “What do you want, Summer?” His voice audibly changes again.

I drop my head. “Just let me go.”

I shake as he runs his fingers up my face. “Well, that confuses me, baby, because you came all the way out here to see me, so why would I let you go?”

“I came to get Misty. You have to let her go, Mikael. She has nothing to do with this. I’m not going to kill her.”

He takes a deep breath and licks his lips as if envisioning her dead. It makes my skin crawl thinking of her with him. It makes me utterly sick knowing his hands were on her in any capacity.

“Is that why you came? To save Misty? Are you finally feeling something under that cold heart of yours?”

There he goes again, calling me a liar. What did I ever lie about?

A rush of anger consumes me. “I feel things. Unlike you, I have a conscience.”

He merely snickers. “Summer, Summer, Summer. I feel things, too. I feel everything. Every moment you’ve lived your perfect fucking life, I’ve felt my hatred for you. My anger erupts e very fucking time I look at you.”

My chest shakes as I choke on my words. He crouches so he is eye level with me. “You still don’t understand the whole fundamental part of what makes you so unique, do you?”

He leans in so close, running his hand over my wound, mixing our blood together. Even in a psychotic state, he still smells delicious, heavenly.

How I remember him in my dreams, even with that scent of burlap.

“Your conscience has nothing to do with what you feel. I have a conscience, too, baby. Everyone does. A conscience is simply a reflection of the knowledge that you believe to be right or wrong. It’s an external factor, Summer. Nothing more.”

I swallow hard, hating how what he says makes so much sense. Hating how much he sounds like Lincoln. It’s a corrupted version of Lincoln with elements of Mikael, and that split mixed in.

He continues, “You could have saved poor Cali. You could have saved Grant, and you could have saved Misty. You could have warned her or told someone.”

I flare my eyes up at him. I don’t want to answer… Saying it out loud makes me just as bad as my father.

He drags his knuckles along my cheek. “You’re in love with me, baby. Aren’t you?”

I pause for a moment as those butterflies hit my stomach. “Yes,” I whisper.

“And that’s why you haven’t turned me in, isn’t it?”

“This is all so wrong.”

“You’re rationalizing your love for me, Summer. And in doing so, you’re allowing terrible things to happen to innocent people, just like your daddy did with his science. He studied fear, and what a better way to understand it than to create it in the most heinous way?”

I let out a small sob at the mention of my father.

He shifts beside me, looking down at me. “You cry for him… Even knowing what he did, and what he was, you still love him.” It’s not a question.

“He was my father, Mikael. He was everything to me. He’s all I knew.”

Something about him snaps. My father makes him snap, just like I make him snap. Split reemerges, and his eyes give off that terrifying shimmer.

“And here you are, following in his footsteps.” His voice becomes demonic in a way I don’t think is humanly possible. But he’s here…all three of them combined, facing me down.

He nudges me up. “Get on your knees. We’re done talking.” The sheer amount of anger radiating off him spikes my fear up another ten notches.

The tension in my body grows torturous as I rise to my knees and place my hands on his muscled thighs as if I’m worshiping him.

As my last moments approach, I am as aroused as I had imagined.

He notices, because his eyes draw down to my chest, then to my lips, before making eye contact with me again. This time, he grabs my throat, his lips a soft breeze against my skin.

“Mikael, I love you,” I cry out softly before he has a chance to squeeze my esophagus. His eyes find mine and visibly shift, softening and dilating.

“You’re a fucking liar,” he growls. “You don’t love me. You only want the part of me society can handle. That’s not me.”

“I do love you, Mikael,” I plea, desperate for him to believe me.

He pulls off his mask and shuts his eyes. “You want to know how many people I’ve killed?”

I pause and wait, catching my breath, and he opens his eyes to face me. “Ten. And I can’t promise you there won’t be more. My anger is as much a part of me as my love for you is.”

I hitch a breath. Ten? Ten!

My hands discover his, which are still grasping my throat. He’s not exerting any pressure…not yet at least.

“I’m a serial killer. It’s in my veins; it’s part of my soul.”

“That’s not true,” I whisper as he edges me further onto the ground. “Lincoln told me the only people you killed were the ones Dr. Garcia had left for you. You were a child, Mikael, and she was sick to do that to a child.”

What the fuck is wrong with that woman? Why would a child psychologist do this?

He moves a hand to my cheek, causing me to face what lies beneath. “I killed that fucker who had his grubby paws on you all semester, and I’d do it again. He was going to fuck you tonight, whether you wanted him to or not. I watched him rape a girl in the bathroom on campus two weeks ago—him and two of his teammates. No one forced me to do it, there were no conditions or variables; it was just me.”

I press my lips together. “ Mikael …”

His head quirks, but his body is still. It vibrates, almost as if he is otherworldly. It’s the fusion, I realize. Lincoln, Mikael, and that split of anger are fusing into one whole.

“That is still your name, isn’t it?” I ask softly.

His body vibrates as if the split wants to come out and play.

“Sorry to disappoint you… I’ve always been Mikael.”

My hands wrap around themselves, and I shiver, realizing Mikael is coming down from whatever psychotic trip he was on, and I allow myself to relax, no longer frozen by blind fear. It’s as if all my psychosocial senses for the last five minutes are dulled. I am, after all, lying on the cold ground.

He runs his hand down my arm, then pulls me into his body to warm me, wrapping his hands around me. “You’re freezing, aren’t you, pretty girl?”

After all this, after all we’ve been through…now he cares about my wellbeing. My teeth chatter and my body crumbles into his, and after a few long seconds, I peer up at him. His pale face, his gorgeous eyes. The light shining out of them.

“If I can still love my father despite what he did, why do you think I’m incapable of loving you, too?”

He pauses before he says, “Because I’m not loveable.” He trembles, reminding me he is only human. “She didn’t love me enough to stay.”

I lay my head on the ground, completely immobile at this point. If Mikael doesn’t end my life, maybe this cold, frosty night will. Taking a brief moment, I close my eyes and appreciate his presence. My gaze wanders into the darkness as I rest my head on the crook of his arm, relishing in his comforting heat.

All of a sudden, an image invades my thoughts, causing me to push away slightly. “There was something I saw a long time ago, when I was young,” I confess.

He adjusts himself, patiently waiting, while his heart pounds and the wind whistles above us. Gradually, the memory comes into focus, crystallizing in my mind.

“Go on,” he says.

He keeps his arms around me as I turn to face him, and I slink back into him. “I always knew what my father was. I lied to myself afterward, and to everyone else, but deep down…I knew.”

I keep my eyes focused on him.

“What do you remember, baby? Tell me all the details of what you can see.”

The memory nearly kills me as it sweeps into my mind, the missing piece of it all. I had it blocked out. For years, I couldn’t recall this moment. This dark memory locked inside my head began to poison my mind.

“It’s a woman…” I say quietly. “She’s lying on a couch, and she’s tied up in my basement. My father is hovering over her, speaking sweetly, like I remember him being. He had a notebook in his hand, and he was talking to her. He was explaining everything he was doing, as if he was making sure the circumstances were perfect. He just kept scribbling things down.”

It’s Lincoln holding me now, or at least, his essence is. I can tell. I relax as he runs his thumb over my cheek. “Where were you?”

“I was hiding underneath the stairs.” My tongue turns thick, like I can’t speak properly.

His fingers begin to caress. “Keep going. Get this memory out of your head, baby. It will make you better.”

The poison. The nausea. My darkness.

“I remember very little of her, but I do remember how scared she was—I’ve never seen anyone so scared. She didn’t scream, and I remember thinking, Why isn’t she screaming? But she didn’t make a peep.”

“Your mother…where was she?”

“My mom was upstairs cooking Sunday dinner. We always had Sunday dinner.”

My hand finds his thigh, and I run my fingers up his muscled leg. He wraps his arms around my midsection when I start shaking.

“I didn’t know what I was watching,” I tell him as the tears sting my eyes. I don’t bother wiping them as I will smear blood all over myself.

“My father cut her eyes out, and I watched him do it. Then he positioned her in a pose and took a photo. She was dead, but she kept looking at me. Even when she didn’t have eyes, she kept looking at me. I just sat there and watched her as my father cleaned up the mess—” My voice cracks. “She just kept staring at me, and I thought… I thought…” I tremble. I can’t finish my sentence, and my voice completely chokes up.

His lips graze the back of my head. “What did you think, Summer?”

I take a shaky breath, then another. Finally, I’m calm enough to formulate my words. “I thought she looked pretty.”

I sense a strange electrical buzz beneath my skin. That sickening, churning sensation returning to my stomach. I take a sharp breath, expelling all the air out of my lungs. Almost like I inhaled that noxious death in my basement and now, years later, I am finally expelling it.

“Was that so hard, pretty girl?” Mikael’s presence is back. He’s rubbing my back as I try not to hurl.

Mikael. Lincoln. Lincoln. Mikael . Their unified movements will take some getting used to. Even if the split is inside him, I’ll find a way to love him, too.

I lift my chin to meet his gaze, and even in the dark of the night, his eyes shine. My lips root for his, and he leans down, giving me a soft, comforting kiss.

Despite Mikael’s desire to kill me, he was the one who provided solace when my mind was lost in those dark places. No matter how hard I tried to block it out, the image of her was seared into my soul. Every nightmare, he was with me. Every time I re-lived what my father did to her, Mikael was there, comforting me. Almost as if he was with me every night, helping me through the pain.

I peer up at him, my eyes wide and blurry. “How can someone stare at you when they don’t have eyes? I’ll never forget it.”

Except I did. I blocked it out for years.

“My father opened a bottle of whiskey and stayed downstairs all night. I waited until he was asleep in his chair before I crept upstairs.”

His body shifts underneath me. “Then you went upstairs and lived your life as if it didn’t happen, didn’t you, baby?”

“My mother was sitting at the dinner table by herself. We had a roast. I can still smell how yummy it tasted. And my mom hummed all night—I’ll never forget her humming. She’s never hummed since.”

Guilt consumed me for so long, I ended up blocking out the emotion entirely. Or did I? Or did I just believe I should feel guilty for watching my father murder someone and didn’t. Perhaps I don’t know what that emotion is actually like.

“I found something out recently. Something I will never be able to forgive myself for.”

He draws a circle on my cheek, running his fingers down to my lips. His eyes flicker. “What’s that?”

“My mother helped him clean it up, and they both watched as that judge, Remington Vital, put Dani’s father away for that woman’s murder.”

I will never forgive myself for hurting Dani that way. If she knew this, she would end me. It would destroy her, or they would kill her.

Mikael merely says, “It’s what they do. They make things go away.” His fingers grip and dig into me. “He got sloppy sometimes; I’m actually surprised he never got caught.”

I shiver as a cool breeze hits us, and I realize I’m losing him again. I shift around to face him, pushing him down before he can stop me, and I straddle him, digging my knees into the icy ground.

His eyes. It’s always his eyes. They are cruel and sexy and so fucking dangerous. Poised and taut like a violin, tantalizing me to play with him.

I meet his stare. “Don’t do that, Mikael.”

His head shifts to the side as if my meager attempts at keeping him at bay are amusing. I know the person speaking to me the last few minutes was Lincoln, but now Mikael’s back—and Mikael, I can play with.

He blinks and feigns innocence. “Do what, Summer? I’m just being my dazzling self.”

I press myself on his growing erection. He watches me now psychotically. The sickness is gone now that I’ve admitted I’m not normal.

The guilt was eating away at me, not his mind control. He never had mind control over me; he just knew that my secrets were killing me.

“Don’t leave me. Stay with me. Please. Work through the anger. Don’t let that split take over you again. You are more than an emotion, so don’t let that emotion define you.”

His jaw tenses, but he arches his hips as I grind on top of him. I pull my leggings down and nudge his pants down to his thighs, pulling out his erection. I waste no time getting him inside me, rolling my body over his.

I stare down at him and just breathe.

For the first time in years, my chest isn’t constricted. My stomach doesn’t feel like it has fleas in it.

I ride him for a few minutes, and I know I have him. Now I just need to keep him from losing himself in his madness.

He grips my hips and flips me over, twisting his body over top of mine. His lip curls and his hand finds my breast, and I squeak when he presses something cold into my neck.

I wrap my legs around him and run my fingers through his dark hair. I go limp beneath him, arch my chest out, and twist my neck so he has easy access to it. “If you’re going to do it, do it already,” I taunt. “Fucking kill me.”

He grabs my hair and tilts my head back. His eyes are wild now. His violent explosion is over; he now has slow methodological movements as he seriously contemplates it. I don’t break eye contact. Not once.

“You love me more than you hate me. You won’t kill me.”

His eyes shift, go blank, and then shift again, reflecting the inner turmoil within him, rendering him silent. It’s as if both of them are absent, leaving behind an empty shell.

The moment swiftly dissipates, replaced by a surge of pure, steely rage. The only thing I can do is try to help him pull all the pieces of himself together and, hopefully, it puts the split at bay.

If I can’t pull Mikael out, I am going to die. I knew that was a risk coming here, and I’m willing to accept it.

“Do me a favor,” I say as the wind shifts and I can hear faint music from the warehouse.

“What’s that, baby?” he says, playing with a lock of my hair. I truly don’t know who’s behind those eyes.

“I want you to fuck me while you kill me so I can at least get off while you do it.” Everything after that is a blur. But one thing I’m certain of: he definitely feels something.

I arch my back and moan when he hits me hard right in my g-spot, then he pounds me again and again, grabbing my throat and squeezing.

My world goes hazy, and I realize ever so slowly that he is killing me. One twitch of his thumb and I’m gone. A deeper squeeze, and he will cut my throat open.

I get lost in it, in the pleasure of dying. The intoxication of love and death at once. It flows through me like a snake slithering through a garden, toward a piece of forbidden fruit. It tastes sour, then it turns sweet. It’s fire and ice, and calm peaceful waters.

He keeps squeezing and fucking until the moment where my stomach heats and my orgasm builds, and I finally find my true release.

It’s my true rebirth.

A deep overwhelm hits me as I begin to pass out. I didn’t ask for this; I didn’t ask for him. And for the first time, I think I’ve fucked the shadow inside him—and more importantly, I think he liked it.