Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Zayne
It takes us two hours to reach the property where Rourke lived. The road cuts through the far side of the Ozark woods, swallowing signal and sound from the streets nearby.
His house stands alone at the base of a hill, wrapped in trees and an empty stretch of yard that looks like no one has touched it in years. No neighboring houses, no one around. His place is the first one you reach if you drive ten minutes back toward town.
The car stops in front of the house.
Detective Mara exhales slowly, her hands tight on the steering wheel.
“What if you’re wrong?” she says. “What if he didn’t take Emily, and she escaped?”
I lift the gun, resting it against her ribs. “She’s too curious about me to run,” I say. “And Zeke is too curious about her to let her go.”
I nod toward the door. “Go.”
She opens the car and steps out. Gravel crunches under her shoes. I follow immediately, shutting my door at the same time she shuts hers. We move together toward the house, the silence pressing in from all sides.
The closer we get, the clearer it becomes. The lights are off, and the front door hangs open.
I shift the gun from Mara to the space ahead, leaning it against my arm, aiming into the dark. She falls in behind me, matching my pace, her boots careful on the floorboards as we step inside.
Nothing moves.
Papers cover the floor, scattered, and the windows are open. The wind pushes through the house, carrying dust and the faint smell of rotting trash.
I tilt my head to the left, signaling her to follow. Mara heads that way, but when I tilt my head, I turn right instead.
Two bedrooms line the hall. Both doors are open. The beds are neatly made. No one has been here in a while. The air feels stale, and beds are untouched.
I step inside the first room. Framed photographs stare back at me. Rourke and his wife, smiling at me, their arms wrapped around each other. A life that looks ordinary. Too normal for someone like me.
“Mercer,” Mara calls out.
Her voice cuts through the house.
I leave the bedrooms and move fast toward the left side. Mara stands frozen before a white wall. It is covered, edge to edge with Polaroids, newspaper clippings, case files, and handwritten notes. Red string weaves between them, pulling everything inward.
And at the center is an old photograph of Ezra Zane.
Below it, faces stretch across decades. Victims from 1976. Others are listed as missing, some are still missing, and some were pronounced dead long ago.
The strings tighten around the center, all pointing back to the same place.
The same name.
The room feels smaller now. The walls are closing. Like we have stepped directly into his mind.
And he knows we are here.
Mara drags her fingers along the timeline, stopping at 1980. She follows the red string to 1981 and pauses.
A birth certificate is pinned there.
One boy was listed as stillborn, and the second was marked healthy.
And only one name appears on the paper, Zeke Cermer Morrell.
“Did you know about this?” she asks, turning toward me.
I nod.
She moves farther down the wall, stopping at 1987. Another birth certificate. This time of Emily Beckett.
She looks back at me, her face tightening.
“What the fuck?” The words leave me before I realize I’ve spoken. I step closer to the wall.
Next to Emily’s certificate is a photograph. A woman I recognize instantly. The woman who dragged me from the fire.
“Maria Blake,” I say.
“How is that possible?” Mara asks. Her eyes flick to me, then she steps back and crouches, following the Polaroids with her fingers. Faces blur together until she stops.
The woman in the photo looks like Emily.
“She was reported missing in 1978,” Mara says. “They never found her body. She was presumed dead in 1980, when the Ozark Butcher was arrested.”
“She was one of the nurses who raised me in the lab,” I say. “The one who pulled me out of the fire.”
Mara taps a sheet of paper beneath the photograph, then tears it free from the wall.
She lifts it, scanning fast. “I guess Rourke solved that one for us, too,” she says. “She’s Emily’s grandmother.”
She laughs softly and grabs another photograph. “Also, Ezra’s wife.”
She steps closer and stands beside me now. “Rourke connected everything,” she says. “He actually did it.” She lets out a quiet chuckle.
“Yes,” I say. “He did.”
She sees it now—all of it.
I raise the gun, centering it between her brows.
Before she can speak, I pull the trigger.
And just like that... bang.
The bullet tears through her skull. Blood bursts across my face and splashes the wall behind her, soaking into photographs and case files. She drops to the floor, her body hitting hard. The sound of her fall began echoing in my ears after the shot.
I stare at the wall of missing women.
I will add one more.
Mara Collins.
I close my eyes. Rourke’s words blinking behind my eyelids, turning into numbers, into patterns, into code that gave me answers.
Mara is the last person who knew about Zeke and me—the last person who knew about Project Gemini.
Maria Blake died long ago. Before she did, she told me how my father tried again in 1987. This time, he took cells from another patient in the program. The same patient carried the pregnancy herself, and the same patient killed herself the moment she gave birth.
It was Maria’s daughter.
Ezra Zane was never the father. Alistair was.
Maria took the child and handed her to a cop she trusted. He helped her erase the paper trail and fake her death. Emily was never the daughter of the man who hurt her. That lie died with him.
Maria told me the experiment worked that time.
She said if you clone a monster, the monster survives only long enough to destroy itself. And if you clone an angel, there is a chance that something good might still exist. The monster always dies. The good always lives.
Her daughter lives through Emily.
And I never thought that would matter to me, but it does.
Watching the world through her eyes gave me something I never had. Hope. A reason to live.
And when I say I would kill every person who stood in my way, I mean it, even if that path leads to killing Detective Mara all over again, even if it was meant to happen from the beginning.
I move through Rourke’s house, room by room.
A home I will never have.
Dirty dishes sit in the sink, crusted and unwashed. Trash rots in a bin, the lid closed as if it could hide the smell. But it can’t hide what matters. The man who lived here never lived at all. He buried himself inside the lives of the dead, chasing one question until it consumed him.
Why?
If you ask why people kill, you will always get the wrong answer.
The real question is how. That is where the truth lives. Endless methods. Endless control.
If you ask how Ezra Zane killed them, you find something simple beneath the murders.
You see a broken bond of a ruined mother figure.
He hunted women who resembled her. He forced them to love him.
If they complied, he would take his time.
If they refused, he would take control back with his hands around their throats.
When my father copied his mind, he unlocked something Ezra never had.
Control.
I controlled my target. I choose how it happens. I decide who around them lives and who does not.
My father was wrong. He believed that love and comfort can erase the urge to kill. He thought that a happy childhood would cure the sickness.
Instead, it created something worse—a monster without restraint.
And he turned Zeke into that.
Not me.
I was raised in a cage from the moment I existed. I learned control before I learned mercy. I didn’t kill because I had to. I killed because I could.
I kill to make sure I never lose myself.
Finding Emily sharpens that control even further.
Whenever the thought comes to me, or I imagine my hands around her neck, I step outside, and I twist someone else’s.
I got rid of abusers, molesters, spoiled brats who break their friends and bleed their families dry.
Not because I had to.
Because I could.
How did I do it, you ask?
I watch.
I watch every one of them carefully. While they plan ways to hurt others, I plan ways to hurt them. I let them expose themselves. I let them believe they are safe.
Does that justify murder?
Fuck no.
But it makes me a much more likable character.
You like me, don’t you?
I am manipulating you right now.
Am I telling the truth?
Maybe.
Would you ever know?
Probably not.
I chuckle and step toward the oven. I twist the knob and let the gas run. Then I turn and head outside, moving toward the barn we passed on the way in.
The closer I get, the heavier the air becomes.
I pull the door open.
The smell slams into me. I step back, my eyes squeezing shut as my hand covers my nose, and when I open them again, he is there.
Rourke.
He sits slumped in a chair. His wrists are chained behind him. His head rests on his thighs, severed clean. His mouth hangs open, and on his tongue sits a single puzzle piece.
The number 26. The last letter of the alphabet.
Z.
As my eyes looked closer, coordinates were carved on his forehead.
“Z,” I say.
I close the barn and walk back toward the house.
I know precisely where Zeke is.
Inside, I grab the matches from the kitchen and step back out. I strike one and toss it through the doorway.
The house turns into flames behind me, heat chasing my heels as I sprint for the car.
I slide into the driver’s seat, turn the key, and pull away as the flames climb into the night.
Zeke is hiding at an abandoned construction site he bought years ago. He wanted to build his own institute there. I have never been there.
I didn’t need to. The coordinates burned themselves into my memory long ago.
“I’m coming for you, Zeke,” I murmured to my chin. “God help you when I do.”
After an hour-long drive from Rourke’s place, I reached the abandoned construction site. I leave the car outside, tucked behind piles of dirt, then slip inside.
From what I remember, he planned to build the lab in the basement, just like Alistair did. The upper level is meant to become either a house or another institute he wanted to run.
The irony presses in. For someone who grew up in one, I will never escape it. I keep coming back. Again and again.
As soon as I step inside, it’s clear that work on the site has already begun. When I reach the staircase leading down, the stench of bleach floods my nostrils.
I move further down. The dirt and debris from the floor above are swept away, revealing a sterile hallway. White walls and harsh lighting burn my eyes, and as I blink, I notice that at the end, there is a single metal door.
I open it slowly with a gun raised in my hand, inching forward. As I closed the door behind me, I heard a soft lullaby.
On either side, empty cells stretched into the hallway, their chains rattling faintly. A scream tore through the air from one of the rooms ahead, but when I stepped inside, there was no one there.
Only two tables seemed too sterile, with two black trash bags beside them. As I entered further inside, my stomach clenched, remembering the cottage I discovered in 1998.
Shelves lined the area, filled with jars. He was turning into him.
And he is no longer just a clone but a complete replica of the Ozark butcher.