Chapter 15
Tobias
The man had been dead for several minutes by then, and his continued existence had already become a matter of disposal rather than consequence.
He had been nobody of importance, only a man with poor instincts, worse timing, and the unfortunate decision to appear at my gate pretending confusion when his eyes had been too observant for someone merely lost.
Killing him had been brief; the part afterward was always what irritated me.
Wet fabric, dead weight, and the unpleasant logistics of extracting a body from a tank without damaging the animals or disrupting the surrounding environment more than necessary.
The cleaning, the cameras, the eventual transport, the careful erasure of every small human inconvenience that turned an impulse into a chore.
Usually, Ben handled the majority of it.
He complained, of course, but was capable of making bodies disappear with fewer questions than most men could manage while ordering dinner.
Tonight should have been no different.
I had wanted the task finished. I had wanted the body removed, the area cleaned, the water tested, and the system restored before the disruption created even more unnecessary stress for the jellies.
But then I heard the sound of something dropping.
Ben’s head whipped toward the source of the sound, his face paling as he whispered, “Oh, fuck.”
A witness, then.
The thought arrived coldly, followed immediately by irritation rather than fear.
Another body would complicate the evening with another disappearance, another route, another set of variables to erase before anyone had cause to wonder why someone who entered my property did not leave it.
I had already been looking forward to washing the evening from my body, and instead, the night had chosen to multiply its inconveniences.
But when I turned to face this new inconvenience, the world stopped.
Cove stood at the entrance to the predator corridor with his bag crumpled at his feet, damp hair falling around his face, and his eyes wide and fixed on me.
His fear struck me with such physical force that I thought I was having a heart attack.
His face had gone stark white beneath his freckles, his mouth parted around a breath he could not seem to take, and he looked smaller than he was, younger than he was, all those long limbs held too still by shock.
He looked at me as if he no longer knew me.
No. Perhaps he finally did, and that was the problem.
All the time I had spent acclimating him, all the painstaking adjustments, the office, the food, the books, the questions asked in measured increments, the distance maintained after my mistake in the guest room, and the trust he had begun extending one delicate, cautious step at a time—it all stood in that corridor with him now, ruined by one disastrous accident of timing.
“Tobias?” he whispered cautiously, my name leaving his mouth like a plea for contradiction, as if he were giving me one last opportunity to remain the version of myself he had almost learned how to trust.
I could have lied.
The impulse presented itself as cleanly as any other option. The man stumbled. The man broke in. The man was already dead. The man threatened the collection. The man threatened me. The man threatened you.
Some of those might even have been useful if delivered correctly.
But Cove was intelligent. Frightened, yes, but not stupid, and he had already seen too much. A lie would not preserve his trust.
It would only insult it.
So I said nothing and watched as it broke him apart.
“What did you do?” he asked.
His voice was quiet, which was worse than screaming. Screaming would have been simpler, because panic had direction and hysteria could be managed, but quiet devastation demanded something I had no talent for giving.
Comfort.
Ben said my name from behind me, low and warning, “Tobias.”
I did not look at him.
Cove was backing away now, one shaky step at a time, as though any sudden movement might trigger a pursuit.
It would.
If he ran, he would try to leave the house. If he left the house, he would call someone—police, a neighbor, his parents, someone from the aquarium. The person did not matter. The result would be the same—exposure, investigation, and the contamination of every controlled aspect of my life.
But even that was not what concerned me most.
If Cove left now, he would not come back.
Not willingly.
Perhaps not ever.
The thought was intolerable.
I released the dead man’s leg and stepped down from the platform as Ben swore at the added weight he was now left supporting.
“Cove,” I called.
“I left my phone,” he whispered devastatingly.
“Cove.”
He looked at me as if he wanted my voice to become a rope and hated himself for wishing to reach for it.
“What did you do?” he repeated, begging me for an answer.
But I couldn’t give him one. I couldn’t lie to him when he was looking at me like that. I couldn’t.
“Tobias,” Ben warned again, his tone becoming increasingly distraught.
I didn’t know what he was trying so hard to say, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered in that moment aside from Cove and the fact that I could not let him leave.
Killing him was not an option. The thought did not even present itself. Cove was not a witness in the ordinary sense, not a loose end, and not an inconvenience to be removed, no matter what simplicity might have demanded from anyone else standing in his place.
He was Cove.
He was the one thing in this house I had not meant to frighten.
The one thing I had wanted to choose me.
And because I had failed to keep this part of myself from him, his choice would now have to be removed.
“I need you to stay calm,” I said, taking another step down.
The moment the words left me, I knew they were wrong.
Cove’s pupils dilated then narrowed, fear surging through his expression so clearly that I felt it like a dull, rusted blade under my sternum.
He tried to step back faster, but the floor was wet from the earlier commotion, and his feet slipped out from under him.
He fell hard, one hand skidding through the water as he tried to catch himself. Then he was dragging himself away from me across the wet floor, terrified, and every bloody fucking millimeter of distance was a stab to my heart.
A wound that only I could be held accountable for.
“Cove,” I said, softer now. “Please.”
He shook his head. “No.”
I stopped halfway down the steps, one gloved hand tightening around the railing as water dripped from my wrist to the metal below. “I won’t hurt you.”
I meant it.
I had never meant anything more.
But his gaze skittered past me to the body, and I understood before he spoke that meaning it would not be enough.
“You killed him.”
There it was.
The simple truth.
The permanent one.
I let the mask of a killer settle into the grooves of my face because if I did not, the despair would show too clearly, and there was no use in showing him more monstrous things tonight.
“Yes,” I answered.
And as his expression collapsed, I knew that whatever trust he had given me had just become something I would have to rebuild from captivity.
He snapped into motion with the wild, graceless urgency of a creature that understood it had been cornered by a predator.
He twisted onto one knee, nearly slipped again, caught himself against the floor with both hands, and shoved himself upright with enough force that he staggered before finding his balance.
“Cove,” I said sharply, pleading with him in my head to just stay still, to just make this easy, to just sit and wait for me to restrain him.
He ran, and the movement tore through me.
Not because I hadn’t expected it, but because some irrational part of me had prayed that my voice might still be enough to stop him.
That after everything, after the body and the truth and the terror breaking open across his face, there might remain some thread between us strong enough for him to at least pause when I said his name.
Evidently, there was not.
Behind me, Ben cursed. “Tobias—”
“Stay with the body,” I ordered, already moving.
“Tobias—please, for the love of god!”
My hands curled into fists, my fingernails biting in sharply to my palms as I made myself stop for just a second.
I stared at the path Cove had fled down while Ben said, “Think before you make a decision you’ll regret.” By the time the last word was coming out of his mouth, I was moving again, leaving him behind.
I sped quickly through the aquarium wing, my wet shoes nearly silent against the floor despite the speed of my stride. Ahead in the distance, Cove’s footsteps were uneven, frantic, and occasionally slipping against the polished surface as he ran past the glowing tanks.
Each sound pained me.
The harsh slap of his palm striking a wall when he took a corner too quickly. The hard, breathless impact of his body catching the edge of a tank stand.
I gritted my teeth.
He was hurting himself.
He was hurting himself because of me.
“Cove,” I shouted, forcing his name into something lower than the desperation trying to break through my voice. “Stop running!”
He did not stop.
Of course, he did not stop.
From his perspective, stopping meant me reaching him, and me reaching him meant whatever terrible conclusion his frightened mind had already decided would follow.
He did not understand. He could not understand, not yet, not with the image of the body still fresh in his mind and my confession still hanging between us.
If he would only let me explain.
If he would only stand still long enough for me to tell him that I had never once considered hurting him, that the man in the tank had meant nothing, that none of this changed what Cove was to me except in the single unbearable way that I could no longer allow him the freedom to leave before he understood.