nineteen
Baron Dolce
“Are you sure you don’t want me out here with you?” I ask.
“He’ll be scared off the second he sees you,” Mabel says. “Besides, I’m not going to fuck him. I just want to talk. I’ll keep him long enough so the killer thinks we did, and then I’ll leave him to his fate.”
It makes sense. The killer probably sees her messages online, although I was watching and couldn’t find even a trace of someone else spying on her connection.
Then they follow her for the meeting, and after that, they have the victim in their sights.
Sometimes they take a while to strike, a week or even a month.
What she’s doing is putting a target on his back.
This time, though, I’ll be watching too, waiting for her stalker to show themself.
If there is a stalker. I’m still not convinced it’s not Mabel herself.
Maybe all those alter-identity games went to her head, and she does it in some kind of fugue state. She might not even be aware of it, so she’s not exactly lying. Mabel Darling may not be the killer. Dahlia Suskind might be.
That explanation might be far-fetched, but it seems likely at this point.
After what we put her through, it isn’t inconceivable that she compartmentalized her trauma by creating a second identity that wasn’t just on paper, but also in her mind.
That explains why the killing stopped when we moved in, why they made an exception for us.
Because try as she might, Mabel can’t deny that she wants to be with us.
She needs us the way we need her, maybe more.
Without us, she doesn’t know who she is.
She has no purpose. We broke her, and we made sure to take some of her pieces with us, so she could never be complete on her own.
She could never fully heal, never put herself back together until we were there to help her.
Now she needs us to survive, to stay sane, to be whole.
“He’s here,” Mabel says. “Go on, get in the bathroom.”
“You sure you don’t want to leave him waiting a few minutes?” I ask, taking her hand and pulling her in. “All this scheming has been an aphrodisiac.”
I circle her slender body with one arm, drawing her against me.
A soft, quick inhale is the only indication that she’s uncomfortable.
After all we’ve done, the thousand times we’ve fucked her, she’s used to being touched, but she still doesn’t like it.
I smile down at her, proud of how far she’s come.
“I don’t want him to have time for second thoughts,” she says. “It was harder than I expected to lure him here. He’s paranoid about losing his job.”
“He’ll be losing a lot more than that soon enough,” I say, giving the tip of her nose a quick kiss before I release her.
“I know,” she says, her blue eyes bright in the dimly lit motel room. A little grin flashes across her face, but she quickly hides it. “Now go.”
Reluctantly, I step into the bathroom and pull the door closed.
She suggested the closet, but I couldn’t bring myself to lurk in there.
She really wanted me to stay outside, but there’s no fucking way I’m leaving my girl with a predator.
He could hurt her before I got inside. This is the compromise.
I lean against the counter and open my phone, pulling up the feed from the camera I placed in the room. Hiding is not in my nature. Dolces like to be known. But when a situation calls for stealth, I can perform it well enough.
I watch Mabel open the door. I can’t have the sound on, in case the man hears the echo and gets suspicious, but the walls are thin, and I can hear them better than I expected.
“Wait,” Mr. Harris says. “You’re not—Hey!”
Mabel has grabbed him and dragged him a few steps into the room so she can slam the door before he backs out. She stands with her back against it and smiles at him. “I’m not what? Seventeen?”
“What is this?” he demands, looking around the room. The bottle of wine he promised hangs forgotten in his hand.
“It’s the place you chose,” Mabel reminds him. “Don’t you like it?”
We offered to meet at the Hockington, but he said it was too conspicuous. When she suggested the seediest motel in town, he was more agreeable, but now he looks with distaste at the thin, polyester cover on the bed, the cheap wall art, the paneled walls, and dim lighting.
“Is this… Some kind of sting operation?” he asks. He pushes up his thick glasses—Duke called them ‘serial killer style’—and licks his lips nervously. “Are you a cop?”
“No,” Mabel says. “I’m a college student.”
“Because you have to tell me if you are,” he says. “You know that, right?”
“Actually, that’s a myth,” Mabel says. “But I’m not a cop, and I’m not working with any cops. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“About what?” he asks.
“About us.”
He doesn’t speak for a long minute. Finally, he smooths his fingers over his short, neatly trimmed beard. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Sure you do,” she says, pushing off the door and moving past him. She snags the wine bottle from his hand as she goes.
He turns to watch her walk to the bed, checking her out behind her back.
My fingers clench around my phone, and I have to resist the urge to throw open the door and show him what happens when he messes with the wrong girl.
Our girl.
“I should leave,” Mr. Harris says. “I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.”
“Right,” she says. “You thought you were meeting an underage girl, but you got a whole adult. Don’t you want to reminisce about the good old days with one of your favorite students, Mr. Harris? Or am I too old for you now?”
“I’m just going to go,” he says, turning to the door.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Mabel calls, all the teasing gone from her voice.
He stops. “I thought you said you hadn’t involved the police.”
“I haven’t,” she says. “Yet.”
He stands there another few seconds before turning back. “Are you going to?”
“That depends,” she says. “Why don’t you come have a drink with me and we’ll talk about it.”
She pats the bed, but he goes to the single chair in the room and pulls it out from the desk affixed to the wall. He sits stiffly facing her. If I hadn’t seen him checking her out, I’d have a hard time picturing this guy as anything but a nerdy science teacher. He hides it well.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“Hmm, what a loaded question,” she muses, twisting the top off the bottle of wine. The bastard didn’t even bother to get one with a cork.
“If you’re in some kind of trouble,” he says. “If you need money—”
Mabel laughs, cutting him off. “You think I want your money? I don’t care about money. I care about the fact that you—you took advantage of me.”
She’s sitting on the edge of the bed with her back toward the camera, and I can’t help but think she must have done that on purpose.
She watched me put it up in a spot where I could see the whole room, small as it is.
But she could have sat in a way so I could read her expression to the best of my ability.
Instead, I can only see her back, her shoulders that sink a little at her words.
I want to know what she’s thinking, want to unlock her skull and swing it open and see everything that’s happening in her beautiful mind.
“That’s not how I remember it,” Mr. Harris says.
“It’s not?” she asks. “You don’t remember that I came to you in desperation, and instead of helping me, you became just another man who took what he wanted because he knew I’d never tell?
What is it with you people? Do you have a sixth sense, or do you spend your days watching your students, sniffing out the vulnerable ones you can exploit? ”
“That’s not what happened,” he says firmly.
She gets up and thrusts one of the hotel’s plastic cups at him so hard he jumps back like he thinks she’s going to dump it on him. When she doesn’t, he takes it carefully and then quickly returns his gaze to her, watching her warily.
“You asked what I want,” she says, turning and sloshing wine into another cup, not seeming to notice it splashing onto the bedside table around it.
“I’ll tell you what I want. I want you to have helped me when I finally, finally, finally worked up the strength to speak after seventeen years of silence.
When I summoned the last of my strength after everything they’d done to me, and I went to someone I thought I could trust, I want that to have not been a mistake.
I want you to have done what you were supposed to do, and called the police, or at least told the headmaster so that he could.
Aren’t you required to do that? You’re a mandatory reporter. You should have reported it.”
She stops and throws down her wine like a shot, then turns back to him and takes a breath. I can see her shaking on my screen, and I move toward the door, but she goes on speaking. I hesitate, not wanting to interrupt. She needs this, needs to say what she came to say.
“So, that’s what I want,” she says, pressing her hands to her thighs.
“I want to never have let you touch me because I didn’t have the strength to fight one more battle that year.
I want to never have gone into your class freshman year, or junior year, or senior year, and thought that because you were nice to me all that time, it meant that I could trust you.
I want to not have to wonder if all that time, every time you called on me in class or told me I did a good job on an assignment, you were watching me, biding your time, and waiting for an opportunity.
And most of all, I want to know that you’ll never use your position of power to gain someone’s trust again.
I want to know that you’ll never do what you did to me to anyone else. ”
She’s crying now. Mabel is not a crier, so I know this man did more to her than she told us, that it hurt her more than she let on.
I grip the doorknob in one hand, my phone in the other, and force myself to stay still and not intervene, not go to her.
She needs me, but she needs this more. This is her moment, and I won’t take it from her.
I watch her shoulders shake as she stands at the nightstand, head bowed, gripping the neck of the wine bottle where it stands in a puddle of bloody red.
“How many more were there?” she asks, so quiet I can hardly hear her through the thin door.
Mr. Harris sets his wine cup aside. “There weren’t any more.”
Mabel is quiet for a moment, motionless. Then she spins around, raises the bottle above her head, and brings it down on his face.
“Liar,” she screams, the sound more animal than human.
I’m out of the bathroom in a second, reaching for her, but she’s already crumpled to the floor on her knees.
I sink down and gather her into my arms. She feels so small, fragile as a bird with two broken wings.
I pull her into my lap, cradling her head to my chest as she shakes with big, loud sobs that wrack her entire body.
I’ve never seen her cry like that, in all the time I’ve known her, after all the ways we tortured her.
I know it’s a privilege and an honor to witness her in this state, so I treat it as such.
I don’t try to fix it, don’t offer words at all. I just let her cry.
When she finishes, she’s limp against me, warm and still, diminished somehow.
Wine is still trickling in a thread from the neck of the bottle, soaking the carpet. Mr. Harris’s broken glasses lay in the burgundy pool. He’s slumped over in his chair, head back, mouth open. He lets out a low moan, and Mabel shivers against me, burrowing closer.
Like I am her protector.
She has chosen me for that role despite our past, and I know the weight of that decision, what it must have cost her. I don’t take that lightly.
I pick her up and lay her on the bed before bending to pick up the wine bottle. I grip it by the neck and smash it on his face—once, twice, three times. It shatters on the third blow, and I sink it into his neck to make sure the job is done. I’ll never make the mistake I made with Jane again.
When I’ve sliced open his throat and the blood stops gushing and slows to a trickle, I wash my hands in the bathroom sink.
I regret that I had to do it while he was barely conscious, that I’ve killed two more men, and each was as unsatisfactory as the last. I still haven’t gotten my perfect kill, to watch the life drain from someone’s eyes, to know that in their last seconds, I am what they see. Their executioner . Their God.
But this was for Mabel, not for me. So I pick her up, cradling her in my arms as I carry her out to the car to take her home. I gently place her in the passenger seat and buckle her in. Then I walk around the car, climb into the driver’s seat, and start the engine.
Before I shift into gear, a voice comes from the back seat. “Did you leave another mess for me to clean up?”