Chapter 59 #2
‘You’re weak as all hell,’ he continues.
‘Kind of depressed-like. And then I found tampons in your bag and I was like, Riley is just dead wrong, there is no way she is a vampire. I hate to admit it, but I was thinking what everyone else thinks about him, that he was just some crazy Uber driver with too much time on his hands. That he’d made up half the shit he’d said about you.
So yeah, that was the night we broke up. ’
That’s why we broke up. It wasn’t that he thought I was a vampire, it was that he thought I wasn’t.
Now an echo of his voice, as I stood outside his door that night, trickles back in: Fuck, I really thought she was the one. That’s what he meant.
‘I was so disappointed,’ he continues. ‘I thought I’d wasted five weeks of my life on nothing .
. . and we’d already ordered this cage. That shit is bespoke.
’ He pauses. ‘But then,’ his voice gets a little higher, like he’s excited, like this is where the story takes a happy turn, ‘Olivia saw you in her photograph and, sure, that could have been a coincidence or maybe you were a stalker, but then came the video of the break-in. That’s when we knew for sure.
Then we just had to figure out where you were.
’ He’s grinning now, like he’s pleased with himself.
My mind whirs as I piece together everything he’s saying.
Riley worked on the site doing tech. He had access to my IP address. Which was either my 5G when I was out and sometimes when I was home—not so easy to trace—or the pub’s IP address when my 5G wasn’t working.
Now I think of that Uber, driving up to Jonathan’s house in the rain that night I peered in the window. That was Riley. They were probably all meeting to talk about how I’d been a dead end.
But hang on . . . if that’s true about the pub’s IP address, then I’m guessing Jonathan didn’t just happen to be at Bunch of Grapes on the afternoon we met. A flash of me sitting there waiting for Daphne, messaging with Sally on the VHC website.
My breath speeds up and everything crumbles around me.
Jonathan’s eyes lock on to mine and he leans in, holding onto the bars of the cage.
‘I did like fucking you though . . . I might have kept you around just for that if you weren’t so intense, blowing up my phone every three seconds like a psycho.
Then where would I be right now, huh? What would you have done to me? ’
‘Nothing,’ I say.
He gives a dark laugh. ‘Fucking liar.’
As I look at his eyes, so full of hate, all I know for sure is he’ll never love me. It doesn’t matter what I say.
And if this really is the end of the line for me, I need something happy to hold on to, another memory from our past life when he did love me. I reach forward and grab his finger as hard as I can, pulling his hand through the bars and hanging on for dear life.
Then I do what Oscar taught me. I pull in all my energy and focus on that blank screen in my mind . . . a warmth, a spark, starts up in my solar plexus.
I must really, really want it, just like he said I had to, because even here, unfed, beneath grow lights, it works.
My stomach cramps and the images flood in: He’s sitting at his desk, looking down at his phone screen. He looks over at his planner then looks down again, and I watch as he types: Just remember, there are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. Always.
The images cut to black and I’m back here, caged, under grow lights, staring at him, still holding onto his hand as he writhes against my grip, and I don’t know what the hell that was but I don’t want that vision, I want a good one, from his past life, when we were happy.
I clench my eyes shut, squeeze him even harder, using all my body weight to keep him still, then I focus and try again.
He walks into the living room and I can see myself there . . .
This is what I need. This is it. When we were happy. When I was human.
I’m lying reading on the sofa. I see him and I smile, stand up and—wait, why am I frowning like that? I look scared. I lift my arms up to protect myself, but his hand comes down hard on my face. I stare at him, terror in my eyes. The same terror I saw in that child’s eyes.
What is he doing?
He punches me now, and my mouth starts to bleed.
And I’m crying. I run upstairs, grabbing onto the banister to pull myself up, and he follows.
I run into the bedroom and slam the door but he grabs it and wedges it open.
I’m pushing back, trying to stop him, but he’s stronger than me.
He forces the door open and comes inside.
He looks towards the mirror and I see his face, contorted and furious.
Then he throws himself forward and his hands find my throat .
. . He pushes me down on the bed. He’s straddling me, his thumbs pushing into my windpipe.
And I’m trying to breathe, clawing at his hands, but he’s too strong.
My eyes are huge, I’m staring at him, terrified, and struggling to breathe as I try to push him away. But he keeps squeezing.
My eyes roll back in my head, but I’m still fighting.
He grabs the brass vase from the dressing table, pulls his arm back, and hits me over the head.
Hard. Blood starts to seep from my temple.
He stands up, wipes the vase off, puts it back on the dressing table and leaves me there, bleeding, walks back down the stairs and—
His hand slips free, the images disappear and I’m left breathless, shaking. Reaching for my throat and gasping for breath like he’s strangling me right now.
The room spins around me and I clench my eyes shut because this can’t be what I think it is. Jonathan cannot have killed me. Oscar did that . . .
Didn’t he?
But now that kaleidoscope shifts again, the sands reconfigure and a new pattern emerges. A new truth.
Or did Oscar just find me there, at death’s door, and turn me into a vampire . . .
My eyes flick open. I stare at Jonathan; his face is all contorted, just like in the flash. He’s looking down at his hand, his wrist.
‘What the fuck, Aubrey,’ he hisses. And I know if anyone is watching the nanny cam they’ll have seen what I just did. But I don’t care. I’m just empty now. An empty vessel. Nothing left to lose.
Because I’ve been wrong, so wrong . . . about it all.
Jonathan might have been my husband when I was human, but he wasn’t my soulmate.
He killed me. If there is something tying our souls together, an invisible string bringing us together life after life, it’s not love, it’s this.
Trauma. This is our unfinished business.
Because look at me, in this cage, at his mercy. He’s about to do it all again.
A numbness descends on me now. So what, I’m just going to let him do this to me again? Kill me for real this time?
And then I think of that first vision I got.
And even though I think I already know what I will see, I glance over to his desk and zoom in on his black leather planner.
And I’m right. There, on the cover, embossed in small cursive type at the bottom, is a quote: There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. C.S. Lewis.
He was pretending to be Sally. My only true confidante, who I’d message late into the night.
Which explains why she kept asking where I was over Christmas, why she was testing me over Kenny.
They wanted to find me. A flash of all the times I told her how lonely I was, how nobody ever saw beneath my surface, but how I feared that they might not love me if they did.
How I thought Edward from Twilight—protective, charming, polite—was the perfect man.
I wrote to her all about Jonathan and our dates; he was getting a blow by blow account of exactly how well he was manipulating me.
And it was easy—I’d given him the blueprints for how to win me over.
He would have known I’d never be able to resist a love story of my own.
But to deceive me like that, with this as his end goal? That’s just pure evil . . .
And just like that I realise if anyone is the monster here, it’s him.
I was right all along, he was like a fog. A toxic fog. I never had a chance in hell of seeing the truth.
That’s when I feel the first tear fall.