CHAPTER THREE
Clay
By the time we get to the cornfield, it’s obvious Vero was here. Stalks are cut and thrown everywhere, loose corn is scattered across a new improvised path, and some stalks are bent at weird angles. We follow the trail until we get to the middle where Cave’s post stands, but there is nothing there.
No Cave.
No Vero.
And no sign of where either of them went.
Brawley turns around in a full circle. “Vero was here,” he says, as if I can’t see the mass destruction behind us.
I crouch down and examine the blood in the dirt. I really hope Vero hasn’t done something stupid—like killed Cave.
“Clay, I don’t like this. Cave is never not here.”
“I know, and there is blood in the dirt,” I tell him.
Brawley crouches to look at the blood as I stand and pull out my radio. Khodi responds fast, and I tell him I need all eyes open for Vero and Cave, though I don’t get too specific, just that I need it done.
“On it,” Khodi says. “I will have everyone alert on the island.”
We spend the next two hours covering as much ground as possible, searching every place we think Vero may have gone, yet we come up empty-handed.
We double back in case we missed something, and two hours becomes three—wherever Vero is, he doesn’t want to be found. Brawley hasn’t mentioned the microchip or why it shows he is here when he isn’t.
“We should head back and check on Kayla. See if he showed up there while we were out here,” I suggest.
Brawley nods, looking tired and defeated. I know this must be hard for him; Vero doesn’t normally have episodes this close together. I pull up my radio again and tell Khodi the alert stands until I say otherwise, and ask him to send me all the surveillance footage from the last twenty-four hours.
Brawley stops and looks out at the water once we are near the residential side of the island. “He could have gone in there,” he murmurs.
“He didn’t.”
Brawley sighs. “You can’t know that.”
“He has Cave with him, and drowning is not Vero’s style. Vero is loud and in your face. When he shows up again, he will make a spectacle of the situation. We just have to figure out where he is before Vero kills Cave.”
We walk back to the house in silence, finding the lights off when we get there. I open the front door and Ares is waiting, which means he hasn’t slept. He stares at us, and as Brawley closes the door, I shake my head. Ares runs his hand through his hair.
“I sent out an alert, and everyone is on the lookout for him. Khodi is sending me the surveillance footage.”
“The cameras on the east side were out earlier,” Ares reminds me.
“I’m hoping Vero went to the other side, otherwise he could be anywhere.”
“You didn’t find him?” We all turn and see Kayla coming down the stairs in one of Ares’s shirts. Even amidst this chaos, the possessive side of me wants her in my clothes.
“Not yet.”
She comes the rest of the way down the stairs and sits on the arm of the lounge. She bites her lip as if trying to hold herself together. I want her to break down, knowing that we’re all here for her.
“He must have cut out his microchip,” Brawley admits. “It still says he’s in the cornfield, but we checked there twice.”
My phone buzzes with a message from Khodi. A file link is attached.
Footage from last night. East cameras are dead, but I pulled everything else. Flagged a few things you will want to see.
“Khodi sent the footage.”
I connect my phone to the television and pull up the file. The footage is split into four angles and time-stamped from earlier today. I fast-forward until after we found Kayla, and Vero took off.
The east cameras are blank, but the others cover the west side, the path along the back of the residential area, and the circus tent. We scan through the footage, and most of it is nothing out of the ordinary.
“There,” Ares says, pointing toward the screen.
I stop and go back a little.
The west path, four hours ago.
The footage is grainy, and the lighting is terrible, but the figure is unmistakably Vero. He’s skipping along the path. Brawley leans forward. “Stop it there,” he says.
I pause the footage.
“His back,” Brawley says.
I look at the frozen image, where Vero is turned mostly away from the camera. “That’s blood.”
“And it’s not a small amount,” Ares adds.
It confirms what we know already: Vero cut out his microchip. Noa messaged this afternoon that his machete was missing, which explains the cornfield. With how much blood we are seeing, he must have used it to cut his neck.
I move the footage forward to the second point and see Cave.
I think we all sigh in relief that Vero didn’t kill him.
What is more surprising is that Cave is carrying someone over his shoulder.
This time, both he and Vero are moving toward the maintenance road that runs behind the island’s outer fence.
“Is that—” Brawley starts, but Ares cuts in.
“Luca, I mean Aaron.”
I glance over at Kayla, where she is watching the screen, but I can’t read her expression.
“They have him,” she whispers.
“Looks that way.”
Kayla is sitting with her hands in her lap and staring at the television screen, which is still paused on Cave with Aaron thrown over his shoulder. She has been awfully quiet, focused on holding herself together.
“Can someone turn off the screen?” I say.
“He told me he has been watching me since he got out of prison. I thought I was safe here, but he still found me.”
“You are safe here,” Brawley tells her.
“He got past every system you have. Your background checks, cameras, and all of you. I won’t ever be safe with him out of prison.”
“He had time to plan it,” Ares says. “He knew what he was doing. That isn’t a failure of the systems—”
“Just stop,” she snaps at him. “He buried me alive.”
She looks at us, her eyes red from the tears she’s holding back, not wanting to cry in front of us.
“He did,” I confirm. “And you were all alone down there. You couldn’t move or yell for help. You were helpless and—”
“Clay . . .” Brawley warns.
“She knows what I’m doing,” I tell him and keep my eyes on her. Kayla knows I’m not being cruel; I’m doing this because she needs to hear it out loud. She hates what he did, and she needs to get it out. “You didn’t know if we were coming.”
That’s what does it, what breaks her, and the first tear rolls down her cheek.
She wipes it away with her knuckles as I move and crouch down in front of her, taking her other hand in mine.
She cries quietly while I hold her, rocking her slightly and remaining silent.
Brawley moves to stand behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder, and she turns into him slightly.
Ares doesn’t move, but I can see the minute crack in his exterior at her tears.
After a few minutes, she pulls back and wipes her face, then takes a deep breath.
“Sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” Brawley reassures her.
“Vero is missing and I’m making this about me.”
I squeeze her hand, and she glances down at me. “This is about you. You’re allowed to break down. Vero is alive, and so is Cave. They are both grown-ass men and will be fine.”
Kayla’s tears start again, and she nods. “If Aaron is alive, he won’t leave me alone—that’s what people don’t understand about him. He won’t walk away; he will wait me out. This will just be a hiccup to him, and not finishing what he started will eat at him until he tries again.”
“He won’t get the chance,” Brawley grits through his teeth.
“You don’t know him,” she says between sniffles.
“No, we don’t, but he doesn’t know us either. And he just made it personal.”
She doesn’t take her eyes off Brawley as they talk. “But what if he hurts Vero?”
I chuckle, and she pins me with a glare. “Vero is dangerous—you’ve experienced that firsthand. And now he has Cave with him, which I still can’t wrap my head around.”
“Do you think they will kill him?” she whispers.
“To be honest, when Vero is like this, it’s hard to predict what he’ll do,” I tell her.
“So we just wait for him?”
“We have alerts out so everyone on the island knows to call in a sighting of him or Cave. And now that we know what direction they went in, we will keep looking.”
“I want to help,” she insists.
“No,” I say, and she pins me with a glare.
“It wasn’t a question, Clay. I am helping.”
“I didn’t say it was a question, but you are not going anywhere.”
She glances at Ares and Brawley, but neither helps her. She pulls her hands from mine and stands. “We can start on the maintenance road.”
“Kayla,” I warn, but she ignores me.
“I can cover ground faster than you think. I’m fine, even Banks said I was.”
“You were buried a-fucking-live earlier today,” I snap.
I know I shouldn’t raise my voice, but doesn’t she understand that she could have died?
It would have destroyed us all. She stops and spins around, glaring at me as I continue.
“You have not really slept. You are running on adrenaline that will cut out really soon, and when it does, you will crash hard. I need you on your feet when Vero comes back.”
She opens her mouth to argue, but I cut her off before she gets the chance. “He is going to need you. You will be the first thing he wants when he walks in that door.”
I glance over at Brawley and his jaw is set tight. He has never really had to share Vero after an episode, and the first time he didn’t like it, but he seems okay for now.
“Clay’s right,” Brawley mutters. “Vero’s going to need you to be okay, or everything he thinks he is doing for you right now will have been for nothing.”
She blinks. “You think he is doing this for me?”
“We know he is.” Ares breaks the silence. “Aaron is probably going to be fish food by the time Vero waltzes back through that door.”
“Fine,” she concedes. “But I want to be the first to know when he comes back.”
I cross the room and she doesn’t fight me when I put a hand on her back to steer her toward the stairs. Once we get to the top, she stops at the door to Ares’s room and turns around.
“Promise you will wake me up. That you won’t let me sleep.”
“I promise. Now rest.”
She holds my gaze for a second, then turns and opens the door. I wait until she is in the room before I go back downstairs.
Neither Brawley nor Ares has moved, so I drop into a lounge chair. No one speaks for a second; we just sit in silence.
“He’s going to kill him,” Brawley says, stating the obvious.
“I have no doubt about that,” I reply.
Brawley stares at the floor. “But that isn’t what worries me.”
Both Ares and I look at him.
“Mid-episode Vero does things he has to live with after an episode, you both know that. But it’s not a haze—he remembers a lot of what he does. Aaron hurt Kayla, and if Vero knows that, then whatever he is doing feels like justice to him now, but when he comes down . . .”
“He could think he did it for the wrong reasons,” Ares finishes.
Brawley nods. “He will convince himself he did it because he lost control, not because the asshole deserved it. That will eat at him, and he will think he could hurt Kayla.”
I don’t respond because Brawley knows Vero better than all of us. He is the one who picks up the pieces.
“There is also the possibility that he doesn’t kill him,” Ares adds. “Technically, Cave has Aaron, and whatever he does is controlled. Cave doesn’t act any other way.”
“You think Cave is managing the situation?” I ask.
“I think it’s possible. Cave has seen Vero’s episodes, and we really have no idea how much humanity he has left. But it’s enough that he scares kids but won’t hurt them.”
“If that’s true, then Vero is out there with a machete and the knowledge that the woman he loves was buried alive, but Cave has given him no outlet for that information. That is not better; that could be worse.” Brawley’s brows furrow in concern.
Shit, he’s right. Vero with a target gives him direction—he has a purpose. But with no target and everything building up inside, he could do a lot more damage. This might be the one time I hope he actually kills the guy as a filter for his rage.
A dead body we can deal with, but Vero loose with a big-ass knife and acting the way he does is a very dangerous situation.