40. Chapter 40
August 5, 2011
11:32 am
The alarm buzzed loudly indicating Lauren could enter the room. She hated the piercing sound that now controlled her. But she hated the blue jumpsuit even more. And the shackles she wore on her wrists and ankles would not be her first choice in accessories.
The corrections officer took her by the upper arm and led her into the room where she sat at the lonely table. It was a cold room, dirty and void of color. The walls that were once white had yellowed from the grime that had accumulated over time.
A spider scurried across the floor, and she clenched her teeth. With the lift of her foot, she stomped on the creature, releasing her rage.
One last kill.
The guard then brought her arms up in front of her and chained her wrist restraints to the table.
Clearly, they weren’t taking any chances with her.
She should feel flattered that they believed her to be cunning enough to harm someone while in chains, but she was merely irritated by the notion. She hated being restricted. She hated being controlled.
The alarm buzzed again, ringing through her ears. She gritted her teeth.
However, her anger subsided, and her heart skipped a beat as David walked in the room. Much like it had when she first saw him.
He had been at a luncheon with the city's representatives and Lauren happened to be dining there too. She hadn’t noticed him until he had nearly collided with her as they both stood to leave. She had dropped her purse and its contents had spilled out. Her cheeks had turned red as he bent down to help her clean it up.
He had apologized profusely, his charm captivating.
She knew a snake when she saw one, she just wasn’t afraid of them. She was drawn to them. And, as fate would have it, he was drawn to monsters.
She had known right then that they were made for each other. Darkness entangling with one another.
They had started talking, her mentioning she was new to town. That’s when he had told her about the job opening at his office. She had interviewed the next day and got the job.
Then she had lied in wake until she was able to become Mrs. David Gallagher.
That had been nearly sixteen years ago.
Now, the bags under his eyes were dark and his hair was unkempt. He was still wearing a button down shirt and tie, always dressed to the nines. He looked as dashing as ever, even if he looked a bit worn out.
“Darling, you look exhausted. Are you getting any sleep?”
He sat down across from her, and the guard left the room. It had been part of her plea deal. She would tell David everything, but only David. They could record their conversation, but he was the only person she wanted to see.
“No, but let’s not waste time talking about me, Sweets. Tell me what they want to know.”
She tilted her head. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m doing? I’m locked up in chains after just having been shot. Look at this place!” She looked around the room, her lips turned down. “It’s disgusting. And you should see the cells.”
Lauren shivered. They were all repugnant lowlifes. She didn’t deserve to be here. She was too good to be in prison.
“How are you?” he asked softly.
“Well, if you must know, I’m doing awful.” She leaned closer to him and whispered, “Get me out of here. Now .”
He shook his head. “You know I can’t do that. I’ve tried. So, tell me what you did so you have a chance at getting out. If you hold up your end of the bargain, the lawyers can work out the rest.”
She huffed and pouted at him. That look had always gotten her what she wanted but she had an inkling that it wouldn’t work here.
She groaned and tossed her head back. “Fine. I’ll tell you.”
“Start from the beginning, before you came to Auburndale.”
Lauren waved him off. She hated talking about her parents; she was glad they were dead. They had been her first kill, at the mere age of sixteen.
“I’ll give you the CliffsNotes version. I was sleeping with a teacher for a better grade. That’s how it started, anyway. But, like all good love stories, it developed into something more and we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.” She sighed. “My parents found out and forbade me from seeing him. They said they were calling the police and having him arrested.”
She conjured up his face. Young and handsome. He had a five o'clock shadow that she loved to stroke. He was a man, and she had been tired of all the little boys who were pining for her. Even at sixteen she had been far too beautiful and sophisticated for the boys her age. None of them were good enough for her. But he was. And she wasn’t going to let anyone keep them apart.
“I walked into the kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife and slaughtered them right in my living room. The mess was far more than I had anticipated.” She giggled. “I put on my cute little pink dish gloves and tried to scrub everything with bleach, but that only made it worse.”
David shifted in his seat. “What happened next?”
“I knew I wasn’t going to get the blood out and I had no idea how to dispose of their bodies, so I called him for help…except he didn’t help me.”
Her eyes glazed over as she allowed herself to get lost in the memory she had pushed out of her mind for so long. The moment that made her into the monster she is, the moment that released The Beast from his slumber.
Her cries for help had alarmed him when she had called. He had rushed over, thinking she was hurt. When he had seen what she’d done, he had been mortified.
She still got enraged every time she remembered his face in that moment.
“Allison, what did you do?!”
“I did this for us! They wouldn’t let us be together and they were going to call the police. I saved you.”
“You’re crazy! We were never going to be together; it was just sex! You’re a damn sixteen-year-old. You’re one of my students.”
He had left then, vomiting outside the house as he did.
She continued, “I knew he was calling the cops to arrest me, so I got all the money out of my parents’ safe and left. I quickly learned how to find people with connections in order to become someone else and disappear. It’s thrilling what a little manipulation and a small favor will get you in the criminal underworld.”
“What happened to the teacher?”
Lauren lifted a brow and smiled. “An anonymous tip came in about his…extracurriculars with his students. Last I heard he survived a prison jump…much to my dismay.”
“Is that when you came to Auburndale?”
Lauren nodded. “It was nearly four years later, but I needed a small town to blend into.”
An alarm screamed and she slammed her fist onto the table, anger burning inside of her.
She hated it here.
David leaned closer to her. “Was I just a pawn to you? Did you use me for some sick game?”
She scrunched her brows together and gasped. “Darling, I’ve loved you from the moment we met. You were never a game to me.”
She wanted to reach out and touch his hand, but her chains restricted her. She wanted to scream with rage at the shackles she wore and the cell she was now confined to. She wanted revenge for Hailey and Sara destroying what she and David had built.
But more than that, she wanted Trinity dead for taking away her freedom. If she hadn’t been shot, she could have gotten away.
She inhaled deeply, calming herself. Everything will be fine.
Nothing could ever come between her and David. Their love was far stronger than any prison cell or the shackles that bound her hands and feet.
“Then why were you with Ryan?” he asked.
“I figured out that he was your son. I thought he may be my best chance at winning you over. Until I realized his paternity was a secret. I thought: if I couldn’t have you, then I could have something that is a part of you. But it was never enough.”
“Is that why you killed Morgan?”
She smiled. “Darling, I killed her to free you. I knew you would never leave her, and you would be miserable unless she was gone. Honestly, I hadn’t planned to kill her that night, but I saw everything through the window. You left the front door unlocked so I let myself in to see if she was really dead.”
She had stood over Morgan for ten minutes before doing anything. She wanted to savor this woman’s death, to have it engrained in her memory. But then Morgan started to make soft noises.
Lauren had felt for a pulse and found that the woman’s heart was still beating. She couldn’t let her live. So, she wrapped her hands around Morgan's throat and squeezed the life from her.
Lauren could still feel Morgan’s body going limp as her life left her.
Lauren shivered, delighting in the memory. Morgan had been so confused to see that she had been the one to take her life from her.
“And everything was fine until Hailey started poking around. But you already know about all that,” she said with a wink.
David didn’t react and that angered her. He always loved when she winked at him; he found it sexy and seducing.
Why was he upset with her? This had all been for him, for them.
She tilted her head. “Darling, I did all of this to protect you. You’re the one who came to me when Hailey started snooping and I was the one who convinced you to get Ryan to do your dirty work, to silence anyone who knew about your secrets. I even gave you an alibi for that night.”
“He was only supposed to scare them,” he growled. “Now you’ve made more of a mess for me to clean up. And having Ryan kill Eli was flat out stupid, Lauren. He was in so deep with me he never would have ratted me out.”
She shook her head and smiled. “I killed them, not Ryan. I knew you’d never agree to it, so I did what was necessary to protect us, to protect what we've built and the secrets that needed to be kept hidden. Ryan merely helped me clean up the mess and I knew he’d make the perfect fall-guy, better than Sara.” She cursed. “I just wasn’t expecting him to go rogue, and by the time he did, I couldn’t get him to stop. His hatred for you was more than I accounted for. And Eli…” She waved her hand. “He was on death's door anyway. He was a liability, whether you want to see that or not.”
“Why didn’t you have Ryan kill them if you wanted him to take the fall?”
“I learned early on that if you want something done right you need to do it yourself. Plus,” she beamed, “I wanted to do it. There’s something so thrilling about taking someone’s life, playing God. Didn't you feel that way when you thought you’d killed Morgan?”
He didn’t answer, but he couldn’t mask the hint of joy that flashed through his eyes.
She giggled. “I knew we were soulmates. Our souls bonded over her death. There’s a darkness in us, David. It’s unique and very few people understand it, but it bonds us together.
He simply nodded and said, “What about Hannah?”
Lauren was getting bored with all these questions. Who cares about Hannah ?
She rolled her eyes. “She was snooping, too. She saw me talking to Nicole a few days before I killed her and started following me. She confronted me when Nicole ‘disappeared,’ so I went to her house, claiming that I would tell her everything. Little did she know she’d turn up dead too.
“Thankfully, I was able to strangle her and didn’t have a mess on my hands. Then, I created that shrine in the back of her closet. It was easy to find photos between our house and Genevieve’s old scrapbooks. I even paid a stranger to take photos of us through the window. Plus, I had my own stash from before I killed Morgan. From there, it was easy to have Ryan hide Nicole’s body at Hannah’s house and pin everything on her and Ryan.”
A vein in his temple throbbed. “Why did you kill Nicole?”
She stiffened at the jezebel’s name. Filth. Whore. Lauren hated Nicole more than anything, even Morgan.
“Don’t you ever say her name to me,” she hissed. “She was coming between us.”
“What are you talking about?”
Lauren tried to go to him, her hands still chained to the table. She screamed and pulled at the restraints, her eyes bulging from her face as she tried to break free so she could go to him.
Realizing she'd lost control, she stopped and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply to steady The Beast that raged inside her.
After a moment, she said, “I never planned for any of this to happen. I only wanted to kill Nicole. She was vile, a seductress. Even Ryan wanted her dead.” She laughed. “Can you believe that? Even her own son wanted her dead. And she would have been the only one, if Hailey hadn’t started snooping around. Then more people had to die.”
David yelled, “Why did you kill her?!”
“Because you were sleeping with her again!” Lauren screamed back. “Even after all I did for you, you still couldn’t break away from her spell and I wasn’t going to become like Morgan.”
David leaned in. “I wasn’t seeing Nicole.”
“Don’t lie to me! You were leaving on trips and working late hours. You were doing the same thing you did with Nicole when Morgan was alive. I was there, remember. I was in charge of your books, so I knew when you were having an affair and when you weren’t.”
He froze and his blue eyes darkened. “You told Morgan on purpose, didn’t you? The night she died, she told me you were the one who mentioned I was seeing Nicole. I thought you had no idea the history we had. But you did, didn't you?”
Lauren smirked. “You were never going to leave her, so I helped speed the process along. I freed you from the marriage you hated, Darling. She was suffocating you and I saved you.”
David shook his head.
“Not like any of it mattered, you still went back to Nicole . But she was never good enough for you. She didn’t love you like I do. I killed for you. Would your whore do that?”
David slammed his hand on the table and Lauren jumped. “Don’t you ever call her that or I’ll kill you with my bare hands. She was everything to me and you took her from me.”
Lauren saw red. Hot rage burned through every inch of her. No one would threaten her.
She narrowed her eyes at him and grinned. “That’s what I did to your precious Nicole. She didn’t even see it coming.”
David started; breath caught in his lungs.
Good, she had his attention.
“She invited me in, you know. She wanted to see what the new Mrs. Gallagher had to say to her. She just didn’t expect me to end her life.”
She inhaled, remembering the smell of iron and the warmth of the blood that soaked her clothes. Lauren traced her hands with her fingers, feeling the blood of her enemy as if it were still on her skin.
David shifted and she continued, “At first, I wanted to strangle her like I strangled Morgan.” She giggled. “A little poetic flair. But she somehow overpowered me. So, I got a knife from her kitchen and stabbed her until my hand cramped.” Lauren lifted a brow. “She called out for you, you know. But it only came out as a gurgling sound as blood filled her lungs. She wept a single tear and then her chest stopped falling as her heart gave out.”
She grinned, proud of her dirty deed.
The Beast had been pleased that day.
Her husband was grasping at control, but he wasn't strong enough. She could see his rage, feel the fire inside of him. He wanted to kill her. Part of her wanted him to try so she could prove who was the superior monster.
He narrowed his eyes and stood up, towering over her. “I wasn't seeing Nicole again. I have cancer. All of those meetings and late nights were because I was at the doctor getting pain therapy and taking care of my estate so that you would inherit it all.”
Lauren stilled; her lungs gasped for air. “Cancer? What do you mean?”
In that moment, nothing else mattered to her. Not his betrayals, not his hurtful words, not his anger toward her. Not even Nicole or Morgan mattered.
He couldn’t be dying. They had a life together. They were supposed to be together forever. Didn’t he know monsters don’t die?
She had beat death, he would too.
David walked to the door and tapped on it. “Goodbye, Lauren. You won’t ever see me again.”
Panic filled her body as she clawed at the chains, “David, no. You have to come back. You can’t leave me here! We’re soulmates, Darling.”
The officer opened the door for David to leave but he turned around and said, “Lauren?”
She stopped. Had he seen her desperation, realized their love was too strong for him to leave, that they were destined to be together?
Lauren said, “Yes, my love?”
“I loved Nicole more than I could ever love you.”
He walked out the door and she tried to follow but her chains kept her in place. She frantically began fighting against them, blood dripping from her wrists, as she screamed, “David, please! You don’t mean that. We can make this work.”
She began to hyperventilate. He couldn't be dying. They had so much to live for. They had hopes and dreams.
“David!” she shrieked one last time before crumbling onto the floor in tears, her wrists still chained to the table.