Chapter 14 #3
The rage comes up so fast I don't have time to stop it. My fist connects with his jaw and he staggers back, blood blooming at the corner of his mouth. He's still smiling.
"That's it," he says. "Show me who you really are."
Trenton's hand is on my arm now, pulling me back. I let him, stepping back. I breathe.
"This isn't about us," I tell Harris. The taste of his blood is on my knuckles. "This is about justice for the women you killed. This is about Charlie never having to be afraid of you again."
His smile falters. Not because of what I said but because of the name. Charlie. His daughter's name in my mouth. The reality of her existence, separate from him, making choices he can't control.
"She'll come back to me," he says. But there's a change in his voice now, a note that wasn't there before. Doubt. The first seed of doubt. "When she understands—"
"She understands that you hurt her mother," Trenton says. "She understands that you scare her. That's all she needs to know."
Harris shakes his head. The movement is small but violent, like he's trying to dislodge something stuck in his thoughts. "No. No, it's not, she's confused. They've confused her. When I explain—"
"There's nothing to explain." I step forward again.
This time, I keep my fists at my sides and make sure he can see my face.
"Sarah left you because you hurt her. The other women died because you couldn't stand that they had lives outside your control.
Morgan and Charlie are safe now because we won't let you anywhere near them. "
There's a break in the facade. The anger collapses, and for just a moment, I see what's underneath, not the monster, not the hunter, not the man who carved crosses on a map and killed women for the sin of being human. I see a man who is terrified of being alone.
"I loved them," he says. His voice cracks on the word loved. "I loved them all. I just wanted them to be perfect."
"Perfect for you," Trenton says. It's not a question.
Harris doesn't answer. He looks down at his hands, and I realize they're shaking. Not from fear.
"What happens now?" he asks. He's looking at me, but the question isn't for me. It's for the night, for the quarry, for the darkness that's been following him since the first woman.
I look at Trenton. He looks back at me. We don't need to speak.
"The police are on their way," Trenton says. "They'll take you in. They'll process you. They'll make sure you never hurt anyone again."
Harris laughs. The sound is ugly, wet and broken and not really a laugh at all. "That's what you think is going to happen?"
"That's what's going to happen."
He shakes his head again. That same violent motion, like he's fighting with himself. "You don't understand. I can't go to jail. I can't, they wouldn't understand what I was trying to do. They wouldn't see the beauty in it."
"There is no beauty in murder," I tell him.
His eyes find mine. For a second, I think I see recognition there, a flash of understanding that what he's done is monstrous, that the women are gone and they're not coming back, and Charlie will grow up knowing her father is a killer who thought he loved her.
Then it's gone. The mask slides back into place. The smile returns, small and tight and utterly convinced.
"You'll see," he says. "When I show you the others. When I show you what they became."
The sirens start in the distance. Red and blue lights sweep across the ridge above us, catching the quarry walls in flashes of color.
Harris turns toward the sound, and I see his shoulders slump, the first genuine reaction I've seen from him all night.
Not fear. Not anger. Just a kind of exhausted resignation, like a man who's been running for a long time and finally understands he can't run anymore.
"They'll take me," he says. "They'll put me away. But it doesn't matter. I've already won."
Trenton's grip on my arm tightens. "How do you figure that?"
Harris looks back at us. In the flashing light from the ridge, his face is half illuminated, half shadowed; the hunter and the hunted in the same skin.
"Because you'll never forget me," he says. "None of you will. Every time you look at her, every time you put her to bed, every time you think she's safe, I'll be there. In your head. In your dreams. In the dark."
The sirens are closer now. I can hear the crunch of tires on gravel, the slam of doors, the bark of orders as the police establish a perimeter. Flashlight beams sweep across the quarry floor, catching the rusted equipment, the standing water, then the three of us standing in the center of it all.
"It's over," I tell him. "For you, it's over."
He doesn't answer. He just looks at me with those dark eyes, and I know what he's thinking, that it's never really over, that monsters like him don't just go away, that the work of keeping Charlie safe has only just begun.
But he's wrong.
Because we're not going anywhere. We're not running.
We're not hiding. We're going to build a life for that little girl in the cabin, and we're going to make sure she knows she's loved, and we're going to be there for every birthday and every nightmare and every moment when the world feels too big and too scary.
And Harris will be in a cell somewhere, his memory getting smaller and smaller with every day that passes.
Trenton's hand finds mine. Our fingers intertwine, and I feel the strength in his grip, the same strength that's carried us through everything, the same strength that will carry us through this.
The police descend the quarry slope. Flashlights blind us. Hands reach for Harris. Voices shout questions we can't answer yet.
And through it all, I keep my eyes on his face.
He thinks he's won because he'll live in our heads.
He doesn't understand that the only place he'll live is in our past.
And the future belongs to us.