Chapter 4 #2
She feels something rise in her throat. Swallowing a gag, she squeezes her hands tighter together under the table. She reminds herself that this is who he is. She prepared for this kind of behavior, this kind of perverse manipulation.
“Sure. I’ll be your Emily,” she says flatly.
He smiles, a wicked glint in his eyes. “Because, you know—”
“So you want me to lead you on like I did in college?” Wren says. The words are coming out strong and measured now.
He smirks, raising an eyebrow slightly. The question throws him, if only for a split second. “Excuse me?” he asks.
“You want me to lead you on, to pretend to find you interesting and charming like Emily did.” She knows this lie will hit him hard.
His precious ego is built on a foundation of sand, and he loves to wield the past against her like a weapon.
The thought of it being disingenuous will enrage him.
She continues, watching the smile melt off his face.
“You want me to give you the smallest sense of unearned satisfaction that I offered you a chance at a real connection, only to then rip it away and completely derail the trajectory of your entire life? To give you a moment of feeling like something fucked you up so badly that you became singularly focused on snuffing it out?”
Jeremy breathes in and out loudly through his nose, the wicked glint in his eyes becoming dead and angry.
Wren continues.
“You want me to be your obsession. You want me to be the reason you are sitting there chained up, smelling like piss and existing on borrowed time before they snuff your life out like you couldn’t do to me.
The one itch you will never scratch.” Wren leans forward now, grinning as Jeremy’s lip twitches.
“Don’t worry, Jeremy. Your Emily is here.
” She feels powerful, if only for this moment.
His silence and visible frustration are charging her like a battery, but there is no room for a misstep.
His words are a weapon almost equal to his hands.
She can’t let him flip the dynamic for even a second, because that’s when he will suffocate her.
Jeremy doesn’t say anything at first. He just eyes her with a barely restrained rage, trying to maintain the polished and calm outer exterior he has worked so hard to exude. When he finally speaks, his voice is strong, but the power is out of it.
“Only one of us changed their entire identity. You would be wise to remember that fact.” He spits the words out like he can hardly contain the venom flowing through his veins.
He squeezes his hands, making several knuckles crack at once.
The loud pops cut through the room, sounding sharp and unsettling.
“But … wow. You’re really something.” He gives her a look that resembles pity, trying to turn the power dynamic back around.
“Your opinion is irrelevant,” Wren responds.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Emily. My mother never really doled out praise. As a result, I don’t find it easy to hand out to people who crave it with such foul desperation.”
“Rose, you better watch your fucking mouth.” Leroux leans forward, pointing a finger to punctuate his statement.
Jeremy laughs again, shaking his head. “Or what, Detective? I mean, I’m doing my best here. You told me she would be broken, but you didn’t tell me she would act like such a bitch.”
Leroux angrily stands, pushing off the table and sending his chair careening backward, onto its side.
“I didn’t tell you shit, you cockroach!” he yells, breathing heavily.
The two guards rush in to see what the commotion is about.
“What the hell is going on in here?” one guard asks gruffly.
Jeremy holds his hands up in a show of innocence, the chains of his shackles rattling together and a smirk stamped across his face. He barely contains a chuckle, pursing his lips together.
“Everything is fine. Sorry, officers.” Wren stands, squeezing Leroux’s upper arm lightly.
“Yeah,” Leroux concedes, eyeing Jeremy. “Won’t happen again.”
“If I see anything else I don’t like, you two are gone,” the second officer warns.
“Thanks.” Wren nods, sitting down as Leroux rights his chair. She can’t help but note how the guards scolded only Leroux—an interesting choice to assume the detective is the antagonist and not the prolific killer in the room.
When the door closes again, Jeremy looks at them, covering his mouth and stifling a laugh.
“You’re the only thing that will end up broken.
You hear me, asshole?” A bead of sweat trickles down Leroux’s temple as he growls out the words.
Wren can see the doubt in his face, the look of regret.
This entire thing was his idea, and it’s clear he thinks he made the wrong call bringing her in here with this animal.
Wren clears her throat, choosing to take control back and giving a seething Leroux a silent message to stand down. “Look, I’m here for one reason. I don’t want to walk down memory lane or play your stupid mind games. I want to know who killed my husband.”
“I did.” There isn’t a hint of uncertainty in his voice. Not a trace of remorse either.
The room feels like it explodes in slow motion.
In her eyes are mad flashes of anger, grief, and, most importantly, doubt, but she tries to keep her composure.
She begs her insides to cooperate, to stay calm and hide what she’s feeling.
She doesn’t want him to see her pain. So she shakes her head. “I don’t believe you.”
He smiles wide, a wolfish grin that sets her nerves on fire. “Oh no? I don’t remember seeing you there.” He pauses, forcing her further into her uncertainty. “Had you been there, you would’ve known that.”
Her lip trembles, and she chews it, attempting to hide the small tell of vulnerability.
“There was another partial print—” Her voice breaks, and she takes a moment to collect herself.
When she speaks again, the weakness in her voice is gone, replaced by something she hopes resembles stoicism.
“There was another partial print on the syringe. There was someone else’s hair. Who was it? Was it Philip Trudeau?”
“Had you been there, you would have seen Richard slowly suffocate,” he says, ignoring her question and bringing his voice to a measured and calm place.
She swallows again. This time it’s a shaky movement, involuntary and harsh.
Just hearing Richard’s name cross his lips is enough to expel what now churns in her stomach.
Suddenly she can’t stop the barrage of images that floods her mind, imaginary movies of Richard desperately trying to breathe, images of her entire world collapsing under the weight of a fast-acting overdose of succinylcholine.
She wants to squeeze her eyes shut, to force the thoughts to stop, but even that small action would give him the twisted sense of satisfaction he craves.
That would be showing him the power he still holds.
She won’t give him anything else, not a single ounce of what he wants.
Instead, she sucks in a deep breath, and using sheer will, she stops imagining that horrible day.
“Whose prints are those, Jeremy? Whose hair?” Leroux interjects, giving Wren a moment to breathe.
“Do you want to hear Richard’s last words?” Jeremy whispers, dropping the question in front of her like a bombardier. He hits his mark dead-on.
She wants to run, to end this lesson in torture and scream until her lungs burst. “Tell me whose they are. Are they Philip’s?” she asks again, not taking her eyes off his.
He tilts his head, giving her a sinister grin. “His last words were about you.”
“He’s trying to get in your head, Muller. This is a waste of time.” Leroux leans forward, trying to wedge himself between them. He tries to catch Wren’s eyes, but she’s ensnared in a cruel dance.
“You want to know what he said, don’t you?” he hisses, his voice a poisonous whisper.
She knows with unwavering certainty that she does not want to know.
They aren’t Richard’s last words. She silently reminds herself that any words that come out of Jeremy’s mouth are the product of a deranged mind and not a true memory.
This is the lowest form of manipulation, conjured to shatter her like the fragile porcelain doll he always hoped she would be.
Richard’s last words were supposed to have been a lifetime in the making, cloaked in old age and spoken with peace to only her.
His last words would have been a reflection of their life, not something forced out of him like a hastily written draft.
No, these words that Jeremy claims to have heard are words she doesn’t need to hear.
She doesn’t need to visualize Richard’s last moments more than she already does every night in the dark.
She doesn’t need to hear whatever lie Jeremy is poised to spew at her. She knows better than to trust him now.
“You weren’t the only one to hear them,” Wren says flatly, not allowing Jeremy to see her teetering on the knife’s edge.
She squeezes her own hands together, comforting herself like she always does, a ritual she learned years ago.
He may be able to sense her fear, but she won’t let him reach out and touch it.
His grin twitches at the edges, a clear sign of his displeasure. His eyes darken almost instantly with predatory frustration. Jeremy likes a challenge, but he doesn’t like an obstacle.
Leroux leans in, opting for a misdirect to try to defuse the growing tension. “Honestly, the Hannibal Lecter act is pathetic, even for you,” he says, sneering at Jeremy.
For the first time in what feels like an eternity, Jeremy’s eyes move away from Wren’s. He slowly turns his head to Leroux, knotting his brows together. “Hannibal Lecter was helping them, wasn’t he? Does it feel like I’m helping, Detective?”
“It feels like you have an expiration date,” Leroux spits back.
Jeremy grins, toothy and taunting. “We all do, Detective.”
Leroux seems to be as unprepared for him as she was.