CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

The road unspooled ahead like a black tongue leading straight into the mouth of hell. Cassius maneuvered the car into the night at a steady sixty, all the while Amanda's voice droned beside him. She spoke in scattered fragments – something about Gary and his ceaseless calls peppered with apologies.

He offered a grunt in reply, his eyes never straying from the road. The woman's words meant nothing. They were a pointless soundtrack to his own machinations. Instead, Cassius pondered the strange whims of fate that delivered Amanda to his door. Happenstance had brought them together as little more than strangers until now their paths converged at this pivotal crossroads.

Perhaps, he thought, it was all part of some grand cosmic design. The universe righting its scales as it offered Amanda's desperation as a counterweight to his own desires. Hamlet called it providence in the fall of a sparrow, but Cassius saw it as deliverance in the form of a heartbroken woman stumbling into a killer's web.

He chewed this notion as one would a tough bit of steak, savoring its existential piquancy. The gods, if such beings existed, worked in exquisitely demented ways. Amanda arrived as a sacrifice for the hungry maw of his latest creation. He could hardly conceive a more poetic turn.

As if sensing the morose bent of his thoughts, Amanda's prattle increased in fervor. ‘I mean, can you believe the nerve? Calling non-stop like his sorries mean jack now.'

Cassius barely registered her outrage, offering only a dismissive ‘Don't answer' in reply. Her marital drama was an irritant easily swatted aside. He had weightier concerns.

The car ate up the miles and soon their destination loomed ahead. Greygate Manor stood like a hulking beast crouched among the pines. A place he'd visited many times as a mere punter, but was now visiting under a wholly different status. To Cassius, Greygate Manor appeared almost expectant, as though the house itself awaited his arrival with bated breath.

He guided the car to a stop near the front doors. The place was locked up tight, all lights off, no other vehicles in the lot. Beside him, Amanda's stream of invectives ran dry, and she peered through the window at their new surroundings.

‘I thought we were headed to the police station?'

‘We are. This is where I come to clear my thoughts.'

Amanda turned to him with a weak approximation of a smile stretched across her face. ‘Cassius, you know all the haunts are closed, right?'

‘I'm aware.' He let the moment hang, savoring her confusion. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘That's not my name, by the way. Cassius.'

She blinked, nonplussed, and tried to laugh off his comment. The sound emerged brittle. ‘Oh? Well, color me a dummy then. Guess you never mentioned your real one.'

‘Would it have mattered if I had?' His gaze bored into hers, pinning her like an insect under glass. ‘We both know you sought me out because you needed something. An ear to bend, a shoulder to cry on. The name attached was inconsequential, wasn't it?'

Amanda shifted in her seat. She fumbled for a response and landed on a feeble attempt to redirect his attention. ‘Hey, ah... you never answered my first question. Why are we here exactly? I mean, if all the haunts are shut down...'

Cassius had never done this before. Never got up close with his victims, never conversed with them and put a personality to the face. In his research of the great paranormal figures of history, Cassius had come across details of some of the world's most notorious villains. Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz, Gilles de Rais. The human monsters and these figures always said that personalizing the victim provided a greater thrill. One that stuck longer after the initial ecstasy had worn off.

He felt a razor-sharp smile slice across his face. He subtly reached into his duffel bag beneath his seat and curled his fingers around the handle of his blade.

‘It doesn't matter if they're shut,' he said. Then, in a single blurred motion, he tugged the knife free and plunged it hilt-deep into Amanda's gut.

Her scream came as a choked gurgle; her eyes blew wide with shock and pain as her hands fluttered uselessly to the bloom of red spreading across her abdomen. Cassius held her gaze and drank in every nuance of her dying expression.

This, right here, was the only honesty left in the world. The unvarnished truth of terror and betrayal when the mask was ripped away. He'd seen it in all their faces. That dawning horror as they realized the scares had suddenly turned lethal.

Amanda was no exception. She gaped at him, her mouth working around syllables that wouldn't form.

Poor woman. Heartbroken. Desperate. Looking for sanctuary and finding only demise. It was almost poetic. So poetic that the story practically wrote itself.