19. Sacrifice

NINETEEN

SACRIFICE

W hen I hear the telltale sounds of heavy footsteps crackling against the dried up leaves in the forest, I glance at my phone.

It takes a good half an hour to reach Halo Lake if you're walking at a quick pace. Cut that in half if you're jogging. Based on how long I've been sitting at the water's edge, watching it shimmer in the moonlight, whoever is out there must've hauled ass the whole way here and only slowed his run to a speed-walk as he approached the lake.

I can't tell from the steps who is out there, though I'm pretty sure it's only one man. Less than a minute later, when Clay pops his head out of the woods before stalking the rest of the way toward me, I give myself an imaginary pat on the back.

If I'd had to bet, I would've put money down that Clay would figure out I was here first.

And maybe that's why I came here to have this confrontation. Tommy said that we needed to take this trip to Halo Island to build new memories, to forget the bad ones that haunted me my entire life. Naively, I thought he was just talking about our weekend getaway. I know better now, that these two men expect my entire life to change after this most recent time on the island. One way or another, they're right.

"Cyn," he says, the relief obvious. "I woke up and you were gone. No, baby. We're gone with that shit. There's no more walking away. You understand me?"

I don't answer him. Instead, I trail my finger through the mud at the edge of the water, wordlessly inviting him closer.

He takes my silence as my agreement. That's fine. By the time morning rolls around in a handful of hours, one thing's for sure: my husband will know exactly what I understand about all of this.

Clay's fully dressed again. From his black hooded sweatshirt to his black jeans, his black boots, and the knife at his waist… the only thing that's missing is the mask from before. I guess, now that the truth is out—and there's no one left on the island who can identify him—he doesn't need it.

My gaze flickers to his knife in its sheath. He shouldn't need that, either, but he brought it.

Interesting. Very, very interesting.

Clay sits down next to me, so close that our hips are touching. "You scared me, Cyn. I get it. I always knew where you were, even when I had to play dead. This was the first time I didn't. You scared me fucking shitless, babe. That's all. Don't do that."

Again, I stay quiet, staring at the water.

He clears his throat. "You told me once that I didn't know what it was like to watch someone die." His gaze slides my way. "To take a life."

I did. It was in a fit of anger when Clay was treating me like I was fragile. I hate that. I like to be pampered, but also respected. If I had to, I'd remind him that I'm not as weak as he thought I was. If anyone knew that, it should've been him, and whenever he forgot, I proved it.

"I know."

He fingers the handle of his knife. "Now I've slaughtered four. Now I do know."

"You say that so easily," I whisper.

"Because it was easy," he admits. "They hurt you."

" You hurt me."

"I did what I had to because I fucking adore you! I would never hurt you!"

He raised his voice as if that'll get me to agree with him. I refuse to react to that at all.

Clay curses under his breath. "Don't you get it? Hurting you… that was the last thing I wanted to do. I knew you loved me, Cyn. If you didn't, I really would've died instead of just pretending. But I always knew you couldn't love me as much as I loved you. It wasn't possible. You could live without me… baby, I could never live without you."

That's what he told me back at the cabin. I want so desperately to believe it while, at the same time, wanting to smack him so hard, his brain rattles around his skull. How could he possibly think I didn't love him as much as I did? Maybe I didn't when we first got together—I had no idea how obsessed he was in the beginning, or how he'd waited years for me to notice him—but once I fell for him, I fell hard .

I don't remind him that he lived without me for five years. I already have, and I'm not in the mood for him to tell me how he stalked me the whole time, making me sure I was fucking crazy.

Instead, I grit my teeth. "Losing you fucking broke me, Clay. Do you understand that? I was shattered . My heart still has cracks in it."

"I know. Don't you get it? That's why I needed this grand fucking gesture. I could say I was sorry with words. I could tell you I love you and pray you believed me. But I showed you my devotion with blood, and my remorse with as many lives as I could sacrifice—and all for you. Now I know what it's like to kill, and if I have to do it again, I'm ready. Nothing will keep us apart anymore, Cyn. Fucking nothing ."

We'll see about that.

I glance over at him. "For me? You sure you didn't just kill them all because they were my friends? Because you're a possessive asshole who acts like he can share, but never learned how?"

It's true. I didn't mind it, but when Clay and I were together, he didn't want me to have any friends. He refused to let me work. He wanted it to just be the two of us, and I was so obsessively in love with him in return, I didn't care. Is taht why I never felt like a part of Tommy's friend group? Because, deep down, I was better with one person… my person?

"I killed them because it was the only one I could think to prove to you my devotion," he says again. "You didn't think I had the balls to do it."

"Clay—"

"No. It's okay. We both know it's true. I'd do anything for you. I know you wondered how far I'd go. Well, damn it, Cyn. I ‘died' for you. I killed for you. And now, when you tell me what kind of nerve it takes to take a life, I can tell you I know all about that." He waits a beat, then says, "How about you, Cyn? Was it easy?"

I go still. "Was what easy?"

"When you killed your mom. I never asked. I figured you had your reason and it worked out for me in the long run so it didn't matter. But was it easy?"

I refuse to answer him, and I'll give Clay a shred of credit: he knows better than to push me on that.

Maybe I shouldn't have lured him to the lake. It's where my life changed forever, but if I want to think about the true beginning of our love story, I have to admit it begins with the night I drowned my mother.

He's right, though. We don't talk about that. After he threatened to out me as a murderer if I didn't do what he wanted, we came to a silent agreement. My mother drowned. It was an accident. It was suicide. It wasn't murder.

Clay and I were fucking? Oh, no. I fell for his charm and his generosity after he invited me—no, not forced, why would you say forced?—to move into his home after my mother died. I wasn't being blackmailed. I was a foolish girl in love who cheated on her loyal boyfriend because she couldn't resist his best friend, the star kicker on the football team.

You mean the boy so obsessed with me, he stalked me on the island, following me while I was completely unaware that he was there? The boy who watched as my mother thrashed and I kept her head under the water, only releasing her when she went still and floated away?

You mean Clay, the man who's own twisted nature was a perfect complement to my own before he disappeared and returned to me a fucking serial killer?

Because he's not done. I can sense the bloodlust emanating off of him as he drops his hand on my thigh possessively. If I try to leave him, he won't kill me. I believe that to the depths of my soul. He won't kill me, but anyone who stands between us is a goner.

Staring at the water, ignoring the way he's boring a hole in my head with his gaze, I smile.

"Look at me, Cyn."

No. I can't always give him what he wants. He doesn't expect me to, either. If I always obeyed him, it wouldn't make it special when I did something like crawling to him because I wanted his dick in my mouth so damn bad?—

"I said fucking look at me ."

My smile widens.

Ah. There's my Clay. I had begun to wonder if the five years messed him up as much as it has me. A killer I can handle. But a man who doesn't lose complete control the first time he thinks he doesn't have my complete attention?

That would never work.

"You're begging." I take my time, turning so that we're staring into each other's eyes. "What happened to the masked killer who held a knife to my throat while I sucked his dick? The one who had to mark me with come, then fucked my ass next to Chase Whitmore because he knew Tommy never has?"

Clay has the decency to look a little ashamed at his actions.

"I was riding high on a cocktail of pent-up sexual aggression, bloodlust, and jealousy, " he admits. "It's a dangerous combination. But you were never in any danger, Cyn. You are my wife ."

I was. Am I still?

I guess we'll see.

With a sigh, I ask, "Clay… why did you come here?"

"Because I knew I'd find you here. You have history." He cradles the back of my head, tugging me close so that our foreheads are touching. " We have history."

"That's not what I meant," I whisper.

"We told you why it had to be on Halo Island."

Because this was the beginning—and the end.

I jerk out of his hold. He lets me, though his stare has turned unblinking.

He still doesn't get it, does he?

"Why did you come back?" I ask, and when his expression hardens, I think he finally does. "Forget your stupid fucking plan. You disappeared, and I was finally —"

"Happy?" he supplies.

I shrug. If that's what he wants to call it.

In the distance, I swear I hear more footsteps. The way Clay's ears cock before he jumps to his feet, holding out his hand to help me up tells me that he heard it, too.

Before we're interrupted, though, he runs his thumb along the height of my cheek. "You weren't happy, Cyn. You were content." His stroke becomes rougher, and I hate how he knows me so well. Content … that's what I thought, too. "You missed me. Pretend if you want to. I know better. You need me."

Maybe. Maybe not.

The footsteps are closer now. We wait. Clay drops his hand, hooking his thumb in his belt loop. My skin burns from where he touched me.

Jesus fucking Christ. What is taking Tommy so damn long?

I thought he'd be right behind Clay. If they're partners like they want me to believe, wouldn't Clay have grabbed Tommy by the shoulder, shaken him awake, then barked at him to get some damn pants on? He should've been seconds behind Clay, but it's been nearly ten minutes that we've been alone.

That tells me that Clay didn't want Tommy to follow.

And I cling to that as I walk toward Tommy. Clay lets me walk past him, then falls into step behind me.

"What are you two doing?" Tommy asks, just winded enough that I know he ran the entire way here once he realized that this was where we'd be. "If you wanted to go for a swim, you should've told me. I would've come."

I get that now. It isn't that one of these men is more dominant than the other, or that one is the mastermind, the other the follower. Both of them want one thing. Both will do whatever they have to to get that one thing. Nothing will stop them.

Except, you know, maybe that one thing has an opinion of her own.

From the moment I let the both of them use me, I realized that—despite their claims to both be obsessively, murderously in love with me—I would always be the goddamn chew toy being tugged between them.

Like Clay, he took the time to get dressed. Like Clay, he knew to find me here.

Of course. Clay let the cat out of the bag on that one. I thought that he was the only one who knew that I drowned my mother in Halo Lake. He was the one who saw me do it, and who used it to get everything he wanted out of me. But somehow Summer knew; how else could she blackmail Tommy into having an affair with her? And Tommy… that meant he knew, too.

He's never said. I guess, following Clay's lead in that, too, he refused to bring it up because I've spent the last years deluding myself into believing that my mother's death was an unfortunate accident, not the result of a narcissitic, impulsive teenage girl feeling the sting of rejection for the first time.

My mother made it very clear that, now that I was almost eighteen, I was no longer the most important person in her life. She was choosing Rick over me. She was rejecting me.

She had to die.

Seventeen-year-old Cyn thought that was a fairly simple assessment. My mom didn't love me. My mom didn't deserve to live.

And I killed her.

It wasn't premeditated. Everything else that led up to her actual death was true. My mom didn't return to the cabin, but that was because she was walking by the lake, trying to find the words to tell me that she was moving Rick into our house after graduation, and that she expected me to move out and start a life of my own.

I wasn't even eighteen and she wanted me gone.

Is it any wonder that I snapped and pushed her into the lake? That when she struggled to get up, yelling at me for getting her wet, I just wanted her fucking mouth to shut up?

She couldn't yell at me under the water. And once she was dead, she couldn't love Rick anymore. She couldn't choose him over me.

What if these two decided to choose each other? They haven't yet. They both want me to choose them… but what if that changes? For seventeen years, my mom chose me until she didn't.

I've already lost five years with one man, then five with the other. I was a widow at twenty-two. I'm twenty-seven now. I don't want to start over again.

"We're not swimming, Tommy," I say needlessly, considering Clay and I have moved away from the lake, joining him near the edge of the trees. "But we're having a long overdue chat."

"Oh. Okay. Well, I don't want to miss that."

No. He really doesn't.

"You both know a lot about me, huh? You'd have to to predict my reactions over the years… to manipulate me into getting what you both want. Well, I think there's something you forgot during all of that. Know what it is?"

Clay's watching Tommy out of the corner of his eye. His hand hasn't left the handle of his knife.

In his hand, Tommy's holding his folded switchblade. Interesting. Maybe they do know everything about me…

Justin case, I give them a little hint. "I'm an only child," I tell them. "You now what that means?" I wait a beat, then shrug. "I don't share."

"Cyn—"

"You love me," I say to Tommy.

"I would've waited forever for you," he swears. "Five years. Ten. However long it took for you to give me a second chance, I would've waited."

I know.

Turning to Clay, I remind him, "You said you can't exist without me."

Clay sets his jaw. His boyish features turn sharp, a deadly edge to the man I mourned for five years. He's older now, but that danger that was always there, even as a teenager… whether it's the memory I have of the blood splattered all over his fa e from earlier tonight or the handle of the knife sticking out of the sheath he pulled back on before he left the cabin, he's absolutely murderous.

His voice drops. "You are my wife. You are my everything."

If I was his everything, he wouldn't have left me. If Tommy cared that much about me, he wouldn't have fucked Summer to earn her silence once we were together. He'd have killed her, made it seem like an accident, made her go away.

One man left me.

One man cheated.

I'm a hypocritical bitch. I cheated first, and even when a part of me inexplicably sensed that Clay couldn't be dead, that he had to be alive, I allowed myself to walk away from my vows, starting up a new life with Tommy.

And it infuriates me that it wasn't my choice. Not really.

They took the choice away from me. If I knew my options, would there ever have been a choice?

I know the answer to that. And now it's time I'm going to make them choose.

One night. I let them have their one night. But if these men loved me as much as they claim, if I'm their obsession—their possession—like they think… they should've known me better.

They should've known that I need to be number one.

Tommy Gillis and Clayton Rivers are best friends. They planned this, plotted it, and executed it. Not only that, but they executed the mean girls, the bullies from my past, the asshole who sexually assaulted me in high school. Anyone who knows what happened to Caroline Preston is worm food now, and I'm facing off against the two men I've ever loved. Two men who were so desperate to have me, they concocted this scheme to manipulate me, to gaslight me, to put me through hell itself just so they could both claim me in the end.

But I don't share—and it's time they understood that.

I smile, tucking a lock of my still-damp hair behind my ear. "Yeah? Then prove it."

Tommy's expression turns puzzled. "Cyn? What are you saying?"

"You love me. But you love each other, too."

That's undeniable. Only a deep bond like the one that Clayton Rivers and Tommy Gillis has would have allowed them to spend ten fucking years on a plan that ended with both of them having the one thing they wanted: me . Screw their plan. Why do they get what they want?

What about me?

"I want that love," I tell them simply. "I deserve it. And the loyalty… you killed for me. Protected my secrets. But that's not enough."

It's never been enough. Not for someone like I am. Broken. Twisted. Selfish.

Demanding.

"One of you has to love me most of all," I purr. "More than yourself. More than your best friend." Now I shrug, dropping my hands to my waist, fisting my hips as I dare them both: "Prove it."

Clay understands what I'm saying first. His cheeks hollow as he sucks in a breath, but he doesn't say a word. Not to Tommy. Not to me. Instead, he twitches his fingers, then unsheathes his knife.

And then it happens, and my girlish heart fucking squeals.

My husband spins on his heel, slashing out with the blade. It drags across his best friend's throat, leaving an open gash in its wake.

"Sorry, Tommy," Clay utters, voice entirely flat as the blood starts to spill. "But I was an only child, too."

It takes Tommy a second to notice what happened. That's how quick Clay struck. No wonder he was able to take down each of the island's guests one by one without any trouble. With reflexes honed from years of athletics, and instincts that belong to a born killer, he not only sliced without hesitation. He did it so effortlessly, Tommy's only reaction is to reach for this throat while stumbling toward me.

"Would've waited…" He gasps, blood bubbling in the corner of his mouth as he drops to his knees, still clutching his throat. " Forever ."

This is because of me. Looking away from the absolute proof of Clayton's jealousy and possessiveness… I won't do that. Just like how I didn't even blink until my mother stopped thrashing under the water, I'll witness Tommy's death, too.

I step toward him at the same time as Clay steps back, allowing me to approach the dying man, and stroke his jaw when I'm near enough to touch him. "I know, Tommy. But you never got it, did you? I made my promise. I made my vow. It's ‘til death do we part for Clay and me, and not even him being dead could make me stop loving him. You would've waited forever?—"

He's gurgling. Choking . Once I take my hand back, he jerks, like he's trying to keep the connection, but I'm already at Clay's side. I lay my hand on his elbow right as Tommy falls forward, then flops onto his back, twitching as he dies.

I tsk , only a tiny bit remorseful.

"—but I already promised it to someone else."