CHAPTER 74
Close enough to smell her perfume when she passed.
Close enough to feel her voice in my chest when she read her statements.
I turned down every new case just to stay in that courtroom.
Weeks went by and the trial ended.
But sentencing was scheduled a month later.
So I came back.
When the bastard heard he’d never be a free man again, he snapped.
Threw his lawyer and came straight for her.
He was big. Angry.
Didn’t fucking matter.
I was over the barrier before the bailiff even moved taking him down with one punch.
She clung to me afterward.
Both hands gripping mine like I was something solid.
Something safe.
But that’s not what sealed it.
It was his wife.
The way she looked at Paty.
Hatred.
TheI’ll-finish-this-myselfkind.
I’ve seen that look before.
I followed her for three days before the woman made her move.
Paty walked into a store, and that bitch followed.
Her hand was buried deep in her purse. Except she paused. Right in the middle of the parking lot, she didn’t follow through.
She turned around and went back to her car.
But it wasn’t hesitation.
It was strategy.
She was still going to do something, she just didn’t want to do it there.
I grabbed a shopping cart and rammed it into her bumper like some clueless idiot.
When she rolled down the window to yell, I knocked her out cold.
And then I checked the purse.
Exactly what I thought. A switchblade, and a sketch of Paty dead, posed like the children her husband killed.
That sealed it.
She wasn’t just grieving.
She was planning a tribute to her husband with the woman that locked him away for ever.
So I made sure it never happened.
Paty never knew.
But I kept watching her.
Telling myself it was just to make sure she was safe.
“What the fuck am I doing?” I whisper, voice raw, shredded at the edges.
“Jesus Christ.”
The man in the mirror stares back—broken, bloodshot, fucking pathetic.
“You’re not real,” I tell him. That other side of me that’s been her shadow for a fucking year.
It sounds pathetic even as I say it.
“You’re a sickness. An excuse.”
Something I’ve worked hard to keep separate from the other part of me. The detective side of me that shows up to work with her everyday on this case.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because she kissed him.
Not me.
Not the man who tries to be better.
She kissed the monster in the dark.
The monster I made.
The one I thought I could control.
The one I don’t know how to fucking stop.
And worse?
It was the best fucking kiss of my life.
I press my fingertips to my mouth like I can still feel her there.
Soft. Trembling. Wanting.
“I wanted her to choose me,” I mutter, staring down the stranger in the glass.
“Me.”
The anger boils over before I can stop it.
I’m tired of looking at myself. Tired of the split in my skin.
I cock my arm back—and this time, there’s no hesitation.
My fist punches through the mirror.
Glass shatters outward, raining onto the counter and the floor. Blood wells instantly from the split across my knuckles. Pain flares—sharp, white-hot—but it’s distant.
Just background noise to the devastation inside me.
I stagger back, chest heaving, and slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold tile, my back scraping the paint-stripped drywall.
The broken reflection stares back at me from the jagged shards.
Fragmented. Twisted. Wrong.
I tip my head back, eyes burning.
“How do I make her choose me,” I whisper to the empty room, “when I’m the one hiding behind the mask?”
There’s no answer.
Only the quiet tick of the clock in the next room.
Only the rush of blood in my ears.
Only the slow, wet drip of blood onto the tile.
Finally, when my breathing evens out?—
When the violence drains from my veins and leaves me hollow?—
I whisper the only truth left.
“I have to end this,” I say, eyes closing, the words cutting deeper than any broken glass ever could, “before she falls in love with a ghost.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned since my case was declared a mistrial, it’s that rock bottom isn’t a floor.
It’s a trapdoor.
And mine swung open sometime after I was kissed by my masked stalker and left sobbing in my driveway like a lovesick idiot.
The raid footage is everywhere.