“Little early, isn’t it?”
“Nope.” Stephen raised the glass. “Little late, maybe.” He looked into his glass then stared out at the sky and pictured Hannah. She’d been so pale, so clammy when he’d touched her before she threw him off. He’d wanted to stop her pain, comfort her. But his feet hadn’t moved. The right words hadn’t come out.
And he’d wanted to kill someone. Still did. That monster he’d discovered inside himself reared its head.
Stephen spun and heaved the glass across the room. It shattered and the amber liquid dripped down the floor-to-ceiling windows. He was as helpless to stop it as he’d been at stopping Hannah’s tears. Exhausted, he leaned back against his desk, hands on his thighs.
Matt didn’t react other than to stand beside him and clap a hand on the back of his neck. He gave a squeeze of support. “Talk to me, man.”
Stephen’s chest felt too tight. His eyes and nose burned. The memories he wanted to drink away only crystallized. He’d never told anyone about the stupid fight he’d had with his fiancée just before she was murdered. Wasn’t sure why he felt the need to now. Stephen stared at his feet, at Matt’s right next to them, and shook his head as the past invaded the present.
“She didn’t want me to go to Brian’s bachelor party. She didn’t say it right out, that wasn’t her way, but I was already traveling so much, and…I snapped at her. I don’t know why, and we fought. I left without even saying I loved her.”
He’d called her the next day to apologize. And continued calling, thinking maybe she was ignoring him, maybe she was more pissed than he’d thought.
But when his phone finally rang, it was his dad. He needed to come home. Now. Those four hours on a flight from Vegas to Virginia were the longest of his life.
He’d soon found out there would be longer. Much longer.
“I didn’t feel anything. No sense something was wrong. No sense she was gone. Nothing.” He looked up at his brother. “How could I not feel something?”
Matt didn’t answer.
There was no answer. Not then, and not now. The only thing clear to him was that someone was going to die. And he was going to kill them.
He’d snapped in the courtroom, jumped the rail and gotten to one of them. Hands around his neck, squeezing, finally doing what he’d dreamed of. He’d felt the blows from the guards, the baton on his back and head. Heard the shouts, his mother crying. None of it mattered except the bulging eyes of that piece of shit who’d murdered the woman he’d loved. He wanted to see his fear. Wanted to feel the life drain out of him. To hell with the consequences. To hell with God and his laws.
“I wanted to kill him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Only because you stopped me.” Because Matt was the only one in that room who could have stopped him. He’d tackled him, pried him off. And there’d been many hours, sitting in the dark, drink in hand, when he’d hated his brother for that.
“I would have killed him with my bare hands without one ounce of remorse. It’s near enough the same thing.”
“No. It isn’t at all the same thing.” Matt’s eyes met his in a level stare. “I’ve killed.”
“But you didn’t get any joy from it.”
“God bless, Stephen, you haven’t killed anyone!” Matt raised his hands like he wanted to shake him.
“But I want to, and the difference is a very thin line.”
“A line I think many people walk. The woman you loved was hacked to pieces, for God’s sake. Hell, I wanted to kill him.”
“But do you still? Do you dream of it? Spend hours imagining how you would do it? Do you practically get hard fantasizing about torturing someone?” His family probably thought he’d turned to alcohol out of grief, or so he wouldn’t think about the crime-scene photos. They’d be wrong. He drank until he passed out to shut his mind off against his own depraved thoughts, so graphic, so perverted, no Hollywood horror could ever come close. He turned to stare out the glass at nothing. “It almost destroyed me before.”
And what had finally begun to dim had been revived by Hannah. “Fuck, Matt. If you could have seen her face, describing the things he did to her.”
“Who? Hannah?”
Stephen nodded. He’d been flattened. Crushed. Tossed back to his absolute darkest days. But at the same time he was there, in the present with Hannah. “It was bad. So bad I could see it. The blood on her body, the slashes. It was so much like before, only worse, more. She told me and I left.”
He looked down at his hands. Seeing her like that, hearing the words, broke him apart inside just when he was starting to feel not broken. “I don’t know if I can do this again.”
“It’s not again. Hannah is alive. And I have a feeling she needs you as much as you need her.”
He doubted that very much.
Chapter 23