Page 99 of Killing Me Softly

Standing close enough to touch, with a knife pressed into his back just enough to remind him she could end this whenever she pleased, washer.

Aaron’s blood ran cold.

She looked too much like their mother. A nightmare twisted from the same bloodline and shaped into something feral, unpredictable, and wholly unrecognisable. But hereyes.

Jesus, hereyes.

Blue. Striking blue. Like his own. But hollow. Dead behind the surface yet brimming with electricity. Purelychaotic. Like staring into the eye of a hurricane just before it swallowed you whole. Her hair was jet black, obviously dyed, as he knew she was really a blonde. Maybe that was what she’d done to get to Kenny’s mother, pretending to be Kenny’s dark-haired twin sister.

She would pay for that.

“Wow.” Her voice was syrupy, teasing, as if she was speaking to an old friend instead of the brother she was holding at knifepoint. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

With the reservoir of self-preservation not yet run dry, he angled his head to Mel. “Let her go.”

“Does it look like you make the rules in here?” She rested a hand on her hip, the one holding the huge blade. “I do.Me. Mable, by the way. That’s what they call me now. Like they call you Aaron.”

“I did everything you asked. I’m here. Alone. Let her go.”

“Sit down.” Mable pointed the blade at a chair opposite Mel’s. “We need a long overdue conversation at least, no?”

“If you think for one second, I’m going to let you do anything to her, or if you thinkI’mgoing to do anything to her, you’re wrong. Drew already tried that and failed.”

“Pastor Whitmore?” She shuddered. “God, he really was theworst, wasn’t he? Used to do some horrendous things to me. I suppose you were spared that childhood trauma. As all others.”

Aaron’s jaw clenched. The way she spoke, so flippant and blasé, about something that should have been horrifying was chilling. He didn’t know the full extent of her story. Not really. Just fragments he’d pieced together from Kenny’s notes, from his own deductions, from looking at her now. And despite everything she’d done—everything she was about to do—he couldn’t shake the sliver of pity clawing its way up his throat.

Why had their mother treated them so differently? Why had she cherished him—or at least performed the act of cherishing him—while brutalising his sister? Was it as simple as gender? Was that all it took to decide who was worthy of love and who wasn’t? Or was there something more insidious at play? Had their mother seen something in her—some latent, writhingthing—that she wanted to snuff out? Or worse, had she tried tocultivateit?

And if the roles had been reversed… would he have becomeher?

It was like watching his last lecturer’s theory unfold in real time.The intergenerational transmission of psychopathy and trauma, ripped from sterile academic discussions and laid barein the flesh. He could almost hear the lecturer’s voice echoing in his head—Are some people destined to walk the same path as those before them?

That was it, wasn’t it?

This was the game his mother had spoken of. A case study waiting to be written. A profile waiting to be built. The age-old dilemma: nature versus nurture. And the answer? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know

“Sit down,” Mable said. “You’re making the place look untidy.”

Aaron glanced around the warehouse. A rotting relic of their past, a place steeped in so much blood, it should have been burned to the ground long ago. The space was cluttered, damp, reeking of mildew. Coppery. Metallic.Cloying. Their father’s old antiques were still here. The so-called business. The smoke and mirrors. A front for something far more sinister. How many people had walked through these doors and never left? Been dragged beneath the floorboards, chained to the walls, and left to rot in the bowels of a building that should never have existed? How many had suffered slow deaths? Or endured hours, days, weeks of torture before their bodies finally gave up?

Aaron’s breath came shallow, uneven, his feet stumbling back over something soft, limp. A slumped figure in the corner. Curled in on itself.

Dead.

His stomach dropped.

“Oh, don’t worry about him.” Mable waved the knife toward the corpse, as if it was nothing more than an old piece of furniture, a discarded thing she no longer needed. “He was a test subject.”

“Test subject for what?”

“How to kill you slowly.” She sauntered over, nudging the body with her boot, rolling it over.

Mel let out a muffled scream through her gag, and Aaron gulped.

He knew that face.

Wide, lifeless eyes staring at nothing.

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