Page 97 of The Player
After the initial shock, I peered up at him and said, “He’s up there. I stabbed him, Will. I stabbed him.”
Will held me closer, burying his face in my hair as he whispered, “It’s okay. We’ll take care of it. We’ll take care of everything.”
I noticed Adam, Devon, Tyler, and Colton farther down the street, about to head into the building, and I wanted to go back too. I needed to see what they’d do to him. I had to know he was gone. Finally.
“Bee, don’t,” Will said, pulling me back as I went to follow them. “Let them sort it.”
But I whipped my head around. “No, Will. I’ve got to go. I need to know it’s over.”
He gritted his teeth, then he nodded. He wasn’t happy about it, but he wouldn’t argue with me.
Holding my hand, he walked with me back into the building and up the stairs, my legs growing heavier with each step I took. My chest grew tight as we came to the floor where Kate’s apartment was, and I saw the door was still open.
One step, two steps, he squeezed my hand as we headed back into the apartment where my nightmare would be waiting for us. When we walked into the living room, I glanced around, but he was nowhere to be seen. Tiny sat staring at us from her dog bed, giving a little yip before she ran over to greet us. I scooped her up in my shaky arms and buried my face into her fur, breathing her in. Thank God he hadn’t hurt her.
The others were stalking around, going from room to room, and when Colton called out, “I think we missed him,” I shook my head.
“He can’t be gone. The knife was still in his chest.” I looked from one angry face to the next, but I couldn’t accept what they were telling me. “He has to still be here,” I shouted, placing Tiny back in her dog bed, and marching over to the bedroom to search for myself.
On the carpet was a small trail of blood, tiny specks that hinted that he’d been in here, and then the curtain at the window billowed out as a gust of wind blew in.
Will ran past me, pushing the curtain to the side and leaning out of the open window. There was a fire escape on the side of the building that led to the street. But he was injured. There’s no way he could’ve climbed out and run away. He had to still be in here or hiding close by.
“I think he got out here.” Will pointed to the windowsill, and I went over to find blood smeared along the sill. I leaned out, noticing the bloody kitchen knife lying discarded on one of the metal steps of the emergency staircase. He had been out here, and he’d pulled that knife out. Surely he‘d be weaker now? The wound would be bleeding faster, internal damage crippling him as he tried to outrun us.
“He can’t have gotten far,” Adam said from behind us. “We’ll head out. Scour the area. And when we find him, we’ll kill him.”
Will didn’t argue. Just nodded and pulled me close to him.
“Do what you’ve gotta do,” he told Adam. “I’ve had enough. I just want it over.”
“It is over,” I replied. “He wouldn’t survive what I did. He won’t get away. He can’t.”
“I know,” Will said. “And I’m just so fucking thankful that you’re okay. That’s all that matters to me.”
I wrapped my arms around him, my eyes closed as I held him tight.
“I love you,” I cried. “And I hate how we got together, but I’ll always love you. Always.”
“I love you too,” he whispered back to me. “And I don’t give a fuck how we started. It’s the end that matters. Our end. Whatever he put us through, what he made us do and what he said to us, it doesn’t matter. None of it means shit. But this?” He held me so tight I could barely breathe. “It means everything. We’re the winners, Bee. We played his fucked-up games and we won.”
“We really did.” I sighed; emotions I’d held in ready to burst free. “We won.”
ChapterForty-One
WILL
We never did find his body after he took the coward’s way out and climbed through the window. We spent hours, days, searching the local area, but came up empty-handed. Nobody had seen anything, no one had heard anything. It was as if he’d just vanished into thin air. CCTV showed him stumbling away from the apartment block, but after that, the trail went cold. It fucking broke my heart that I couldn’t give her the peace of mind she needed, that she fucking deserved.
After everything that’d happened with her father, Kate decided to cut her trip short and came home to be with her family. Bryony’s mum had wanted her to move back in with her. Kate had asked her to stay with her too. But at the end of the day, we didn’t want to be apart, so she moved in with me at The Sanctuary. There she could be close to her sister, Shelley, and it meant I could be with her. It was all I’d ever wanted.
Bryony started attending therapy sessions, and I went with her. In many ways, it helped me too. The games we’d played in that basement and the guilt I’d felt over what’d happened at Clivesdon House was something I needed to work through. Although I didn’t tell the therapist about everything that had happened, talking about loss and grief and how the guilt eats away at you helped me to begin to process some of the feelings from my own childhood that I’d kept locked away in my head. Things I hadn’t faced before, that’d stayed buried, forgotten like a bad dream. But nightmares from our past don’t stay buried forever. I’d learned that the hard way. Some things you have to face to finally defeat them.
We lived in a weird kind of limbo for weeks after he escaped, not knowing when the rug would be pulled from under our feet. That was until we had a visit from Tom, our local policeman, as well as our eyes and ears to what was going on around Brinton Manor. He came to see us on his own one day. It wasn’t an official visit, and he sat with us in our living room, looking like he’d seen a ghost.
“What do you know, Tom?” Adam asked as we all sat waiting in anticipation.
Tom sat forward, his fingers steepled together as he took a moment to compose himself.
