Page 45 of There Are No Saints

I snort. “It won’t matter either way. No one will believe you.”

Her face blanches, her breath catching in her throat. That touched a nerve. Poor little Mara has been disbelieved before. Probably in relation to the “creative” stepfather.

Stepping close to her once more, I look down into her terrified face and I tell her the brutal, unvarnished truth:

“I own this city. With money, with connections, and with pure fucking talent. You try spouting off about me and see what happens . . . you’ll look unhinged. Unstable.”

“I don’t care,” she whispers.

I let out a low laugh.

“You will,” I say.

* * *

12

Mara

Istumble back to my own studio, closing the door behind me and locking it, leaning back against the cool wood with my heartbeat scattering frantically across my ribs.

I’m breathing hard, clutching the front of my shirt, sweating more than ever.

He’s lying! He’s fucking lying!

He’s not gonna gaslight me. I know what I saw that night. He was standing there, staring down at me. I didn’t make that up—I couldn’t. How could I have imagined his face before I ever saw it?

Maybe you had seen it before. In a photograph. In a magazine.

No, fuck that. I didn’t see his picture and forget about it. That’s not what happened.

What can I do? Who can I tell?

He kidnapped me. Did he? Someone did. And Cole was there.

Bits of memory cut at me from all sides, jagged as a shattered mirror. I see little flickers, fragments. I want to burst into tears but I know he’s still somewhere close by, he could hear me. He owns this building. HE OWNS THE FUCKING BUILDING!

What is happening? The coincidence, the situation, it’s making me feel like my head is splitting apart. I don’t know what to believe.

Maybe I could have imagined it.

But the way he reacted when I confronted him . . . he wasn’t surprised. His eyebrows dropped, his pupils contracted, he didn’t hesitate for a second, he bit right back at me, attacking like a snake. That’s not normal.

He says it wasn’t him.

Is that true? Can it be true?

That would mean there were two soulless psychopaths in the woods that night. That doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes sense.

I’m pacing back and forth, still strangling my shirt, sometimes lifting it up over the bottom half of my face and breathing into it.

What am I supposed to do?

What about the grant? What about the fact that all my stuff is here now?

Does any of that matter? There might be a murderer walking around. There is for sure, I’ve seen it in on the news—girls beaten and hacked to bits by the Beast of the Bay, which is a fucking upsetting nickname by the way – like the media itself wants to give him power over us. Turning him into some supernatural force before which we can only be prey.

Did the same person snatch me off the street? Was it Cole Blackwell?

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