Page 133 of Unholy Masks

Sofia, Nikki, and Rose had died for crimes they had not committed. Crimes they were never going to commit.

“You know who you should have hurt?” I stared at him. For the first time since we’d walked in, he looked at me. Really looked at me. “You should have killed every man who had hurt you and gotten your revenge.” He shrank back. The response was instinctual. I understood it. I understood the pain. I understood the way his fear suffocated him.

“Instead, you became the men you hated. You became them.”

A violent tremor ran through him. His body jerked. His face collapsed.

His eyes became unfocused, like he was seeing horrors only he could. Horrors he committed, and horrors thrust upon him. He saw it now. He felt it now. The extent of his crimes. The horror of it.

“I-I…” He slapped his forehead. Over and over again. “No. No. No. I—”

This… this boy was long gone.

“I became them,” he said it like a confession. “I became them. My mother was right. I am a foolish bastard.” A dark, broken laugh.

“You don’t deserve to go so peacefully,” I bit out. “After what you had done to Sofia and Nikki and Rose. You ruined them. You… you deserve to die screaming and begging.”

“I didn’t kill my mother,” he said. He smiled. Ugly and twisted. He was no longer the boy. He was the monster that grew up to take the boy’s body. He was Noah Mercer now. “My father did. He killed her, and then he took me home. He… gave me everything I had ever wanted. I lived in peace, and then my father died. He died.” There was agony in his words. “With him gone, my mother came back. Why did she come back? Why didn’t she stay dead? She came back. She fucking came back.”

So, his father's death was what pushed him into this madness!

God, what was it with fathers and mothers and…

“Sofia Martinez wasn’t your mother.”

“Oh, she was. She was. She had the same eyes. The same hair. The same smile. She was mocking me with every smile, every laugh.” He clawed at his throat, nails digging into his flesh. This… the boy. “She should have stayed dead. She should have never… shown her ugly face again.” He gritted his teeth. When he opened his eyes… the anger in them, the cruelty, it froze my blood. This, the killer.

I looked at Ryden before moving toward Noah. He couldn’t move, but he was desperate for it.

“This was already a mercy.”

A mercy he didn’t deserve.

I aimed the gun at his stomach and pulled the trigger. He screamed when I pressed the gun into his wound. His screams slowly became whimpers.

I wanted to empty the bullets, all of them, into him. I wanted to shoot him until only holes remained in his body.

With a shaking hand, I pointed the gun at his cock.

“Red…” Ryden warned. I hated that he was being rational even now. I hated that I couldn’t be.

I slammed the butt of the gun into his cock. Again and again. Until his screams broke into a sob.

Ryden grabbed the gun from my gloved hand. He knew if he didn’t, I would do everything to make him suffer, consequences be damned.

A single bullet to his head. Blood spattered across the soft beige couch, and he slumped. Dead. Gone before he could fully feel the pain. Gone too soon. Ryden wrapped the gun in his hand.

The cops would find him like this. They would find the gardenia, and they would make up their own story.

“He… didn’t deserve to go out like this.”

“At least, he can’t hurt anyone ever again.”

If it wasn’t Noah, it would be a million other men.

The cycle went on and on, and we walked amid the rotten, cruel men—and women like Sophie Ortiz—in circles, sometimes never noticing them for who they were, what they were. Let them touch innocent lives in impossibly brutal ways, changing them beyond recognition.

The world goes on, in its merry, twisted circles.