CHAPTER 68

Emily Morgan twisted her wrists within the cuffs and tried to find a comfortable position on the floor. The smell of gasoline wafting from down the hall made her feel nauseas. Her head throbbed, and the world still rolled. A moment ago, they had heard a crash. Ackerman hadn’t seemed surprised by the sound. Without a word, he had moved her farther down the hall near the back stairwell of the building.

“I feel sorry for you,” she said.

He chuckled. “Oh you do? Why is that?”

“And I forgive you.”

His expression fell. “I don’t need your forgiveness or your pity. Don’t try to get in my head. You wouldn’t like what you find there.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t. It has to be hard. It’s been difficult for me over the past few days carrying around the pain of one night. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for a little boy living in a constant nightmare.”

He didn’t respond, but his nostrils flared with each deep inhalation.

When she looked at him, she tried to see beyond the man who had stolen her husband to the scared little boy inside. She had to release her hatred and move past it. His unshed tears glistened in the pale luminescence of the flashlight’s beam. “You don’t have to do this. You could—”

“You don’t know anything about me. You’re right. You can’t imagine what it was like to live in my father’s house. But that doesn’t matter. My father’s actions might have been the fuel, but the flame was there from the beginning. I don’t blame him. This is who I am. I’m not human. I’m a monster. I could never be like you. I could never be normal. Have the white picket fence, two-point-five kids, and a mortgage. It doesn’t matter what I want, or if I wish that things were different. You can’t change the past, and when the darkness is in your soul, you can never tear it out. I can’t just be washed clean and rehabilitated. There is no cure for what I have. This is who I’m meant to be. My destiny.”

She was quiet for a moment. “When I was eleven, there was a little boy who used to tease me every day. He’d walk behind me and call me pale-face or slant eye or gook and much worse. One day, he pushed me down, and when I stood back up, I had a rock in my hand. I hit him as hard as I could. He fell, and I thought that I had killed him. It ended up being nothing but a bump on the head, but for a moment, I wasn’t afraid or sorry for what I had done. I was glad. I was exhilarated. For a split second, I hoped that he was dead. It made me feel…powerful. The darkness is in us all. You just never learned how to contain it. Instead, your father forced you to embrace it.”

He was still for a moment. Then, he smiled at her, but the expression seemed different somehow. She wondered if this was the only time in his life that he had ever truly smiled both on the inside and the outside.

“I’m glad that your husband beat me and saved you. It was a good feeling. It got me thinking about things. Got me thinking that maybe things really do happen for a reason. And maybe we all have a part to play. Maybe your purpose hadn’t been fulfilled, so you couldn’t die there that night? Your survival doesn’t prove anything, of course, but it still made me wonder.”

“Maybe God doesn’t want to be proven to exist? Then…we wouldn’t need faith.”

He seemed to consider her words. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For talking to me like I’m a real person. I think you’re the only real person who has ever done that. I didn’t come here to kill you, by the way.”

“Then why did you come?”

“Faith.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

A flower of light bloomed at the opposite end of the hall. Ackerman retrieved a lighter from his pocket and picked up a bottle with a rag poking out of the top. He extinguished the flashlight.

As the darkness returned, the fear filled her, but she willed it away. I won’t die here tonight. She had faith in that. “What are you doing?” she said.

The killer lifted her from the floor. “Fulfilling my purpose.”