His captor returns, but this time: he has a knife with him.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I cry out, lunging to my feet, as if I can somehow leap through the screen and save the prince of sloths, like a princess on a white steed, brandishing her sword. “Please don’t hurt him. I’ll do it; I’ll play. I love games.”
He ignores me, cutting Parrish’s t-shirt with the knife and dropping the bloodied fabric to the floor. When he moves aside, I can see it, a long slice along the right side of Parrish’s chest. It doesn’t escape my notice that just a few days ago, my mouth was in that spot, kissing and tasting his sweet skin.
“For every day that you take, I make a mark. Just one mark. But eventually, it’ll be too much for him. Your time limit is entirely dependent on this boy’s strength.” As I watch in wide-eyed horror, he puts the blade of the knife to Parrish’s chest and presses down, drawing blood.
Parrish barely acknowledges it, his eyes on mine, his face stoic even as he sweats, even as he bleeds.
“You don’t have to do this, Dakota,” Parrish finally says, and I can hear in his voice just how much pain he’s in—even if he doesn’t show it. “Just … forget about me. Go tell Tess. Tell the cops. I don’t want you involved in this shit.”
The man—my father? the Seattle Slayer? one in the same?—just stands there, tapping the bloodied knife against his gloved palm.
“Your decisions are yours to make, Mia. But there are repercussions. Every choice you make has a ripple effect on the world around you. This is an important lesson for you to learn at your age, one that I wish I’d been able to instill in you sooner.”
I stand there for a moment, trying to process all of this.
I’m a gamer, right? I love puzzles. I like to figure out how to beat each level, how to take the top score. Analyzing tricky situations is a specialty of mine. When Danyella joked that I could be a detective, she wasn’t wrong. It’s sort of my thing. The pieces click into place.
Teenagers in the Seattle metro area are going missing. Teenagers in Seattle started going missing after my story went viral. Parrish is a teenager. Parrish is missing. His kidnapper is the Seattle Slayer. His kidnapper is my father.
“My father is the Seattle Slayer.”
The words almost hurt when they come out, like my tongue is being scraped by a serrated blade. I taste blood. That’s when it occurs to me that I’m biting my tongue so hard that it really has started bleeding. I force myself to stop, still sitting there and watching Parrish through the tiny phone screen. He feels so far away, so goddamn far away.
He just sits there, wrapped in ropes, bruised and bloodied but alive. He’s still wearing his pajama pants, the ones he slipped on after we finished making love. The ones he was wearing when I kissed him goodnight and slipped into my room with a goofy smile on my face.
It’s surreal.
Had my first time on Saturday. My new love-hate boyfriend kidnapped on Sunday. Sitting here on Tuesday negotiating with a fucking serial killer. All of this could’ve been avoided if I’d never seen that stupid Netflix show. If my grandparents had never called that awful hotline.
I exhale sharply and shake my head.
“I’d do anything for you, Parrish,” I tell him, and I mean it. He looks devastated by that news, not uplifted, not hopeful. Devastated.
“I wish you wouldn’t, Dakota. I really wish you wouldn’t.” Parrish closes his eyes tight, but he doesn’t stop talking. “If you’re determined, I can’t really stop you though, can I?” He opens his eyes again to stare at me. We both studiously ignore the psycho in the stag mask. “If you want to save my life, here’s what you have to do.”
With my heart thundering in my throat, I stare at the typewriter on Tess’ desk. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen her use. She touches it reverently, like it’s an extension of her soul. It must be, for her to prefer writing on it when it would be a million times easier to just use a laptop.
Sweat drips down the sides of my face as I touch it, keeping my fingertips light the way Tess does, like I’m just saying hi. If I think about the page I found in here the other day, will that make this easier? Only, nothing about this easy. It may very well be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.
Chasm told me text him if I got another message, but I can’t bring myself to do it. This … task, or whatever it is, feels too personal. Too urgent. That’s the point of it, I imagine. Because if this man, this Justin Prior, really is my father, he’s got an agenda in mind.
I could turn him in right now, tell the cops that I know who the Seattle Slayer is. If I did that, would they be able to find him and rescue Parrish before it’s too late? But no. No. He wouldn’t have told me the things he told me if he thought he could be caught.
Either way, it’s not a risk that I’m willing to take. Any risk to Parrish’s life is too much.
Please let him be okay, I think as I pick up the typewriter and make my way downstairs. A quick peek down the hall toward the living room/kitchen area shows me that I’m alone for the time being. Not that it matters. The missive was quite clear: smash the windshield with the typewriter then tell her how you really feel about her; tell her she’s a bad mom; tell her she’s the reason that Parrish is gone.
I feel dizzy, almost like this an out-of-body experience. Tess is inconsolable and panicky, as she should be. She lost a child once, and now she’s missing another. What if she never sees him again? If I don’t do this, that’s both of our realities.
With a groan, almost like a strangled cry, I move into the garage and stare at the white BMW sitting pretty on the epoxied floors. I’m about to destroy the very first birthday present that my biological mother ever gave me (that I can remember) with her special typewriter, the one she writes all her bestsellers on.
Gods help me.
Swallowing hard, I move into the garage and then try to sort the logistics of this out. Throwing a heavy typewriter into a car window isn’t an easy thing to do. Eventually I just set the typewriter on the roof and climb up beside it, hefting it into the air … just in time for Tess to open the door and see me standing there.
Pretty sure there are tears streaming down my face, but what can I do?
The life of a boy that I hated, that I’ve come to love, is on the line.
I could never forgive myself if something happened to him.
“Dakota?” Tess asks, sniffling and red-faced, her eyes puffy and her hands shaking. Paul is standing just behind her, gaping up at me from behind his glasses. Fuck. And I’d thought my life was hard before? That was nothing compared to this. Why did she have to get my name right for once? Why couldn’t she have called me Mia this time, just to make this a little easier? I look at her, and all I can do is say how sorry I am with my expression.
I keep the words to myself. Well, those words anyway. There are other words that I have to say, or else Parrish will be the one that suffers. Because of me. This is all because of me. No wonder he hated me, no wonder he wanted me gone; I really did ruin his life, just the way he claimed.
And yet … the memory of his warm hands on my body, his lips against my own, I can’t shake that.
“Parrish left because of you,” I say, and then I throw the typewriter as hard as I can into the windshield of the car, destroying both. Small squares of safety glass scatter as Tess screams, clamping a hand over her mouth to cut off the sound. “Because you’re a bad mom.”