Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(80)
“So you killed Damian’s father and had Maria all to yourself again.”
Porter nodded, smiling widely again. “For a while, everything was wonderful. Of course, I gave Maria plenty of time to mourn. I’m not a complete monster.”
Oh, no. Not a complete monster.
But I held my tongue and went back to my own problem of how to escape. Since I’d ruled out using my Ice magic, I focused on my Stone power. But it wouldn’t help me cut through my ropes any more than my Ice magic would. So I asked him some more questions, trying to buy myself some more time to figure this out.
“And what about Damian? What does he think about your obsession with his dead mother and all the women that you kill in her place?”
Porter snorted in disgust. “Damian’s always been far too interested in his booze and broads to think about anything else, including his mother. He’s just like his father that way. As long as I keep him happy and cover up his drunken messes, he lets me do as I please. He understands that I know what’s best for him.”
I wondered if Damian was really as self-centered and oblivious as Porter thought. Or maybe Damian realized that if he didn’t go along with the dwarf that he would end up dead in a supposed car accident just like his father had.
“But finally, I got tired of waiting for Maria, and I told her that now that her parents were gone and Richard was dead, it was finally time for us to be together.” Porter shook his head. “But she didn’t react the way I expected. Not at all.”
This time, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut or keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “Let me guess. Maria said that she only thought of you as a friend. That she just didn’t love you and that the two of you were never going to be together the way you wanted. Maybe she even tried to break it to you gently, but that’s when you finally snapped.”
Something else occurred to me, something that I’d read in the information that Finn and Silvio had compiled for me on the Rivera family. “Maria died in a car accident too, didn’t she? Several years ago. Let me guess. More of your handiwork.”
Porter shook his head. “I didn’t mean to hit her. It just happened. She just made me so angry, saying that she could never be with me. That I was just a friend. That she appreciated my service and my loyalty, but there could never be anything more between us. Why couldn’t she see how much I loved her? Why did she have to make me kill her? Why . . .”
He kept right on talking, but I tuned him out, much more interested in what the stones of the cottage suddenly had to say. All around us, they started muttering, responding to Porter’s dark, dark rage.
Blood, violence, pain, death . . . blood, violence, pain, death . . . blood, violence, pain, death . . .
The shrieks were even stronger here than they had been at the caretaker’s cottage, the agonizing notes so sharp and loud that it seemed the emotional vibrations were slowly tearing the stones apart one molecule at a time. Of course, that wasn’t really happening, since emotions, no matter how strong and intense, couldn’t break apart solid stone.
But I could.
I needed to incapacitate Porter, and what better way to do that than by using my Stone magic to drop his own house of horrors right on top of his head? That would be some poetic justice, Spider-style. So I concentrated on all those plaintive shrieks and wails, listening to the mutterings and using the sounds to seek out the weakest points in the stones that made up the cottage.
There—right there.
The mutterings were particularly harsh and loud in the upper section of the fireplace, right above the mantel where Porter had put that doctored photo of him and Maria. Of course, the emotional vibrations would be concentrated there, since Maria was the focal point of Porter’s obsession. Even better, I could see a faint spiderweb pattern of cracks starting from that point in the fireplace and running all the way up to the ceiling.
I glanced from the cracks to Porter and back again, calculating distances and angles. I needed to get him to move just a little bit closer to me, so that he would be directly in the line of fire, so to speak. But that would be easy enough to accomplish. All I had to do was attack him with words the same way that I had Tucker. So I fixed my attention on that one weak spot in the fireplace and started gathering up my Stone magic. I’d only have one shot at this, and I had to make it count.
“And do you know what the worst part was?” Porter said, still continuing his rant. “Maria was ready to move on. She told me that she’d already made plans with someone else and that she was on her way to meet him. I stood there and watched her curl her hair and put on her makeup while she told me all about it.”
Well, that explained the makeup. He was trying to re-create that one fateful moment, only with the outcome that he wanted instead of what had really happened.
“She put on her lipstick last, then looked at me in the mirror and smiled, asking me to be happy for her.” Porter snarled. “As if I could ever be happy when she was with someone else. Why did she have to do that? Why couldn’t she just love me as much as I loved her?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, my voice dripping with venom. “Maybe because she realized how obsessed you were with her. Maybe because she was tired of you always watching her, not to mention following her around all the time. Or maybe she just wanted you to go away and give her one fucking moment of peace. Did you ever think that you were the problem, not her?”