Paint It All Red (Mindf*ck #5)
S. T. Abby
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This is for the ones who lost their voice. This is for the ones who wish they could be Lana Myers. This is for the ones people still whisper about.
This is for the ones who fight every single day to forget.
You’re not alone.
Love is not supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be a raw, gritty struggle that forces you to face the most vulnerable parts of yourself, so that when the good times come, you can savor and enjoy them, fully appreciate what they’re worth. Otherwise, you take it all for granted.
—Lana Myers
Fuck the list. It’s time for the endgame.
Chapter 1
We are rarely proud when we are alone.
—Voltaire
LOGAN
Hadley jumps when I sling open the door to her room. She jerks out her earbuds, clutching her chest with her free hand.
“Cheese and rice, you lunatic. Don’t scare someone like that when there’s a serial killer literally in our backyard.”
“Or living just a few cabins down, right?” I ask dryly, though there’s an edge to my tone that has her entire body stiffening.
She doesn’t even have to say the words, but I want to hear them.
“You knew?” I ask her quietly, my tone full of disbelief and heartbreak.
Everything hurts right now, even as I fight off the onslaught of emotions. In this unit, you train against showing emotion at all costs. I’ve never found that to be harder to do than today.
Her lips move for several seconds before words actually start coming out.
“Logan, I’m sorry, but—”
“You knew!” I shout with accusation, as my fist slams into the wall, and my entire body heaves for a breath of air that doesn’t feel lined with lead.
“Logan!” she yells, but I turn around and face her, slowly regaining my calm. “Listen. It was complicated, and she—”
“We’re done, Hadley. You and me. I’m fucking done with you,” I say on a broken promise.
Tears immediately spring from her eyes.
“Are you serious?” She has the nerve to ask that with incredulity in her tone.
“Yeah. I can’t be friends with someone who could watch me fall in love with someone like that and not tell me the truth.”
Her eyes narrow, and her lips tremble. “Someone like that? Someone who would kill or die to keep you safe? Someone who loved you so much that she almost gave up her revenge?”
“Her revenge?” I ask bitterly, shaking my head as I turn and stalk away. “It’s not her fucking revenge!”
I slam the door behind me, and stalk next door to where Leonard almost falls off the chair when I burst in. “Shit! Easy, man. I’m trying to find some more info on Ken—”
His words die when he sees my face. “Oh shit,” he says on an exhale.
“Yeah,” I say, dropping to a chair and grabbing the bottle of whiskey he has hanging out of his go-bag. “She admitted it.”
“She what?” he asks, shocked.
“She basically admitted it. I couldn’t stick around for a full confession.”
“Where the hell is she?”
I run my sleeve over my eyes, then turn up the bottle.
“Cuffed to my bed,” I say when I lower the bottle.
His eyes grow wider.
“I have no idea what to do right this second. She’s fucked my head up so much that I can’t bear turning her over to anyone in this town or the FBI. But I know I have to do something. Since I don’t know what, I cuffed her in place.”
It’s a terrible fucking way to stall, but it’s the only solution I currently have.
He scrubs his face before shoving a file at me.
“I can’t find anything at all in her history—besides drug use—that would make her willing to do anything like this. She’s been clean for years though, and I haven’t noticed any track marks. And she’s not delusional or suffering a psychotic—”
“Hence the fucking reason I don’t know what to do,” I growl. “She’s lucid, well aware of her surroundings, too fucking smart to be too stupid, and definitely not the type to be easily manipulated by anyone—not even Jacob Denver.”
I laugh humorlessly as a memory surfaces. She called him Jake, even fucking told me Jake was her bisexual business partner. I never pieced the shit together. Because I was too blinded by everything I felt for her to even consider such a possibility.
“Here’s the file,” he says quietly. “Have a look at it. Maybe it’ll help you figure it out.”
I jerk the file from the tabletop, and I flip it open. I’m immediately grimacing when I see the folder, because of the grizzly pictures. But there’s one thing that doesn’t make sense.