Dominated (Obsessed II)

43.

Jude Bellingham
It Ends here.

I had learned a long time ago that the most dangerous part of a confession wasn't the words themselves. It was what came after them, when the person sitting across from you finally realized there was no way to take them back. I kept my phone exactly where I'd left it, screen facing down against my thigh, the small red indicator confirming what I'd already known would happen before I'd asked Bianca to tell me everything. I didn't look at it. I didn't need to. Every word she had spoken was being captured, every admission preserved in the quiet space between us while I sat beside the woman I'd once loved.

He held my gaze. "You can tell me anything."

I watched Bianca take a shaky breath, her fingers twisting together in her lap. She looked frightened, but not frightened enough to stop. That was something I'd come to understand about her. Fear had never been enough to make her retreat when she believed there was something she wanted badly enough on the other side of it.

"I killed Dominik."

The words landed quietly, almost disappointingly so. I didn't move, how could I?

I didn't ask her to repeat herself. I didn't curse. I didn't lean away from her in horror, even though every part of me wanted to. I simply kept looking at her because I'd spent too long wondering what she was capable of, and now she was finally telling me herself.

For a second, I thought she might become suspicious of my silence. Her eyes searched my face, waiting for something, anger, disbelief, disgust, anything that would reassure her that I'd heard her correctly.

I gave her nothing.

"It was the grapes," she whispered, and there was something almost unsettlingly calm about the way she said it. "He loved them, so I knew he'd eat them. I had something called Vesper-9. I sprayed it onto the grapes, and it caused the cardiac arrest."

My stomach turned. She looked down at her hands before continuing.

"I thought it was poetic, at least. The last thing he ate was something he absolutely loved. It's the least I could do."

I stared at her, trying to process the fact that she had just described killing a man as poetic. That was the word she'd chosen, and somehow it disturbed me more than the confession itself. She hadn't called it tragic or horrible. In her mind, there had been something almost beautiful about the symmetry of it, and that frightened me more than I wanted her to know.

I was starting to feel uneasy but I forced myself to relax before she noticed.

"I didn't want it to happen that way," she continued, and this time her voice trembled. "But it was either me or him. I couldn't let him ruin everything."

Her eyes filled.

"I just wanted to be free. I have felt like a prisoner my whole life."

I had heard enough. Not because I couldn't listen to more, but because I already knew where this ended. I knew what she had done. I already had enough recorded. I knew what my private investigator had found, what I'd collected, and what was waiting beyond the doors of this hotel.

And still, when she started crying, some part of me remembered the girl I'd once known. That was the cruelest part.

I pulled her into my arms.