It's a fact that you can't help who you fall in love with. And for Rosaline Davenport and him, it definitely shouldn't have been each other.
Because, sometimes, love stories have blood on them.
[warning: this is the mother of all slow-burns]
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【 29.
Twenty-nine
Jalaana 】
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[ Jalaana • burn ]
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THEY FIND THE taxi driver who picked Zachary up from Iskandar Innovations—and with him, the GPS records of the route he took on the night of December 31st. Zachary’s let go of once they confirm his whereabouts and the time stamp proves it took longer than usual since the driver didn’t travel through the usual roads that night in order to avoid the heavy traffic.
There’s no longer any duration of time for which Zachary has no alibi. He’s free to go.
And yet liberation is the last thing he feels—and probably one of the luxuries he’ll never be able to enjoy feeling again. Peace is somewhere at the top of that list. Along with joy, and happiness, and the goddamned ability to ever trust someone again.
“Dahlia landed in Springfield by early noon. She was here hours before she dropped in to see you, Mr Zachary.”
Zachary squeezes his eyes shut and lowers his head, covering his ears with the heels of his palms while his fingers twist the unkempt locks of his dark hair around them. He tugs on the strands, taking some sick form of comfort in the slight jolts of pain each pull of his hair causes.
Walking out of that wretched interrogation room and getting into a taxi was something out of a dream, like his body was performing the actions and movements but Zachary was just experiencing them rather than choosing to do so. He can’t even remember telling the driver which hotel to drop him off in.
But he must have done it—considering he made it to the hotel, dragged his feet across the front lobby and into an elevator, and then across the floors of the sixth floor lounge before letting himself into his room and standing stock-still in the dead centre of it.
“Look, there’s no easy way to say this. There are a handful of eyewitnesses who saw these two together often.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he mutters to himself, shaking his head and pressing his hands tighter against his ears. “Just—just shut up. Shut up!”
“Fact is, Mr Hawthorne, Dahlia and Micah have been here before. Together.”
“SHUT UP!” Zachary roars, grabbing the iron box he took out of the closet to use that morning and chucking it at the wall opposite him. It makes a sickening but satisfying sound as it collides against the hard surface, creating a tiny dent in the wall and chipping off some of the paint in that area. The iron clatters to the carpeted floor of the room, undamaged and just like it was before he threw it.
