This time, however, I’m doing something a little different. This time I’m letting Wren decide what I do. After she brought up her cheating ex earlier, I figured it would be the perfect time to show her, to explain some things, to really get everything out in the open.
Well, almost everything. There are some deadly secrets in my family that must remain so.
“You can’t give me a single hint?” she pouts.
“Nope. Patience, Wren, and I’ll show you.”
She’s not too thrilled with being in the dark, but she has no other choice, so she doesn’t try to argue with me. We simply hold hands while I drive us to my place, and when I pull into the driveway and into the garage, she tosses me a knowing look.
She thinks I brought her here for sex. I mean, that could happen, after, but it really depends on how this next part goes. It’s not going to be what she thinks.
I lead her in the house by the hand. Together, we go upstairs, and we end up in my home office, a room I did not show her thelast time she was here. I don’t turn on any lights, but once I let her go so I can type in the password to my computer, she’s too curious to keep silent.
“What is this?” she asks. “What are you going to show me?”
My computer boots up, and before I dive deeper, I turn to face her, blocking most of the computer screen’s light with my body. “Remember when I said, at the cemetery, I’ve been watching you a while? I wasn’t lying. I meant it.”
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
With a shake of my head, I step towards her and slip my hands beneath her jacket, to her waist. “That’s not what I meant. Let’s just say there are things I know about you that you don’t know I know.”
That finally gets her to give me a strange look. “What do you mean?”
“Like, for instance… I already knew Logan saw you and invited you to mic night. I also know he came before and tried to mend things with you when Sloane and Elias were not home.”
“How…?” She is so utterly confused, and it’s so utterly adorable.
I bring her to my computer and go for the software hooked up to the cameras at her place. I open one of them and reveal the living room, where Logan sat down with her and handed her that flyer.
She stares at it with wide eyes as the realization hits her, and I tell her, “There are many things I’m good at. Watching people is one of them.”
It’s a long, tense moment before she swallows and turns her gaze away from the screen, angling those shadowed eyes up at me. “How long have you been watching me?”
“Since the beginning.”
“So you know—”
“I know everything. I knew about your plan to get Logan to sing again with you. It’s why I was there that night.” Softer, I add, “I knew there was something special about you. I had to watch you, learn more about you.”
“So you snuck into my house and put cameras everywhere?”
“Not everywhere. I didn’t touch the bathroom or Sloane and Elias’s rooms. The kitchen, the basement. I stuck to where I thought you’d be most often.” Waiting a moment, I say, “I told you there were other parts of me, darker parts. This is one of them.”
Wren lets out a long breath. “I can’t believe I never noticed. I can’t believe Sloane never noticed.”
“Yes, I was worried about that. She is… she has a bit of darkness in her, too, as does Elias.”
It’s a while before she asks her next question: “I assume I’m not the first person you’ve watched like this?”
“The first person I’ve watched that I don’t want to put in a maze, yes. You are the first I’ve watched for myself.”
She’s smart enough to pick out one single word. “Maze?”
“I make mazes. I like to test people. I find they often show their true colors when they’re faced with what they believe might be the end. After all, what’s a maze without a few dead-ends?” I reach for her hair and tuck some of it behind her ear, and she lets me do it, which I take as a good sign.
She’s not running away from me screaming about how crazy I am, so that’s a win.
I don’t tell her I put Logan in a maze. I figure she needs to make her mind up on him all on her own. This little show-and-tell isn’t about Logan, anyway. No, it’s about the other asshole she brought up when she was in my office earlier.