Page 82 of Please Open Me
“Do you think they’ll want you after everything you’ve done?”
Dale’s voice again—calm, taunting.
“Sebastian, you betrayed me.”
Cameron’s voice. Closer. Angrier.
“I didn’t! I did it to save you! It was a mistake!” I cried, clawing at the splintered edge of the falling floor.
“Dale took everything from me. And now you’re supporting the cult that ended my life?”
I couldn’t see his face, but I felt the fury in it.
“It’s not like that!”
“You’re sacrificing me,” Mason’s voice added. Distant. Muffled. Like she was screaming from behind locked doors.
Her presence gripped my soul, pulling me toward her. I could feel her.
“Mason! I’d never—I—”
“You already did,” she whispered, voice cracking like splintered porcelain. “You let him get to me. You let him touch me. You should’ve killed him when you had the chance.”
“I didn’t know,” I croaked. “I didn’t know he’d go after you. I didn’t have the evidence—”
“You didn’t stop him. You could’ve stopped him!”
I shut my eyes.
The world shifted again.
Suddenly, I was no longer in Saint Samael’s. The podium was gone. The pews had vanished.
I was kneeling in a bathtub. White porcelain bit into my knees as blood burbled from the drain.
My breath hitched. I fell back, still dressed in the priest’s vestments I never deserved.
I turned my head—and regretted it instantly.
Mason and Cameron’s bodies slumped against the wall. Naked. Skin half-charred. Eyes plucked. Mouths agape.
Unmistakably dead.
I tried to scream, but my lungs refused to work. I couldn’t move.
Why the fuck couldn’t I move?
Mason’s lips twitched, and bile rose in my throat.
“You let us burn,” she slurred, ink-like sludge falling from her lips. “You let me burn. Just like every other victim.”
“No—no, I didn’t—”
“I believed in you when no one else did,” Cameron whispered. “I thought you were more than a monster.”
His head lolled with a sickening crack, hollow sockets staring straight throughme.
“I begged you to help her. To free us from the Sons of Christ sotheycould live.”
