Page 21 of Condemned By Betrayal
I let go of both Rosie’s and Bruno’s leashes, and they sprint to the same place they went yesterday. I follow them. Just like yesterday, he’s standing against the wall, patting Bruno and Rosie the same way Salvario used to, maybe that's why they like him. Because to them as well, he looks like Salvario with a new face.
He isn’t Salvario.I tell myself again, and again when he looks up as I reach him.
“I want to ask you something,” I say, dragging my focus from his eyes, from the way he’s looking at me.
He nods.
“Were you following me that day?” The question has been nagging at me. “I spotted you at every location I visited. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“I thought you were someone else,” he intones.
Before he opened his mouth, it was just his build, his hair, his eyes making me uneasy. Now his voice has made it ten times worse. He doesn’t have the faint Italian accent Salvario had, but everything else is the same, the exact same baritone, the way he forms words, the way he pauses, the speed of his speech. Every single thing.
“Just as I thought,” I murmur, more to myself.
He nods slightly.
After this morning, I can tell it’s not something he wants to discuss. Anything that touches on Salvario makes him stiff—yes, I observed him, despite having no business doing so. I can’t shake the similarities between them. The first day I met him, I was devastated. Seeing him dragged me down into the black swamp of believing Salvario was dead. It took Amber six sessions straight to pull me out of it, out of the suicidal thoughts, too.
Then yesterday, he said he could find Salvario in exchange for the city. All my dead hopes came back to life. For the first time in months, I fell asleep with the wish of waking up the next day.
Then this morning he showed up, and he sat, talked, moved, stared—just like him. At first I was surprised by the similarities, minor and major, and then the more I observed him, the more I saw my Salvario in him. Which is absurd, any person in her right mind would call this my biggest delusion yet, but I’m not normal anymore. The day he vanished from my sight after crushing my heart, I stopped being normal. And after eighteen months of waiting and dying little by little, nothing close to normal is left in me.
“Who did you think I was?” I ask, dragging myself out of my head.
“Someone I was looking for.”
He clearly doesn’t want to tell me. But I want to know. So I keep going.
“Your girlfriend?”
He shakes his head.
“Then your crush?”
He nods slowly.
“And did you find her?”
He nods again.
“Who is she?”
“Doesn’t matter. She loves someone else.”
I bite the inside of my lower lip, unsettled by his constant low-blink stare and the opaque answers he’s giving me.
I look away from him, down to Bruno and Rosie, who are sitting between us. I gather their leashes. They both look up at me, then back at Hunter.
“They would love it if you joined us for a walk,” I falter, unsure—not of his answer, but of my own request. I shouldn’t indulge myself with him.
He nods.
We start walking down the empty alley in silence. The sound of our footsteps and the dogs’ paws on the pavement is too loud in the quiet evening. In the distance, I can hear the footsteps of my bodyguards.
“Where are you from?” I venture.
“Toronto.”
