Page 46 of Hunter or Hunted

But it wasn’t about what I wanted. It was about what needed done.

“I have to,” I murmured.

His hand on my back moved to my hand, laying limp at my side. His fingers threaded through mine. Giving a gentle squeeze, he stroked his thumb over my tense knuckle.

The deep breath I pulled in cracked that stone around my legs. Moving them still felt like lifting weights. Some way or another, though, they carried me to the casket.

Breath collapsed into my lungs, and a door shut behind it. If I forced it open, a desperate, pathetic wail would slither out.

She looked wrong. It was Delilah, but it wasn’t Delilah.

She never would’ve worn her makeup so thick. If she could, she would run to the bathroom and wash it off, complaining about how cakey it made her look.

The color of her lips was off too. She liked a bold, Marilyn Monroe kind of red. This was too pink, too girly. She always wanted to look older, more mature. No matter what, she always looked like a little girl, but she tried to look womanly. To be taken seriously.

The eyes were perfect though. A neutral dust across them, a pop of glittery white at the corner and beneath her brow, and thick yet wispy black lashes. She would’ve liked the nail polish too. Pale, baby pink.

She wouldn’t have worn the clothes either.

It hugged her frame closely. A tweed sort of texture, but thinner, in pale pink. Like the color of a hydrangea. She would’ve been proud of me for remembering that—it was one of her favorites.

But the color and the texture marked the problems. She wouldn’t have minded those.

It was the cut. Or rather, the lack thereof.

Turtleneck.

With clarity, I remembered her hating them. She’d spilled some spaghetti on her shirt when we ate at my house one time, and I offered her a sweater. She refused to wear it though, sporting the spaghetti stain instead, because she hated turtlenecks. Like Sebastian and his high-collared button-up, she hated anything too tight around her neck. It made her feel like she was suffocating.

And that’s when the door fluttered open. Acid burned across my irises. No amount of blinking eased the sting. I managed to swallow the sobs that wrapped around my vocal cords, but I had to press a hand over my mouth to keep it all contained.

The only reason they would’ve put her in a turtleneck, knowing how much she hated them, was if something was wrong with her neck. Something they didn’t want everyone to be reminded of when they said their goodbyes.

It was better than I imagined. All those images in my mind of a bullet slicing through her skull, blowing out the back in a violent spray. This was better, and somehow worse.

She hanged.

That explained why they ruled it a suicide. No one shot her. She dangled from a tree by a rope around her neck. Swaying in the cold wind like a bulb off a Christmas tree. Snow must’ve gathered on top of her, like it had that day she came to my cabin. She’d only been walking for an hour or so that night. It must’ve taken many more before anyone found her there, dangling from the tree. No wonder she had so much makeup on. Her skin had to have been bluer than the sky by the time they got her down.

How could anyone have hung her without leaving obvious marks? To get her up there, to tie her around a tree, wouldn’t there have been signs of foul play? Bruises on her hands, or her arms, or something? If someone had hanged her, they couldn’t have done so easily. She would’ve fought back, and there would’ve been marks, and…

Could I have been wrong?

Was it possible that they were right? Had she killed herself?

“She doesn’t look real, does she?” A voice on my left made me jump.

I jolted again when I looked her way.

Familiar, bouncy blonde curls. A ski slope nose.

Delilah. Delilah stood beside me, and Delilah lay in the casket.

No. No, not Delilah. A few hard blinks revealed the differences. This girl’s cheeks were fuller, younger. Her lips, though similar in shape, were just the slightest bit denser. She stood shorter as well, somewhere around five feet. A pair of thick rimmed black glasses covered her eyes.

The girl reached out and draped her hand over Delilah’s. She wrapped her hand around the flesh-wrapped, frozen bones. “Like a doll. A pretty, porcelain doll.”

Swallowing a couple times, I wiped the corners of my eyes. It took clearing my throat for words to come out. “She always kinda looked like a pretty porcelain doll to me.”