Page 26 of Unholy Masks

My stomach coiled in anger.

“If God had loved Tany,” I hissed. “He wouldn’t have let this happen. He wouldn’t have broken her like that.”

“God doesn’t love her, not like we do,” the girl whispered.

I looked up, and she looked at me with tears trailing down her cheek.

Tany’s sister.

“You know.” she whispered, anger tightening her lips.

“I know.”

The Strangler was someone I had met at the orphanage—someone who had seen me killing Robert Miller. Someone who probably was hurt by him, and found solace in his death…

Someone who bonded with me over death and suffering and murder.

The girl holding my hand.

“I know…”

“Patty. Patty.”

I sat up straight.

Patty.

8

CALLING CARD

RYDEN

After dropping Yara off, I drove to Art For Charity. I had another bastard to catch. The Strangler had kept me busy for the past few days, but of course, I would never rest until Sofia and Nikki got their justice.

Helene Diaz, the director of AFC, looked like a woman on a mission the moment I told her everything.

Narrowed eyes studied me as I showed her the picture of Sofia and Nikki and told her about my suspicion.

“You’re saying that someone from AFC could have killed them?” she asked, her words hesitant, as if she could barely believe what we were talking about. “Is AFC really the only thing that connects them? Nikki wasn’t even working here that long.”

Her face paled, and her fingers trembled as she clenched her hands together.

“And it could be one of our donors or volunteers?” She swallowed, looking down at her nails. “God, we work to protect women who have been abused, raped, scarred for life, and you’re telling me that someone has been using this place to prey on more girls?” She shuddered, disgust flashing across her face. “What kind of monster would look at a place of charity to protect women and think, yes, I’m going to kill the girls who work here? It is inhumane, it is…”

“The very worst kind of monster, Ms. Diaz. And unfortunately, the world’s full of them,” I said.

I’d seen them, met them, often hiding in plain sight. I had killed them, too, but there were more. Always more.

Men who felt like women owed them. Men who used women to make themselves feel powerful. Entitled, narcissistic men.

And these men, they often didn’t fit the image of a monster, not the one we grew up believing in. No, these men were the ones who knew how to wear normalcy with ease. They were our neighbors, our teachers, sometimes our brothers and fathers. And we stayed blind. We stayed in the bubble we had built around us, defending the brothers and fathers.

Even I did. I knew Victor was beyond saving and still…

I wasn’t different from any of them, the good men pretending to not know about the bad men who lived around us. The good men who willfully ignored the bad men. Their morality died, when the abusers were their own.

And then they will go around and say not all men!