Page 29 of Unholy Masks

She shook her head.

“Fuck, how did I miss that?” she grunted, punching the dashboard. “The reason Rishi stopped the car in the middle of nowhere…” Yara pressed her palms against her eyes.

Rishi wouldn’t have stopped if he had thought the person could hurt them.

“All these years, it’s the anger that kept me running. I wanted to hurt the bastard who killed my best friend, and now—to know this woman, the one who killed Kat, could have been a victim once. I hate it, Ryden. I want the anger back. I want the rage.” Her voice was shaking. Her whole body was shaking. I pulled her to me. “That’s the only way I know how to survive.”

“We don’t know if it’s a woman, but even if it is, she killed Kat, killed all these women, and that didn’t change.” I pressed a kiss to her head. “She’s a woman, but it doesn’t erase everything she did, Yara. She killed innocent people.”

“I know…” Yara trailed off.

“She might be a victim, but she turned around and hurt other women. Women who didn’t deserve it. Kat didn’t. The others didn’t.”

“You’re right.” Yara pulled away from me. “She still killed them. She still killed Kat.”

There was no conviction in her voice, no fire. She looked as though someone had poured a bucket of water over her fury and completely doused it.

“Did you find more?” I looked at her. She looked away. She was hiding something. “You found her. You know who it is.”

Yara took a sharp breath.

“I think it’s Tany’s sister.”

Oh, fuck.

I now understood the guilt.

“Tany’s sister? What do you mean?” She looked down.

“I think so. Everything points back to that. Every fucking thing. I wasn’t close to her as I was with Tany, but I think it is her.”

“How sure are you?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I always thought the Strangler was too kind to be a man. I mean…”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“Everything he—she did was deliberate.” I knew this was taking a toll on her. I hated it. “I don’t know, Ryden. I’m too fucking tired. I just want to stop.”

STOP? That didn’t sound like Yara.

“It’s okay to rest for a while, to think about it.” I ran my fingers down her cheeks. She closed her eyes. “And if you don’t want to do it, tell me what I should do, and I will do it for you.”

She stared through the window, looking at something I couldn’t.

When she turned, her eyes were determined.

“She killed them. She threatened Irene and you/” Yara shook her head. “I can’t stop now.”

“We can’t.” I agreed.

“Did you go to the AFC?” she asked after a minute. “Did you find anything?”

“I met Helene Diaz. She gave me the list of donors and volunteers working on AFC. I will be busy digging into it.” I told her about the strange gardenia, what Sofia said about Daiken, and everything else I had learned.

“We didn’t find the flowers on the dead bodies, you know. He must have taken them away just after he murdered them,” she said. “He was careful about the flowers. He didn’t want anyone to find them. He knew the Gardenias could lead the cops back to him.”

“I was thinking the same,” I admitted. “He left the tattoo for everyone to see, but not the flower?”