Twenty minutes later, Paris pulled Riley through the front door, and slammed it behind them.
“Veo!” he called as Riley stared at the ground in horror, completely frozen and numb. “VEO! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?”
The man came running down the stairs at an instant, standing in front of him and Riley.
He gave the girl a concerned look before returning it to Paris. “Yes, sir?”
“Lock down the house,” Paris instructed. “Complete lockdown. And I need patrol.”
Veo nodded, Paris letting go of Riley’s wrist seconds later.
“Riley,” he said a little sternly, eyes burning with rage and fear, “go to my room again. The one you woke up in, okay?”
That was his room? What was he going to do to her in there?
He wasn’t still talking about consequences, was he? She heard the hint behind the type of consequences.
It was far from small little innocent punishments.
“Paris…” she tried to reason.
His eyes narrowed. “Now.”
But she nodded, every part of her still hollow and went upstairs, making her way to the room she woke up in and sat on his bed, contemplating her life choices.
She sat there for a full ten minutes before the panic vanished.
She stood after a moment of regaining her composure, snapping into action, and decided to search through his things to get better insight of who he was.
His room was clean for one; spotless, and she wasn’t used to a teenage man’s room to be so clean and healthy.
It could’ve been his staff or ‘underlings’ who cleaned it, but she tossed the thought.
Everything was white, not black.
He clearly wasn’t goth or emo or whatever, but there was no color either.
He had good taste in bedsheets, she knew as she ran her hands on them.
There were a lot of intriguing things about him, he was strong and carried her places.
He wore a lot of plain colors like black, grey, or white.
She found herself wondering how it would feel if his calloused fingers slipped inside—
She slapped herself internally.
No, bad, Riley. Bad.
100Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiN82TKbZwh
She gazed up then, eyes locking on his oak dresser.
Usually people hid there dirty secrets in the dresser.
She could raid through his stuff and torment him with his sex toys like he did with her.
So she ran over to the wood and opened the top drawer, shuffling through the contents and then went lower.
There was nothing in here other than plain colored shirts and pants.
Ugh.
But then something caught her eye.
There was an article of blue and pink clothing stuffed inside a bunch of regular clothes.
She pulled it out, curious as to why he had a splash of color in his black and white beauty.
But as she examined it, her breath caught at the sight of the jacket.
It was Bella’s jacket; the one she wore the day she died.
Why did he have it?
But that meant...
Her eyes rounded.
He was the killer.
A sudden knock cascaded on the door, startling her.
“Riley?” Paris called. “You decent?”
She immediately stuffed the jacket in the drawer and half-hazardly closed it, running over to his closet and rolled open the doors, closing them in front of her seconds later.
Her heart hammered against her ribcage when he opened the door and walked into the room, scanning the area before exhaling, “Shit, she’s gone. Fuck.”
But she touched the wall, hoping to find some kind of hidden exit.
But that’s when something sharp sliced her skin, and she sucked in a breath, gazing down at the source.
It was a mirror... A broken one.
She caught a shard and closed her hand around it, looking back up to find Paris pacing the room impatiently through the crack of the closet door.
“Riley?” he questioned. “Riley, are you in here?”
She backed herself against the wall behind her, hoping to melt into it and become a part of the plaster.
“Riley,” he said then, “if you’re in here, come out now and your punishment won’t nearly be as bad.”
Well, technically she wasn’t in the room, she was in the closet, so that was a loophole.
He sighed, shaking his head.
Right as he was about to exit through the bedroom door, his eyes locked on the closet.
Shit.
She clutched the shard tighter when he stepped up to the closet, eyeing the door carefully before catching it.
Slit his throat, a part of her told him.
Kill him slowly, said another.
At least wound him, said the third.
He might’ve fooled Claire and everyone else with his… kindness… but he was far from fooling her.
Serial killers were very good manipulators.
The closet door finally rolled open, and Riley didn’t waist a second, she took the shard and slashed him across the cheek, making him yell out.
She didn’t wait to see what his reaction would be, she just ran with the shard piercing into her skin, and blood lightly slipped down her wrist as she made her way to the exit.
“RILEY!” Paris screamed in anger.
She’d get the police to come here so they could save Claire and everyone else.
She couldn’t do it on her own no matter how much she wanted to, not even if she shot Paris in the balls.
He always had followers lurking everywhere.
She was proven right when Veo suddenly stepped away from the wall and blocked her path to the front door.
She skittered to a stop before he could catch her and backed away.
“Miss Princes…” he whispered.
She then spun around and ran the opposite direction, turning a corner before Veo or Paris could follow her.
She saw a staircase here, anyway.
So she darted to the open door and ran down the stairs two steps at a time, not stopping until she reached the bottom.
It was a basement, but it was cluttered with a lot of weird stuff, so she could hide down here easily.
“Riley, come back here!” Paris called from upstairs, and she only closed her eyes and swallowed down a lump in her throat.
But she ran to a corner hidden by a bunch of boxes, and crouched down in the darkness, holding the shard tighter despite it burning her skin.
ns 15.158.61.6da2
