Chapter 8
“I remember every word,” Miles whispered. “I wrote them all down in the dark. Every promise you made. Every story you told me about Julian. About how you ran down the slippery dock. How the iron winch smelled like wet rust. How you broke your hands trying to drag him out of the black water.”
Bryce smiled in the amber gloom, a master reveling in his own masterpiece. “I remember, too. Every syllable. Because everything I told you was the truth of how much I’m willing to bleed for the person I love.”
“You love so fiercely, Bryce,” Miles said. His tone was honeyed, almost reverent, but beneath the silk lay a taut, razor-thin stillness. “Most men run away from tragedy. You chased it down to the water’s edge. You leaped into thirty feet of freezing silt. You took the memory of a dead boy and built a cathedral out of it.”
“I didn't build it for him,” Bryce whispered, leaning in until his chest pressed against the soundboard console. The hot mic picked up the rustle of his shirt, the damp swallow in his throat. “I built it for the person who could understand what it means to be pulled back from the brink. Julian couldn't survive. But you did. You’re the life that came out of that water, Miles.”
“Am I?” Miles breathed.
Across the studio glass, the digital VU meters danced in smooth, undulating green and amber waves.
“You are,” Bryce insisted, his voice thick with unmasked hunger. “I brought something to the studio tonight, Miles. I want you to hear it.”
Bryce picked up the small velvet box. With a quiet, deliberate click, he flipped the brass spring hinge open right next to the diaphragm of the microphone.
The mechanical snap sounded unnervingly crisp over the national syndication feed.
“What was that?” Miles asked, his voice innocent, hovering on the verge of a gasp.
“Platinum,” Bryce said, his eyes darkening as he stared at the two gleaming rings nestled in the velvet slit. “Two bands. Hand-forged. Inlaid with Montana sapphire, the exact color of the deep water at Blackwood Ridge. One for me. One for you.”
A profound, suffocating silence gripped the line.
In that dead air, Bryce could hear the soft, phantom pulse of his own blood in his ears. Through the soundproof glass, down the far hall, he knew Teresa was probably staring at the switchboard in disbelief, network executives across three time zones scrambling to calculate the ratings jackpot of late-night radio’s first live, blind proposal.
“Bryce...” Miles murmured. The voice trembled, laden with an emotion so dense it seemed to bend the frequencies. “You haven't even seen my face. You don't know the scars. You don't know what the dashboard did to my cheek. My mouth... it doesn't smile the right way anymore.”
“I don’t give a damn about your scars,” Bryce snapped, the raw possessiveness tearing through his polished radio persona. “I want the voice that kept me alive for a hundred nights. I want the broken soul that fits into the hollow of my shoulder. I don’t care if you never turn on the lights in my apartment. I don’t care if you hide under the sheets until noon. You are coming home with me, Miles. Tonight. Tell me where you are.”
“You’re so impatient,” Miles sighed, a delicate, teasing smile audible in the timbre. “You want to skip right to the end of the song, Bryce. But you haven't answered my final question yet. The one from our deal.”
Bryce’s grip tightened on the edge of the console. “Ask it. I’ve answered everything you’ve thrown at me for ninety-nine nights. What could possibly be left?”
“Just one thing,” Miles said.
His voice didn't waver. In fact, the slight rasp that had characterized the caller for weeks seemed to melt away, replaced by an eerie, crystalline resonance that sounded terrifyingly pure.
In the background of the call, the subtle, rhythmic tapping began.
*Tap.*
*Tap.*
*Tap.*
Silver against lacquered mahogany.
“You’ve told the world how you tried to pull Julian through the window,” Miles murmured, his words falling like cool stones into a well. “You told the coroner the hydraulic locks were shorted out by the lake water. You told the newspapers that the door wouldn't budge no matter how hard you pulled.”
Bryce’s breath stuttered.
His hand drifted away from the ring box. A tiny, cold needle of dread prickled the base of his neck.
“Miles,” Bryce said, attempting to force the practiced, therapeutic cadence back into his throat. “We’ve already walked through that memory. The door was jammed by the collision. The frame was warped against the rocks.”
“Was it?” Miles asked softly.
The tapping stopped.
“The coroner’s divers pulled the sedan up three days later, Bryce,” the voice continued, smooth as glass, wrapping around the host’s consciousness like a tightening garrote. “The front bumper was caved in, yes. But the driver’s side door wasn't warped against rock. The hinges were straight. And the child-safety mechanical latch on the exterior edge... the little toggle switch inside the door jam... had been flipped down before the vehicle was rolled into the water.”
The blood seemed to freeze in Bryce Vance’s arteries.
The studio around him suddenly felt cavernous, vast and freezing cold. The red ON AIR light glared back at him from the wall, no longer a beacon of his triumph, but an unblinking, bloodshot eye recording every breath he drew.
Three million people were listening.
Network stations from Boston to San Francisco were routing this audio through their digital transmitters.
*‘Cut the feed,’* a frantic voice screamed inside Bryce’s skull. *‘Hit the emergency dump button. Kill Line 7.’*
His hand twitched toward the red console toggle.
“Don’t touch the switch, Bryce,” Miles whispered.
The caller spoke as if he were sitting in the chair beside him, looking directly at his fingers.
“If you cut the line now,” Miles murmured with devastating, gentle intimacy, “you’ll never find out where I am. You’ll spend the rest of your life staring at an empty bed, knowing you were one sentence away from being forgiven. You want to be clean, don't you? You brought the rings. You want us to be together.”
Bryce swallowed. His throat tasted of copper. The sweat on the back of his neck felt like melted ice.
“Miles...” Bryce rasped, his voice dropping into a desperate, strangled plead. “Why are you doing this? What does Julian have to do with us?”
“Julian is us,” Miles answered simply. “Julian was the boy who sat where you’re sitting right now. Julian was the boy whose research you stole to get the syndication contract in New York. Julian was the boy who stood on Blackwood Ridge in the rain, holding the printouts of your plagiarized dissertation, telling you that he was leaving you. That he was going to the board on Monday morning to tell them what an empty, fraudulent parasite you really were.”
The studio fell into a terrifying, vacuum-sealed silence.
Bryce’s knuckles turned bone-white against the edge of the mixer. The walls seemed to tilt inward.
Every lie he had spent four years cementing into stone was dissolving into the airwaves. But looking at the blinking green light of Line 7, Bryce’s mind didn't retreat into self-preservation. Twisted by weeks of psychological conditioning, poisoned by his own desperate narcissism, his brain inverted the terror.
