Dylan Moran stared down at me, his mouth bent into a hard frown, his blue eyes as implacable as a stormy ocean. The leather jacket he wore was wet, where Tai had soaked him as she fought for her life. He had a dirty red brick from the back patio in his hand. Before I could get to my feet and put my hands around his neck, he swung the brick toward the side of my head. I saw it coming, heard the rush of air. I tried to duck, but I wasn’t fast enough.

A white-hot eruption of pain went off inside my skull like fireworks, and then I was gone.

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 24

I awoke to a raging headache and the coppery taste of blood. My eyes blinked open. At first, I saw only the ceiling fan rotating slowly above me, making a low rattle. Then I shifted my head and saw that I lay in bed. When I tried to move, I found that I was tied down, spread-eagled, my wrists and ankles tightly bound with silk neckties to the four corners of the bed frame.

Night hadn’t fallen yet, but the room around me was dark. The heavy curtains were closed. In the dense shadows, I could barely distinguish a kitchen chair that had been pulled into the corner of the bedroom. Someone was sitting in it. A dark shape watched me. I could hear his breathing and the rustle of his clothes as he moved. He knew I was awake now. With the scrape of a match, I saw a tiny flame illuminating the skin of his hands. Then the sting of cigarette smoke made its way to me.

“Hello, Dylan,” my doppelgänger said.

He pushed himself off the chair and came and stood over the bed. I stared into a black mirror, his face identical to mine. He had the collar of my father’s leather jacket pulled up, framing his neck like the wings of a crow. Under it, he wore a collarless olive-colored shirt, untucked and misbuttoned. He had wild, messy dark hair, and he hadn’t shaved in days. The bones of his face jutted out in angles that looked sharp enough to make you bleed. He was the same as me in every physical way, but we were two different people. His mouth had no expression, whereas Karly had always told me she could read my mood by my lips. Given the things he’d done, I expected to see cruelty shining in his blue eyes, but his fixed gaze offered no evidence of his sadism. The bubbling cauldron inside him had to be at the bottom of a deep well.

“You didn’t have to kill Tai,” I said.