Forever Night (Darkness Falls Book 3)

Chapter Thirty-Two

"You know her?" Clara asked.

I hesitated, confused.

"Don't you recognise her?" Ethan asked.

Clara shone the torchlight on the dead girl's face again, and I peered closer, trying not to breathe in the death-reek. I gazed at the body, and suddenly it became blindingly clear. I knew where I'd seen her before and I knew what she was doing here.

"It's Jenny Simpson," I whispered.

With everything else that had happened lately, I'd completely forgotten the mystery of my missing lookalike, the girl who'd been snatched from the streets of Portsmouth shortly after Rachel's return. Even if I hadn't forgotten about her, I'd never have put the pieces together.

Rachel had wanted Noah to suffer and she'd devised a way that I could never have imagined. I'd thought she would beat him or feed from him, but even in my darkest visions I could never have imagined something this sick and twisted. The mad vampire had locked Noah up in this tiny stone room with the body of his wife and the body of a girl that he believed was his daughter. She'd made him think his entire family was dead, and she'd left him alone in the dark with their rotting bodies.

And she'd murdered an innocent girl as part of her sick scheme.

Something thick and hot clogged my throat, tears burning my eyes at the sheer cruelty of it.

All this time I'd thought of Noah as being virtually unbreakable, and here he was, a cowering, cringing shell, crying and whispering in a corner. His mind had shattered, splitting into tiny pieces, each shard locked in this eternal hell.

"Should've saved her. My Kiara..." Noah whispered.

A sob built in my throat and I pressed my lips together. It had a long time since I'd hoped that Noah would see me as a daughter rather than a soldier. For years I had ached for his approval and his love. I had ached for him to look at me with something other than dispassion in his eyes. I had just wanted to know that somewhere, however deep down inside him, Noah actually loved me.

Maybe now I had my answer.

His belief that I had died along with Ava was what had snapped his mind, and there was no mistaking the raw grief in his voice when he said my name. However he'd treated me in the past, a part of him must have cared about me. If he really had seen me as just another soldier then he would have chalked my death up to a casualty of war. He might have spared a moment of passing regret for a wasted life, but that would be all. He wouldn't have broken under the weight of grief if he didn't care for me. I'd never understand why he couldn't have shown me that during all the times I'd tried reaching out as a kid, but maybe it was because that it was how he himself had been raised. He was part of a vicious cycle of vampire hunting, one that had gone on and on until I broke the chain.

But none of that mattered now. Noah didn't even know who I was. The bitter irony of it sunk into me, a razor-edge cutting my heart. After all these years I'd finally started to see that my parents might actually care about me, and now it was too late. Ava was dead and Noah had gone mad.

"What should we do with him?" Ethan asked, eyeing Noah as he started to rock back and forth.

I noticed that Noah wasn't wearing his glasses, and something about that brought fresh pain to my heart. He'd worn glasses to work because he thought it made him look softer and more approachable, less like a secret killer, but in recent months I'd started to realise that he might actually need them. It had shocked me when I found out, realising that my indomitable father actually had vulnerabilities. Now it ached to see him without his glasses, knowing that his eyesight was failing.