The Deep Dark Web | lrh

Eight

The next morning, Luke isn't in his room.

The sheets are perfect, with no signs of being touched aside from the wrinkles I'd made on it the night before.

I wander around the house, calling out for Luke, but to no avail. His car is gone. So is the gym bag under his bed; in it's place, a folder.

Quickly, I take it out, feeling a shiver course throughout my veins as I unzip it and allow the contents to fall out. What I see before me makes my heart fall to the very pit of my stomach.

They're pictures. And not just any pictures, but pictures of me.

Pictures of me laughing, smiling, on the bench outside with my hand out trying to get him to stop the shot. Some of them, I was aware of.

Most of them, however, are pictures I never knew existed.

There's one of me sat at the kitchen table, poring over bill notices with a frustrated look on my face. Another is of me sat on the swing outside, my back turned to the house. There's one of me lying on my bed, scrolling through my phone.

The more I go through them, the more terrified I feel. It goes from me on the porch swing outside to me fully asleep and unconscious on my bed, the flash on, eyes completely shut.

Then the worst one falls out, and I can't help but let out a slight gasp.

It's of Luke and I, on a night that I don't currently remember seeing as I was flat-out drunk at the time it was taken. I'm slurring my words, lips formed in an awkward shape as Luke stands right next to me, a drunken smirk on his otherwise perfect face.

His eyes are dark, much like they were a few nights ago. And his hand is bright against the flash, knuckles paling as his fingers clutch the handle of a short blade.

In the picture, he's holding it up to my throat. Threatening to slice it, with the calmest, most psychotic expression I've ever seen plastered across his face; the face I'd always felt safe around, up until now.

That's when it all comes together, when all the jigsaw pieces begin to fall into place. Red Rum isn't a place. The blood on the shirt wasn't Luke's, but somebody elses. And the knives- my chest deflates as I think of how Ashley was right, how she had a point all along.

But Red Rum isn't a place. It was never a place. Luke never went out every single night to a club with Michael- at least, they never went to a club. They went somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn't called Red Rum-

I place a hand over my mouth, holding back a cry as I dissect the two words that used to hold very little meaning to me. In a slight whisper, I say it, as if it has all the power to disappear if I so much as acknowledge it. "Murder."

"What the hell are you doing?"