Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
I spin around, Bertram at one side and Waylen at the other, my two worlds standing in the same damp concrete space.
It wasn’t real, I tell myself. Collette isn’t here.
But then I hear it again. “Mom!” she cries. The color drains from Waylen’s face, and I know that his fear, at least, is real. Collette is the one thing that was never an act between us.
We both shout her name and take off running in the direction her voice was coming from. There’s darkness up at the top of this platform that leads to the next level. I’m only vaguely aware of Bertram running after us, saying words I’m not able to hear over the rush of blood in my ears.
“Collette!” I scream.
“Where are you?” Waylen shouts, cupping his hands to project his voice.
We’re still running when Bertram snags my arm, causing me to tumble backward against his chest. I struggle as he coils his arms around me, keeping me from running. “Let go of me!” I demand.
“It’s a trap!” he insists.
But I’m thinking of Skylar’s dead body, and of the blood in Erin—Annie’s—apartment.
The woman who may have done these things has my daughter.
I do everything I know to force Bertram to let go.
Elbow him, stomp on his heel, bite him. But he’s still winning, dragging me away from whatever is waiting for me in the darkness at the top of this platform.
Waylen is still running, and then I hear the loud crack. Even as I tell myself it can’t be what I think it is, that I’m mistaken, I know that it was a gunshot. I can smell the gunpowder.
Blood puddles out onto the concrete. I can’t tell where it’s coming from or if he’s still breathing. My breath hitches.
Bertram has lifted me off the ground now and is running for the exit, no matter how I fight him. Through my haze, I realize that he’s just saved my life. I was going to be shot next.
There’s a metallic rattle, like chains coming loose. And then the security cage slams down before us, right as we are coming up to the exit.
Bertram sets me down only so he can grasp at the bars and try to shake them loose.
There’s a clap. Then another.
We both spin around to see the woman coming down from the top of the platform, sidestepping Waylen’s body as she does.
I know her as Erin Casimir. But the sneer on Bertram’s face confirms what I’ve already come to learn: This is Annie. The elusive ex-fiancée who he claims has been stalking him for years.
“Thank you for keeping things interesting,” she tells me. “When I hired you, all I wanted was for you to take the bait I set out. Bertram would be implicated in Skylar’s murder and go to prison.”
I want to lunge at her, to throw her to the ground and demand that she pay for what she’s done to Waylen and that she give me my daughter.
But logic—frustrating as it is—comes flooding back to me, and I know that I’m of no use to Collette if I’m dead.
And if Waylen is still alive, he needs me to find a way out of this so that I can get him help.
If I run to him, she’ll put a bullet in my back for sure.
So I tamp down my rage. “Why did you do it?” I ask. “Why hire us when you could have just filed a police report yourself when Skylar was killed?”
“Oh, come on, you’re smarter than that, aren’t you?
” Annie says. “You and your brother have been running your little operation for years and nobody has ever figured out that you’re behind all these mysterious criminals who got away with their crimes the first time.
You always make sure they end up in prison.
” She shrugs. “So I made Bertram out to be a criminal. You’d get him put in jail, and that would be that.
And then”—she smiles at Bertram sweetly, as though they’re sharing a romantic evening over champagne and clams—“he would have no choice but to love me. What choice would he have, cooped up in prison with no pretty girls to fall in love with him?”
Bertram’s jaw is clenched. “You’re leaving out the obvious part,” he says. “Margaux puts away guilty people. I’ve never committed a crime.”
But I’m still stuck on something else she said. She called Mr. X my brother. How did she know that?
Annie looks at me as though she’s just read my mind.
Her piercing gaze is so intense that I would believe she has the ability to do it.
“But you’re no stranger to the law, are you?
” she tells me. “You and your brother killed your parents. Got a nice little inheritance. They had a tidy sum tucked away, and you found out about it, didn’t you? ”
I stumble back a step.
“Don’t listen to her,” Bertram says in my ear.
But Annie goes on. “I bet you thought nobody would suspect a poor, sweet, innocent little girl. Or is that what your big brother told you? Did he convince you to do it? Or did you already want to?”
“No.” My voice comes out small, like I’m a child again.
“I’ve done my research,” Annie says. “I like to know who I’m working with. And look at us now, all cozy.” Her smile is so eerie.
“What do you want?” I rasp. “Where is my daughter?”
“How should I know?” Annie says. Then she laughs. “You mean this?” She holds up her phone, taps the voice memos screen, and plays back the scream I’d heard earlier. It is Collette’s voice, but that’s all it is. “I’m working on a new AI voice impression app. What do you think?”
My stomach is sick to think of Annie lurking about somewhere, collecting a recording of my daughter’s voice to add to her program. It speaks to just how long she’s been watching me.
She must have spoofed Erin’s phone number in a similar way.
When Mr. X and I started our vigilantism years ago, we were ahead of the game on technology. But now it’s so readily accessible that we aren’t the only ones with a trick or two up our sleeves.
But Annie doesn’t realize that she’s just given me something valuable. She’s told me that my daughter isn’t here, which means I don’t have to bargain for her safety. She’s already left Waylen for dead. Which means I have nothing to lose.
I lunge for her, tackling her to the ground in a single motion. She doesn’t fight me. I pin her arms behind her back and I straddle her with my knees, shouting for Bertram to find a way out. Maybe Waylen can still be saved.
And all the while, a nettling feeling starts to grow in the back of my head that Annie isn’t fighting me. That she’s gone to all this trouble to set me up, but now she isn’t fighting me.
As this feeling rises, so too does the smell of smoke.
Annie is laughing, a low chuckle that grows to a keening, hysterical pitch.
“One more dead girlfriend ought to do it,” she tells me.
Too late, I realize her plan. Her attempt to put Bertram in prison didn’t work out according to plan, but Annie is adaptable.
Of course. By ruining her initial plan, I’ve inadvertently handed her an even better one.
She’s going to set me up as having an affair with Bertram.
I’m the last dead girlfriend in a pattern of dead or missing girls.
Annie will slip back into the shadows, still technically missing.
But Bertram—it will look as though he lured me and Waylen here.
By contacting Elodie and telling her to hide Collette, I’ve played right into it.
Then I came here to de-escalate things. Bertram killed my husband in a jealous rage, and when that wasn’t enough to win me over, he set this place on fire and killed me, too.
Annie will make sure that he escapes somehow. Then she’ll disappear. The police will never believe him. There is no security footage to prove otherwise, apart from cameras on surrounding buildings capturing his car with a phony registration that won’t be linked to either of us.
billionaire can’t buy love. I can already see the headlines.
It’s so brilliant that I would believe it, too.
He will pay the ultimate price for not being enough to fix what was broken in her when she came back to him.
Worse than his prison sentence, he will spend the rest of his life telling a truth that nobody will believe.
I stagger to my feet. How long has the fire been burning? The faint smell becomes stronger. There must have been a car on the upper level that she set on fire, because I smell the singed metal and the rubber from the tires.
Bertram rattles the bars furiously. He doesn’t realize that he’s destined to live, in this game of Annie’s. Waylen and I are the ones who are meant to die.
Years ago, I ran away from the flames. This time, I have to reach Waylen’s prone form.
Annie is right that I would take the bait because I will save my husband or die trying.
Collette can’t lose us both. The first time I was in a fire, I ran away and saved myself. This time, I run right into the flames.