27. Colin
Colin
By the time I left the station, most everyone had been long gone.
Alex and Lucy never returned after the pointless expedition I sent them on.
The busy, regular buzzing of the department floor had died down to the hum of sleeping computers and a single glow of blue light coming from Micah’s office.
I’d been staring at the photo of Lily for so long, unmoving, that the conference room lights clicked off automatically, and I didn’t do anything to revive them.
After the realization hit me like a freight train, I slowly, shakily shuffled the photos of Caroline Stark into a neat pile and handed them to Micah.
“Lose these,” I told him, and he agreed with a single nod of his head, taking the photos from me and letting the shredder devour them in an angry grind.
I left the station at midnight. Stopped by the twenty-four-hour gym to hit the heavy bag. Took a cold shower there.
I hadn’t intended to sleep, but I didn’t want to go home, either.
After I redressed, I leaned back against the lockers, banging my head a couple of times against the thin, cold metal before sliding down to the hard floor, trying to decipher what it was exactly that I was feeling.
It was a storm of feelings. A storm that scared me.
I felt rage. Rage over the fact that I have been right this whole damn time, and I feel like I got fucking played.
Well, I guess technically I was wrong. Chloe didn’t “have something to do” with her stepfather’s deaths—she’s entirely responsible for them.
Caroline wasn’t protecting Chloe. Chloe was protecting her mother, and that knowledge roared to life something inside me.
Something that felt a lot like empathy. Because I can’t truly say the lengths I wouldn’t go to protect my own mother.
To protect myself. It broke my heart to wonder about what exactly happened inside those walls to lead Chloe to act so recklessly, so savagely.
The other feeling streaming through me, tearing me to shreds, was uncertainty.
I cared about Chloe. I was still worried about her being out in the world with those men unaccounted for, possibly hunting her.
I had to laugh at myself as I sat on that hard locker room ground.
The puzzle pieces fell from the ceiling and scattered on the ground around me, before rearranging themselves perfectly into a full picture of Chloe Stark. Capable, conniving Chloe Stark.
She killed her stepdads. She killed Richard. She killed Grayson. I was certain of it all.
Who else has she killed? Who else will she kill?
I was also anxious about the fact that Chloe had gone to Sunset Peak last night, and by the time I checked her location history, it showed she’d been at my mother’s apartment complex for hours before the tracker seemed to have died.
A quick phone call to the front desk affirmed for me that my mother was safe and sound, but why had Chloe gone there?
And where the fuck was that surveillance team that was supposed to be watching her and her friends?
And the final feeling that wound through my body, the one that felt especially hard to come to terms with, was indifference.
I wasn’t just fucking the Baby Widow, I was falling for her, and that had me willing to turn a blind eye to all of this. Which is the exact opposite of what I said I’d do when I stood in front of that podium ten years ago and took my oath.
Turning a blind eye is the exact opposite of what I said I’d do again, when I was promoted to detective.
To serve and protect. That was the promise I made.
But suddenly, I don’t know who I’m supposed to serve and protect anymore. Because clearly, all this time, I’ve been trying to protect the wrong people. Victims who were never victims to begin with. Men who were various shades of monster.
Still, it wasn’t the uncertainty or indifference that pulled me into Chloe’s driveway.
It was the rage.
When I woke up on the floor of the locker room, I forced myself to rise.
To put one foot in front of the other all the way to my truck.
The sun had risen. People were moving about.
The coffee shop next door was flipping their sign and turning the lights on.
The man at the vending cart outside was rearranging today’s newspapers on his stand, drawing my attention to the headline that I already knew was written by Barry MacGregor.
Angel of Mercy Takes Last Life by Train.
It was a curious headline. Curious enough that I crossed toward the cart and pulled a five-dollar bill from my pocket on autopilot, shoving it in the direction of the vendor in exchange for the grey folds of thin paper.
I gripped it in my hand as I turned back to my truck without more than a glance at the article, because I already knew.
Chloe’s garage is open, and her mother’s black Suburban is parked right next to her little blue Bug inside. I don’t know how long I stare at the two vehicles, finding another stark contrast between the two sides of her.
The bright, cheerful side. And the dark and deadly side.
Eventually, I climb out of my truck and move up her driveway, each step bringing me more clarity but also, more conflict.
I enter her house through the garage door without knocking, and she turns to me with a bright smile.
“Panda bear,” she sings, reaching out to me from the kitchen. I cross to her in long strides and pull her into me, letting her wrap her arms around my body. I inhale her scent, that poisonous, hypnotizing blend of sweet berries flowing from her hair and skin. “You’re here early.”
“You’re here early,” I return, resting my cheek against the top of her head, holding on to this moment for just a little while longer until it all tumbles away from me. “What time did you guys make it back?”
She pulls away and leans back against the counter, lifting her fresh coffee to her red lips and taking a long sip before answering.
I’m keenly attuned to her this morning. On the lookout for lies and half-truths.
Searching for tells in the way her lips twitch or her eyes shift.
She doesn’t have many, but when her gaze snags on mine for a second too long, and she’s no longer sipping the mug in her hands but merely holding it near her mouth, I know instantly she’s trying to buy time.
She rolls her eyes away from me, setting her coffee down. “Just about an hour ago.” Lie. The tracker in her mother’s vehicle clicked back to life just in time to show her arriving home at one in the morning. “Can I make you a coffee?”
With a shake of my head, I decline her offer. “You were on the road at six then?”
She tilts her head as she assesses me, maybe wondering why I’m asking such pointed questions. Maybe feeling like a cornered animal, though she doesn’t appear frazzled or feral in the slightest.
“About six, yeah,” she eventually says. She lifts her mug into the air in my direction. “You sure? You seem…off. Have you had any caffeine yet?”
That smile. Charming and disarming. Easy. Beautiful.
I let an honest chuckle pass my lips. Off is an understatement. Fucking nuclear is how I feel, and at the same time, so insanely cool and collected that I am scaring myself.
Vera Bryan’s car was smashed into a thousand pieces by an unmanned freight train at midnight last night.
It’s seven a.m. now, and the crews are still cleaning up the wreckage.
Probably will be for the next few days, if not weeks.
The train tracks that the freight was traveling on divide Sunset Peak from Devil’s Peak.
It’s the only route without having to go around the entire Four Peaks Highway, through North Peak and Eagle’s Peak, which would take hours.
When I pulled into Chloe’s driveway just ten minutes ago, news reports detailed that the road had been closed since the accident in the middle of the night, and likely would be—at a minimum—the remainder of the day. They encouraged people to plan their travel accordingly.
Chloe couldn’t have left Sunset Peak at six a.m. this morning and made it back already—unless she was on this side of the tracks before midnight. And why would she have been, unless she knew she’d be stuck on the other side?
“I don’t need caffeine.” I move toward her at the counter, spinning her so she’s bent over the cold marble and pressing my hips to her ass. She groans, letting her head fall forward and pressing her ass against me harder as her fingertips spread under her chest.
“What do you need then, detective?” she whispers, turning her head to the side to try and get a look back at me.
I let the rough skin of my hand drag against her smooth thigh, under her dress and over the bend of her hip. Digging my fingers into her bone, I use my other hand to free my hard cock between us, stroking myself as she wiggles her hips in front of me.
“I need you,” I rasp, lowering myself over her back.
In one slow movement, her underwear is pushed to the side and I’m plunging into her heat.
“I missed you,” I groan, sliding in and out of her wet cunt, feeling the twitch of her inner walls around my thickness as she sighs and lifts her hips a little higher into the air.
I did miss her. And that’s just one single thread of silk in this tangled web she has me trapped in. There are a hundred other threads, maybe even more than that. But they are so tightly intertwined that I can’t tell where one ends and another begins.
I can’t tell the loud truth from the quiet secrets.
“I missed you,” she says back through a moan, and it just pisses me off. Is any of this even real?
I pound against her ass and let her high-pitched grunts and whines slink through my veins like ice.
Hatred. Lust. Anger. Suspicion. Hope. My enchantment with her.
It’s all frustratingly convoluted inside me and building into something I already know I won’t recognize when it releases.
Hell, I already feel like I barely recognize myself.
Why am I fucking her, when I meant to show up here and haul her ass to jail?
Brushing my lips against the edge of her ear as I thrust into her, I slide my tongue along her skin.
“I need you,” I say again, and I can see the corner of her lips tug into a smirk.
I flatten one hand on her ass, and my other hand slides up her neck, gripping her jaw and forcing us upright and her head back against my body.
“You have me, Colin.”
“I need you.” Thrust. “To tell me the truth.” Thrust.
And then I pull the rolled-up newspaper from my back pocket and flatten it on the counter right in front of us.
I squeeze my hand tighter around her jaw, holding her head in place against my chest, and I can only assume her gaze is straining to see it from the angle I have her in, but I do know she sees it.
Her pussy flexes at my roughness. At the growl of my voice.
She’s trapped between my body and the cold countertop.
Trapped between my desire and hatred for her.
But come to think of it, that’s where she’s always been.
“The truth,” she breathes, wrapping her soft hand around mine on her throat.
“Yeah, baby. The truth.” We’re cheek to cheek, and it reminds me of when she was gazing over my shoulder at my stupid fucking panda bear. “How many?”
Her breaths are coming in quick pants and I slow my movements, lazily dragging my hips back and forth, way too lost in the feel of the soft pressure of her pussy walls wrapped around me.
But I don’t release her face. I keep her cheeks gripped between my fingers and force myself to focus on why I came here—even if I’m now balls deep in a murderer.
“How. Many?” I bare my teeth against the side of her head, the fingers of my other hand digging into the flesh of her ass. “How many, Stark?”
“I’m going to come,” she cries, arching her neck against my grip. Fuck. So am I, and that’s so fucking twisted.
Releasing her face, I push her forward and pull out even though I don’t want to, even though I know I should want to. The head of my dick tickles her entrance, and I just barely push inside before pulling out again.
“Tell me,” I demand. She glances over her shoulder at me, honey eyes sparkling, full lips spread in a smile.
The whole look is somewhere between an annoyed glare and devious amusement.
I move my fingers to her core, letting them disappear inside her slick center before pulling them out and rubbing circles against her slippery, sensitive clit.
She moans at the touch, her face falling forward again as her hips buck against my fingers.
“Tell me how many people you’ve killed and I’ll let you come. ”
There’s a long pause. A heavy silence that falls around us, penetrated only by the sound of my fingers sliding against her clit and her desperate mews.
“Does it matter?” she wonders aloud, her voice breathy.
No. “Yes.”
And then it happens. A whisper. One syllable. “Ten.”
I slide my dick back inside her, gripping her hips in my hands and slamming against her ass until she’s screaming and her fingers are turning white from clawing at the countertop, crumpling the grey paper. Until my jaw is clenched so tight I can feel the muscle in my cheek straining.
It’s the confirmation that flows through me, grabbing hold of my orgasm and flying through every inch of my body as my come ribbons out of me and into her.
I’ve always been right. She’s dangerous.
Her pussy twitches around my cock as she comes, too, and I fist her hair in my hand, wrenching her neck backward and keeping my pace inside her until her moans quiet and her body starts to sag.
In a few swift movements, I release her, tuck myself back into my pants, and pull my handcuffs out, snapping one around her wrist and the other around the kitchen drawer handle in front of her.
I have her right where I’ve always wanted her.
Now I just need to figure out what to do with her.