Chapter 2 Rowan
ROWAN
Rap rap rap.
I look up from my computer and frown at my closed office door just in time for it to swing open. Julia, my most reliable front desk clerk, sticks her head in. “Hey, boss,” she says. “There’s a lady here to see you.”
“Who?” I say, keeping my breath calm. “Is it the police again?”
Julia hesitates. “I don’t think so,” she finally says. “She just asked if she could talk with you about—” She swallows, her throat bobbing. “You know.”
So I guessed right, it seems. I knew this would be a challenging one, having a death so close to my hotel. But I have a message planned, something I very much want to say, and unfortunately, the Palm Breeze Hotel was the only place I could say it.
A risk I was willing to take. Especially for Abilene Snow.
“Is she a reporter?” I ask.
“Maybe?” Julia shrugs. “Do you want me to ask?”
I consider it briefly. No, better to just talk to her, whoever she is, and get this over with.
The sooner everyone—from the Rosado police to the insurance company to Mr. Nielson’s steely-faced daughter, his only next of kin—understands that this was just a terrible, terrible accident, the sooner we can move on, and I can start planning my next kill.
“Rowan?” Julian prompts.
I blink, forcing myself to focus. “No, just send her in. I guess you didn’t get her name?”
Julia shakes her head, and I wave her away and slump back in my chair, staring at my darkened computer screen and the scatter of papers across my desk.
Uncle Nash left me one thing in his will: the Palm Breeze Hotel, his most profitable property, which is how I became a hotelier at the age of eighteen.
All his other riches—the mansion on Aransas Street, the other hotels and restaurants along the beachfront, the millions in his bank account—were distributed among the various business partners and girlfriends he had accumulated before I threw him through that window ten years ago.
I didn’t mind, though. I hadn’t killed him to get his money.
Another knock at the door, even though Julia had left it hanging open. I glance up, rearranging my expression to look like the hapless hotelier everyone needs to think I am.
Except I find Abilene Snow standing in the doorway.
My whole body goes rigid, and for a moment, all I can hear is the frantic pounding of my heart in my ears.
She knows it’s me, I think, and the idea terrifies me more than I expect.
After all, isn’t that why I started all this up two years ago?
Because it was the only way I could conjure up the strength to talk to her? To get her attention?
Well, I have her attention now. Her blue eyes are fixed on me from behind her glasses, and I think I may have forgotten how to breathe.
“You’re Rowan Hanover?” she says, a hint of surprise in her voice.
I swallow because my mouth is too dry to talk. To buy myself some time, I stand up to greet her. But she keeps staring at me. I have to say something.
“Y-yes,” I finally stammer out. Get a grip, I tell myself, in that harsh, cold voice that sounds like Uncle Nash. Don’t act suspicious.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she says. “My name’s Abi Snow—”
Abi. She goes by Abi. How did I not know that?
“—And I work as the coroner for Rosado County.”
My heart is jackhammering wildly, but I somehow manage to gesture for her to come into my office. When she does, she sweeps her gaze around, her eyes lingering on the framed movie posters I have on the walls.
“How—” My voice comes out shaky and high-pitched. I force myself to focus. “How can I help you, Ms. Snow?”
“Oh, call me Abi.” She turns toward me, her face lit up with a pretty smile.
“I like those posters, by the way.” She nods at the Italian Blood Raiser 3 poster I bought a few years ago, a lurid painting of the movie’s female killer holding a long, sharp knife.
She looks a little like Abilene, with her long dark hair and high cheekbones, which is why it’s my favorite of the series.
It takes me a second longer to register what the actual Abilene just said to me.
“Thank you.” The words come out clearly, thank god. “I, um, I wanted to make my office feel a little more personal.”
“I don’t blame you.” She glides up to my desk, moving with the same elegant grace I admire every time I watch her from afar. Seeing it up close, though—
I can feel myself getting hard. I also feel myself studying everything about her so I can remember it later.
She sinks into the chair across from my desk, and then I sit down, too.
“I love the Blood Raiser movies,” she says lightly. “Especially the third one.”
I knew this about her already. She watches it every year in the fall, around the time the first cold front blows through.
The year her uncle died, she watched the whole series, all eight of them, one after another.
I watched them with her, peering in from where I’d perched in the tree that lined up against her upstairs living room, shivering in my thin coat.
“The third one’s my favorite, too,” I say stiffly, hoping it’s what a normal person would say.
Abilene—Abi—smiles at that, just for a second. Then it vanishes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t actually come here to talk about movies. I’m just—” She stops, tucks her hair behind her ear. “I wanted to talk about the death that happened here a few days ago.”
My chest tightens. With fear or excitement, I don’t know. Still, I manage to find the words I know I need to say.
“I already spoke to the police.”
Abi blushes, her cheeks turning a lovely shade of red, and for a second, I swear I can smell her blood. My cock strains against my pants, and I shift in my seat, trying to get more comfortable.
“I’m not with the police,” she says. “I do work with the Rosado sheriff’s department, but I’m not—I’m not really here in an official capacity?”
She turns the last word up like it’s a question, and she gives me this kind of sheepish look like she expects me to kick her out of my office. Which of course I would never do. Having her so close, having her speak to me, is intoxicating. Even more so now than it was ten years ago at the funeral.
“So why are you here?” I say slowly, hoping I can keep the excitement out of my voice.
Abi bites her lower lip, her pretty eyes darting around.
She’s nervous. Scared, even, although not the kind of scared I’m used to.
That’s one of the things about me, one of the things that Uncle Nash was so keen to exploit.
I can sense what people are feeling. I can sense when they’re near, the way a dog can sniff out its quarry.
“I—Look, I don’t want to alarm you, or anything.
” She leans forward, the chair creaking.
I grip my own chair’s armrests, afraid that if she gets any closer, I won’t be able to control myself.
“Like I said, I’m the Rosado County coroner.
And I’ve noticed—patterns, I guess you could call them, in some of the bodies I’ve examined.
That’s what I want to talk to you about. ”
My heart is going to erupt out of my chest. She knows she knows she knows.
The words circle wildly around in my head.
Well, maybe she doesn’t know, but she’s seen them.
The letters I chose for her and carved into the skin of my victims, small enough to go unnoticed by most. But she noticed them.
Just like I hoped she would. No—like I knew she would.
Abi’s staring at me, waiting for a response.
“Patterns?” I squeak out.
She nods. “It may be nothing, but I saw that same pattern in the most recent death, the one that occurred here at your hotel.”
My thoughts are racing. This isn’t how I expected this to play out. I thought I’d finish my message first, and then reveal myself to her. Not as Rowan Hanover, but as myself, my true self.
I never expected Abilene Snow to come to the hotel, to sit in Rowan Hanover’s office, to be bathed in the sunlight from the window behind his desk. But that’s what she’s doing right now, and as beautiful as she is, it’s all wrong.
I swallow. “What are you saying?” I finally ask. A prompt, really. I want to know more about what she’s thinking.
“I’m not sure.” She shakes her head, frowning a little. “I’ll be perfectly transparent with you, Mr. Hanover—“
My insides twist, hearing that name. My disguise. The face I put on to hide what I am. Still, I have to play along.
“Rowan,” I say. “Please.”
“Rowan.” Abi smiles as she says it, and it’s like music or the roll of the Gulf waves over your feet or someone’s final exhalation of breath.
It’s that pretty, the way she says my disguise.
“Rowan, I really do want to be clear. I’m not here in any official capacity.
The sheriff’s department, the city police—they haven’t taken my reports on this seriously. ”
It’s a bit of a slap, hearing that she’s reported her findings. Those words are for her, not Rosado’s bumbling police officers. But I also suppose I can’t fault her for it.
“I was hoping I could talk to your staff,” she says, the words coming out quickly. “Not any of your guests, of course. Just staff. If they saw anything, or…”
Her voice kind of trails off, and she looks at me helplessly. My little detective, and it takes every ounce of my willpower not to come clean to her right then and there. But of course I know not to do that. Uncle Nash was an abusive piece of shit, but he taught me how not to get caught.
Besides, there’s no fun in it. She only came to me because the kill was at the Palm Breeze Hotel, not because she actually knows it’s me.
“You can talk to anyone you’d like,” I say. They didn’t see anything, of course. Not even Maria, who found Mr. Nielson’s body. “Although I’m not sure they’ll have anything for you. It does seem like it was an accident.”
God, it hurts me to lie to her about that, especially when disappointment flickers darkly through her expression.
“I appreciate it,” she says, squaring up her shoulders. “I really just—I mean, maybe this one was an accident, but—” She gives me a thin, trembling smile. “But if there is a killer out there, we should do something about it, shouldn’t we?”
My throat is too dry to speak, so I just nod. All my emotions are twisted up strangely because Abi being here means my messages worked, and I desperately want to know what she knows. What she thinks she knows.
But I also don’t want her solving anything too soon.
“If it’s not too much trouble—“ Abi prompts.
Embarrassment floods through me. I need to stay focused. “No, of course, it’s not. I’ll call up Maria now, and I can let the other staff know they can talk to you if they have anything.”
My heart is racing at a million miles per hour, but god, it’s so lovely the way Abi smiles gratefully at me.
I can feel the relief rushing through her, too.
I suppose she was afraid I was going to turn her down or kick her out of the hotel.
As if I would ever do that, even though it’s utterly bizarre to have her in the same room with me and have her aware of it.
I fumble for the phone on my desk and stab in the number for the housekeeping department, trying very hard not to look too closely at Abi, to play it cool so she doesn’t suspect there’s something wrong with me. That I’m the one she’s looking for.
The phone jangles in my ear. When Darcy, the head of housekeeping, answers, I manage to say, “Could you send Maria up to my office when she gets a chance? There’s someone who’d like to talk to her,” and have it sound normal.
Like I’m just a normal 28-year-old hotel owner and not a killer who finally impressed the woman he’s been pining over for a decade.
“Thanks,” Abi says when I hang up. “I really do appreciate it.”
I clear my throat and pull on every ounce of training that Uncle Nash gave me in his time on this earth. He said it was for my own good, and I suppose it was, in its way. But it still hurts to have to pretend.
“Of course,” I tell her. “Anything to catch a killer.”