Chapter 10
ROWAN
The coffee shop has the same nervous energy as the hotel. Everyone seems normal on the surface, but I can feel their fear drifting around, taut as a wire. That murder really has everyone worked up, and I wonder, for the first time, what my rival did that was so terror-inducing.
I specifically craft my kills so they don’t like kills, and I take pride in that—in protecting myself, in being clever.
But I suppose, wading through the fear in the coffee shop to a small table near the back, that I can see why someone might want to generate all this terrified energy. Why they might want to bask in it.
It certainly helps distract from my own anxiety over being on a date with Abi.
I get there early because I don’t want to make Abi wait. I order a plain iced coffee and sip on it, watching the door while I count down until our meeting time. I also listen, because half the people in the coffee shop are talking about the murder.
“Can’t believe something like that would happen here,” says one woman to her friend, both of them older and clearly wealthy, the kind of people who live elsewhere but own a house on the beach for whenever they want to get away. “Can you imagine?”
“I heard it was a gang initiation,” her friend says. “With Rosado being so close to the border and all.”
I roll my eyes. I had more than my share of encounters with the gangs that run drugs through south Texas. Their kills are strategic, just like the assignments Uncle Nash gave me.
“Do they know who it was?” This question isn’t from the two wealthy ladies, but from a surfer-type hanging around the bar, bothering the barista in his board shorts and flip flops. “ID’d the vic?”
“Not that I know,” she says, sliding glasses down the bar. “I heard it was a tourist. An out-of-towner.”
“Oh, yeah? Who told you that?”
She says a name, but I don’t hear it, because everything in that coffee shop becomes overpowered by the sweet scent of lantana and orchids.
The bell over the door chimes, but I already know it’s Abi.
She’s as pretty as she was last night, although she’s pulled her hair back, and she’s not wearing her thick-framed glasses.
That just makes it easier to see her big blue eyes as she sweeps them around the space.
When they land on me, my heart nearly erupts out of my chest.
I still manage to lift my hand in greeting.
And Abi smiles, right at me, and it’s like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
“Hey,” she says when she comes over to my table. “You’re here.”
She says it like she thought I might not be.
“Well, yeah, of course.” I hope my voice isn’t too shaky. “Do you want me to get you something?”
Abi hesitates, just for a second. I think my question surprised her.
“Sure,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”
I’m already pushing away from the table, my wallet in hand. “I’ll get it for you. What do you want?”
Abi blinks at me. “Um, how about an iced lavender latte?”
“Coming right up.”
It’s interesting how easy it is to fall into the role of Rowan Hanover when twelve hours earlier she was pressed against me, and I wasn’t Rowan Hanover at all.
I order her drink and wait for the barista to prepare it. When I come back to the table, Abi gives me a somewhat embarrassed smile. She’s scared, too. I can sense her fear as much as I can sense everyone else’s.
“Thanks for meeting me,” she says, stirring her drink around with the straw. “I know—I know it came out of nowhere, but I just...” She looks up at me, gnawing a little on her bottom lip. “I just wanted to talk to someone, and you seemed nice when we met the other day.”
An odd, wriggling feeling rolls through my chest. I think it might be guilt. After all, I’m not exactly who she thinks I am.
“I’m happy to talk,” I say, a million other questions bubbling around in my head.
I know she doesn’t really have friends here in Rosado.
I never see her going out with anyone. She certainly doesn’t go on dates.
She spends her holidays alone, which has always worked out for me, since it means I don’t have to spend them alone, either.
But I want to know why. That’s always been the missing piece.
“When you texted about the murder this morning,” she says, looking down at her latte. “I don’t know, I just needed to get out of my examination room. I—”
She stops, and I feel something drifting off her, a hesitation and a whiff of lust, a ghost of what I felt last night. For a second, I think she might tell me about it.
Instead, she says, “I agreed to autopsy the victim.”
“Isn’t that what you do?” I ask carefully.
Abi looks up at me, her long side-swept bangs falling across the tops of her eyes. “Yeah,” she says. “But I knew her.”
I freeze, my fingers tightening around my coffee glass. “Who was she?” I say softly, before I can stop myself. But I need to know. This killer, I need to know everything I can about him, if only to keep my Abi safe.
Abi bites her lips, more hesitancy coming off her. “I probably shouldn’t say,” she murmurs. “But I’m going to. It’s gonna be in the papers soon enough anyway.”
I wait, watching her.
“She was a reporter.” Her voice is steely. “She lived in Magnolia.”
I don’t react. I don’t show Abi that I know what that means, that I know about her past.
“Her name was Olivia Pearce,” Abi continues, and I recognize the name immediately.
I have copies of all the articles that Olivia wrote about Abi from back when I was a teenager, when Abi first moved to Rosado.
All I knew about her was that she had killed someone and that she was beautiful.
I wanted to understand everything I could about that kill, so I went to the library and pulled issues of the newspaper Olivia wrote for and copied anything that mentioned Abi’s name.
I still have those articles, too, tucked away in a file folder in my desk.
But of course I can’t let Abi know any of this. Rowan Hanover is a stranger to her.
“How’d you know her?” I say.
It’s the right response. Abi jerks her gaze to meet mine, and I feel a flutter of her excitement. A kind of—lightness. Or relief.
She thinks I don’t know about her past.
But I do know. And I really don’t fucking like that this interloper killed someone who helped clear Abi’s name ten years ago. I don’t like that this murder has any connection to Abi at all.
“She helped me out with something when I was younger,” Abi says carefully.
“It’s not—it’s not important. But it freaked me out that she could—” Abi looks off to the side, her expression distant.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to dump all this on you.
I just needed to be around another living person, and you—”
“Seemed nice?” I offer. Abi smiles. Laughs a little.
“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, you had a Blood Raiser 3 poster in your office. You seemed like someone—” She shrugs a little. “Someone I could be friends with.”
My heart races a million miles a second. Friends. She wants to be friends.
It’s a start. A step closer to having her the way I want to have her. Not like last night, where I had to take. Maybe she doesn’t want the real me, but I think if Rowan Hanover asked to touch her—not right now, of course, but soon—she would say yes.
“I don’t have any friends who like the Blood Raiser movies,” I say.
Abi laughs, a kind of tension-breaking laugh. I’ve heard it before, from victims. It’s more hysterical-sounding when they do it. And not nearly as sweet.
“I mean, I guess I technically do,” she says. “But they don’t live here. One of them’s always moving around, and the other’s on the East Coast.”
I know about them, too. Chloe Monroe and Penelope Noble.
I’ve scoured every photo they’ve posted across social media.
Parties from college. A vacation to Florida that they all took together.
I know Chloe is a data analyst, and Penelope’s an environmental activist who moves around to chase different protests.
I’ve spent hours learning about Abi. Killing and Abilene Snow, those are my two biggest interests.
But of course I can’t let her know any of that.
“That sucks,” I finally say. “Not having friends close by.” I sip on my drink, barely tasting it. “I don’t have a lot of friends, either. I have to spend all my time at the hotel.”
“Oh, I can imagine,” Abi says. “God, that seems like so much work. Running a hotel.”
“I fell into it. My uncle left me the hotel when he died.”
I wonder if she remembers Uncle Nash’s death. She was still living here when it happened.
“My uncle left me the funeral parlor,” she says with a laugh. “Funny. That’s another thing we have in common, isn’t it?”
“We both inherited real estate from our uncles?”
“Yeah.” She smiles. “Well, real estate and a business.” She pushes her hair behind her ear. “I don’t do funerals, though. I wasn’t really good at that part. Not like Uncle Vic.”
“So what part were you good at?” I can’t believe how easy it is to talk to her like a normal person, to learn things I can’t find out from watching her in the dark.
Abi rubs her finger around the rim of her cup. “I liked working with the bodies,” she says softly. “Uncle Nash would let me help with the preparation. Putting on makeup, that sort of thing. I liked how— unjudgmental they were, I guess.”
All I can do is sit and stare at her. I’m afraid that if I say anything, it’ll scare her off.
“God, I’m probably freaking you out right now,” she laughs, shaking her head.
“No!” I say it too quickly, and she jerks her gaze up to mine. “No, I think it’s interesting. I feel like maybe running a hotel and running a funeral parlor are kind of similar?”
I have no idea where I pulled that out from, but Abi tilts her head, waiting to hear more
“You have to make people happy,” I say. “Make them feel welcome.”
“Honestly, you’re right,” Abi says. “It’s all hospitality, right? That’s why I like doing autopsies instead of mortuary science. The dead don’t care what you do to them.”
That’s the same reason why I like killing people more than running a hotel. Another similarity between us that I can’t say out loud.
“I wish my guests didn’t care what we did to them,” I say. “But, alas, they care way too much.”
Abi laughs at that, and I can feel her anxiety lifting, just a bit. So I start telling her about running the Palm Breeze Hotel to see if I can lighten her mood even more. To my surprise, it works.
I tell her about the Patton family, who show up every July with their seven incredibly destructive children.
And about Mrs. Gomez, a widow who spends the whole summer at the hotel, lounging by the swimming pool like an aging movie star.
The more I talk, the more stories come out, and soon we’re having a real conversation, me and Abi, our words crossing back and forth across the table.
I’ve daydreamed about this a million times, probably even more than I’ve daydreamed about fucking her. And it’s just as exhilarating as it was to kiss her last night, and to feel her arousal seeping through her panties.
And it’s just as disappointing when she cuts it short, too.
“God, I’m sorry,” Abi says, checking the time on her phone. “I didn’t mean to stay this long. I’ve got to get that autopsy done.”
“Do you need—support, or something?” I imagine stepping into the examination room as Rowan Hanover. But Abi shakes her head.
“I just need to get out of my head for a while, and this helped. A lot. Thank you.” Her blue eyes meet mine. “Really. I appreciate it. I know how weird—”
“It’s not weird,” I say quickly. “I like talking to you.”
A pink blush creeps into Abi’s cheeks, and, just for a second, I catch the same heightened orchid scent from last night. My cock stirs.
“I like talking to you, too,” she says. “Maybe we can do it again?”
“Anytime.”
When she stands up from the table, I do, too. I’m a gentleman, after all.
“Thanks for the latte,” she says. “I’ll text you, okay? Maybe this weekend?”
“Sure.” As if I’m going to wait until the weekend to see her again. I’ve never needed much sleep, which means I’ll be watching Abi’s house tonight. And tomorrow night. And every night until I make sure that the interloper who killed Olivia Pearce breathes for the last time.
I don’t believe in coincidences. Uncle Nash taught me that. And it’s certainly not a coincidence that Olivia Pearce died in Rosado, not Magnolia. I’m a killer who sends messages, so I know what a killer’s message looks like.
“Thanks again,” Abi says sweetly, lingering by the table.
“Let me walk you out,” I say.
Let me do anything to protect you.