Chapter 13 #2
Of course, Waylon would be hers. Irritating her into the afterlife.
The crash of the chandelier, crystals breaking into smithereens, brought Fletcher back to reality. One that did not and would not ever involve dissecting the color of Waylon’s eyes, because she wasn’t dead.
She wasn’t dead. She was—
Touching Waylon. Everywhere. A knee slotting between his legs. His arms banding around her waist. Their hearts beating out of sync, their lungs out of rhythm.
The sudden knowledge of all the ways their bodies pressed together put Fletcher at serious risk of spontaneous combustion.
She heaved herself upright. Standing, she felt each step crunch with cut glass. A puddle of dark blood inched toward her heels. Dim without the chandelier, the room had lost its former charm. It took her vision a few blinks to adjust.
All that ornate crystal easily weighed a hundred pounds, and Brian hadn’t moved in time. His body crumpled beneath the fixture, too still.
“Oh shit.” Other Brian paled. Whether that was from the shock or the blood loss, Fletcher couldn’t tell.
She and Waylon moved toward the door, but unfortunately, they’d been so distracted by trying not to die, neither of them noticed the commotion had drawn an audience.
“What do we have here?” Bertram’s baritone drove a stake of dread through Fletcher’s chest.
The SVP of Marketing waddled into the study, vision glazed red. He was a forty-eight-year-old unmarried marketing exec, but the way his face morphed with calibrated ire was more Trained Assassin than Big SEO Nerd. (Although his striped tie and boring button-down screamed desk job.)
Behind him stalked Deepti. Clothed, blessedly. Whatever alliance they’d struck, Fletcher doubted it would last any longer than Deepti’s other flings. The CFO was nothing if not efficient. She got what she wanted and cut her losses.
Either way, Deepti planted her feet in front of the door, holding her ground and also a Taser.
Fletcher shot Waylon a look that was supposed to convey a general sense of dismay and exponentially growing panic, but he’d trained his gaze on Deepti and her pink stun gun as if trying to gauge how badly something bedazzled could hurt.
(A lot, obviously.) It wasn’t the kind of weapon Dyer would have lying around—it was the kind she’d stash in a leather purse.
One she definitely knew how to wield in emergencies.
“We tried to stop them,” Other Brian answered Bertram’s lingering question pathetically, “but the chandelier…it fell.”
“Disappointing,” Bertram mused over Brian’s lifeless shape as his protégé Wicked Witch of the Easted beneath the chandelier. “I hoped I’d be able to work with him for longer. Great ideas. Subpar execution.”
He dipped inside a refrigerator, masqueraded behind two cabinet doors.
Fished out a bowl of cleaned, tailless shrimp.
Pink and slimy. Tossing a crustacean down the gullet, Bertram made a noise of satisfaction at the back of his throat.
Out of the corner of her eye, Other Brian shrunk into himself, his stomach clawing toward his spine.
Bertram’s beady eyes glanced between Waylon and Fletcher, Waylon and Fletcher. “I’ll admit, I am surprised to see the two of you in cahoots,” he said, pointing his half-eaten shrimp between them.
“We are not in cahoots!” she said. At the same time, Waylon groaned, “Cahoots? Really?”
The light from the fridge was blocked momentarily as Bertram reached back inside for a glass bottle filled with red. He shook some into a dish and swiped his next shrimp through it. Relishing the taste, he slurped all the sauce off the crustacean before biting into its flesh.
Across the room, Other Brian retched. Dragging himself off the floor, he limped toward the exit. “I’m sorry—I need to—” Another gag. “Get out.”
“You don’t like cocktail sauce?” Bertram asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. With two unstabbed legs, he moved much quicker than Other Brian. Bertram daubed the shrimp in his vat of ketchup and horseradish, dangling it before his direct report.
Fletcher started toward them, “No, he can’t! He’s—”
But it was too late. Bertram poked the sauce-drenched shellfish between Other Brian’s pursed lips.
His palm clamped over Other Brian’s mouth, refusing to let him spit it out.
Other Brian’s hands found his throat, terror rearing in his eyes.
Images of Other Brian’s untouched prawn on last night’s dinner plate shot through Fletcher’s mind.
Soon, his lips would swell, the skin stretched taut.
“Allergic,” Fletcher said, deflating against the bar top.
Her brain was firing desperate neurons. Yes, Other Brian was responsible for aiding and abetting an attempted murder. And yes, that murder was supposed to be hers.
But she also knew there was an EpiPen in the emergency kit in the kitchen. She’d ordered one specifically for Other Brian and his overactive immune system.
She didn’t want to sit here, helpless, and watch him die.
Waylon hurled toward Deepti, fist-fighting the Taser out of her grasp, but Fletcher couldn’t move. Her body felt frozen and on fire at the same time. Her muscles seized with fear. She didn’t register Betram reaching toward her until he had a vise grip on her shoulder.
A choking noise came from Other Brian’s direction that Fletcher had to look away from—both for the preservation of her own sanity and because Betram’s fist yanked her neck at an unsustainable angle. The joints in her spine popped, stretched, strained.
She bit down the begging whimper that threatened to spill out her mouth. Realistically, she’d be more than willing to grovel for her life, but she’d rather not have to.
Waylon pivoted his attention and tried to reach for her, but the marketer knotted his knuckles in her hair and said, “You want to watch her die? Take another step.”
Tension rippled down Waylon’s neck. “You know, I never was any good at doing what I’m told.”
“No time to learn like the present,” Bertram said, his words slurring with passion. “Fletcher and I are going to come to a little agreement. And if not, I’ll have to get rid of her.”
Waylon crept forward, testing the waters. “You won’t.”
Oh, thanks. Call his bluff when it was her life on the line.
Fletcher imagined Bertram’s eyes narrowing as his grip pulled against her roots. “You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you. I just won’t let it happen.”
He really had to stop vowing to protect her because it could too easily be misconstrued for kindness. Unfortunately, any heroism was short-lived. Deepti scooped her stun gun off the ground and jammed it into Waylon’s back. He hit the floor with a thunk and a groan.
Fletcher had to figure this one out for herself.
Everything she knew about Bertram felt just out of reach. That could have something to do with the way her vertebrae sounded like a beloved breakfast cereal at the moment. Think, Fletcher. Think.
She knew his belly was putting too much pressure on the buttons of his collared shirt and that he should have invested some of his annual bonus in a cologne that didn’t smell like a seventh-grade locker room.
She knew he’d been in charge of the Marketing department for a handful of years, but he wanted more.
They all wanted more. That was why they came here.
Calendar pages populated behind her eyes as his finger grip tightened. Meetings with Dyer, did he have any?
No.
No, the schedule had been empty for weeks. Bertram had barely been at work. His out-of-office autoresponder flashed through her brain. She’d seen him on the LaGuardia airstrip for the first time since…
Fletcher wound her elbow forward and thrust it into his abdomen. Right up against the still-soft stitches from his gallbladder surgery.
Bertram moaned, immediately releasing her, and Fletcher scrambled forward. She braced herself against the bar as the ache in her neck radiated down her shoulders, her rib cage. There was no time to be relieved. Wild fury lit in Bertram’s dark brown eyes.
Waylon’s arms quaked as he struggled off the parquet floor, and Deepti lurked behind him, all too ready to shock him again. Beyond him lay a very squished Brian and a very puffy Other Brian, both of them very, very dead.
Fletcher and Waylon would be next.
Then, the study’s door swung open to an alarmed attorney, and Melv blinked unwittingly at the horror movie he’d walked into. “What the hell is happening here?”
His entrance was all the distraction Deepti needed to make the first move, lunging toward a weak-kneed Waylon.
Electricity zapped. Before she could make contact with his skin, Waylon drove his elbow into the crook of Deepti’s arm and pried the stun gun from her grasp.
The Taser flew across the room, landing in a rum puddle with an igniting spark.
Flames burst, hot and hungry. With the amount of liquor in this room…
Waylon clearly had the same thought. He snatched Fletcher out of the fire’s path as it snaked toward the bar. As soon as cinders hit the bottles, everything exploded in a blood-orange blast. Smoke cloaked the room quickly in a choking gray.
Deepti barged past Melv, whose horrified trance had lodged him squarely in the doorway. She raced down the hall and out of sight. Her movement jostled Melv back to himself. “Everyone, follow me.”
“It’s okay,” Fletcher said, scratchy against the fumes. “The sprinklers should turn on soon.”
Smoke detectors wailed and sprinklers ejected from the ceiling, but the omnipresent robotic voice that would cameo in all of Fletcher’s future nightmares snarked: “Fire protection system deactivated. Sprinklers disabled.”
“Never mind.”
Thanks a lot, Dyer.
Melv and his marathon-running lungs were far more prepared for this than Fletcher and her expired-gym-membership lungs. His fast clip had Fletcher cursing her choice of heels.
“Do I even want to know what just happened in there?” he asked.
“No,” Waylon and Fletcher answered in unison.
Smoke ribboned into the hall. Booze and burnt flesh were a terrible combo. When Fletcher glanced over her shoulder, Bertram’s silhouette faded as the soot thickened.
“We lost Bertram and Deepti,” she said between hacking coughs.
“Good,” Waylon muttered.
A fair response given all the recent maiming and Tasing and asphyxiating. Unfortunately, Fletcher’s overactive conscience failed to get the memo. “If the fire spreads…”
“I’ll worry about the others,” Melv coughed, already turning back. “You two get out while you can. Go. Go!”
How they ended up in the garage was a blur of adrenaline, from the chase and the warmth of Waylon’s fingers against her skin in equal measure.
The next thing Fletcher knew was the crank of the garage door opening, the nectar-sweet breeze lifting the loose hair off her neck but not strong enough to mask the scent of gasoline.
Someone had been here already.
An engine revved as the only Jeep speared across the grasslands. Jackie’s silk scarf billowed behind her as she veered across the savanna, kicking up dust. Fletcher’s countdown ticking, ticking, ticking.
Waylon snagged their backpacks from a cabinet he’d hid them in. He could have left without her, could have stranded her at the estate and stolen Carlotta’s master key for himself. And instead, he…came back for her.
They started running as Lydell Manor burned. She couldn’t help but think it wasn’t just the estate on fire—it was her future going up in smoke.
But if Fletcher didn’t get off this island, she wouldn’t have a future at all.