17. Chloe
Chloe
“Morning, panda bear,” I greet Colin, circling into the kitchen to where he stands in front of another beautiful breakfast.
He laughs, the sound of it reverberating from his chest flooding me with warmth. It’s not a sound I’ve heard very often, at least not when it sounds this light and honest. “Are you ever going to stop calling me that?”
I shrug, reaching for the avocado toast and taking a bite. “Probably not,” I mumble around the mouthful of food.
I’ve managed to corner him against the kitchen counter, and I’m standing close enough that our bodies are brushing with every slight movement. He watches me eat, like he did last time, his brow furrowed and eyes unable to keep themselves from flicking to the movement of my mouth.
His walls have been up again since the kiss. Taking steps back into the shade of familiarity instead of being willing to entertain what the glorious glow of acceptance would feel like.
When I finish chewing, he lifts the coffee mug from the counter, bringing it to his lips and then extending it in my direction.
“Taste this.”
I hold his stare as I take the cup from him, and the spot where our fingers graze tingles across my skin as my lips land exactly where his had been. His throat works with a swallow as I taste the drink.
“It’s perfect,” I tell him, losing myself in the taste of his lips on the edge of the mug. Losing myself in the color of his eyes that look more gold than green in the morning light—lit up with awe instead of suspicion for once.
I don’t often have men in my space, not since the evil men whose names shall not be spoken.
Anytime I imagine it, shivers of disgust roll through me—along with the memories of what it’s been like in the past. What it’s cost me.
But here, in this moment with Colin, there’s a sharp pain blooming in my lungs and stealing all the air from my body as I stare over at him, grieving the loss of something that’s never been mine.
The possibility that he never loves me back—that I won’t be good enough, too bad—picks at my bones like a dull axe, chipping pieces of confidence out of me like it never belonged there in the first place.
“You were out of your usual ingredients, so I had to get creative.”
I force my lips into a smile and Colin seems to sense the tensing of my muscles. His head tilts as he leans back against the counter, setting his hands on the edge before he continues. “I’ll run to the store on my way back.”
My eyebrows pinch together. “You’re leaving?”
“Just for a few hours,” he promises. “And Maeve will be here with you.”
“She will?”
Colin clears his throat, shrugging. “I mean, I’m assuming she will be.”
I study him, wondering why he would assume such a thing. But his hand reaches out and curls around the side of my face, distracting me from whatever suspicion was tugging at my intuition. I lean my head into his hand, my eyelids fluttering closed.
“You don’t deserve this,” he whispers, almost to himself, his thumb gently caressing the tender bruise on my cheekbone.
I open my eyes to him, to his light eyes that are flashing with darkness as if he’s seeing it all happen again. “I don’t?”
Colin shakes his head, his jaw flicking with tension and his thumb continuing to glide against my skin. “No.”
A knock from the front of the house interrupts us, and he releases my face with a regretful look in his eyes. “That’s probably her,” he says, turning from me and forcing me out of his bubble.
I leave him in the kitchen to find Maeve with a bright smile on her face as she stands on my doorstep, her laptop bag hanging off her shoulder. Her smile falls as I stand inside the house, wondering if I’m imagining her. “You look surprised to see me,” she hedges. “I texted you I was coming.”
I shake my head, taking a step back to give her space to come in. “I haven’t checked my phone this morning.”
Despite the smile lingering on her lips, I can sense the nerves rolling off her in waves as she crosses the threshold, and I wonder what it is that’s got her so on edge.
Colin comes around the corner, greeting Maeve with a single nod and grabbing his own laptop off the table by the door. “I’ll be back later,” he says, and he’s out the door without even a kiss on the forehead. Boo.
Following Maeve to the kitchen, I return to my coffee as she opens her laptop on the counter across from me, a knowing smile plastered on her lips.
“Looks like you two are playing house,” she teases, nodding toward the plate of food in front of me.
I scoff, rolling my eyes. “Yeah, divorced parents maybe. He’s done nothing but sleep on my couch for three days,” I whine, flinging a hand in the direction of the living room.
“Boring.”
I nod in agreement, then tip my head toward her laptop. “So, what have you figured out?”
“Put some music on,” she says, turning her attention to her laptop screen. “We need something light and happy for this shitshow.”
She settles into the chair opposite me and taps away on her laptop.
Taking a deep breath, I mess with my phone until the music starts, and I switch the output from the living room to the kitchen speakers.
Today’s Pop Hits starts playing, which makes me feel less jittery.
The classic rock made me antsy, and ‘this shitshow’ Maeve is about to dump on me already has my nerves on the fritz.
I’d asked her to look into the false EMS report, as well as the curious name of the police department employee who called it in. Micah Winters.
I already know Colin is the one who took my blood. He told me himself. So where did that report come from, and why?
Maeve spins her laptop to face me, looking around the edge at the man displayed on the screen.
“Micah Winters,” she starts as I study him. “He was at the party the other night.”
We make brief eye contact before I return my attention to the laptop and she explains, “I remember seeing him, though he was kind of just lurking around. It really didn’t seem like he knew anyone there.”
The first thing I notice is the tattoos crawling up his neck, the ink contrasting comically against the department-issued polo he’s wearing for the photo.
He’s good-looking, with black hair, bright blue eyes, and an even brighter smile.
But that lopsided grin can’t hide what I can already see plain as day in his alluring blue irises: he’s no angel.
“He’s on the forensics team at the department.
Digital forensics, specifically,” she adds, continuing to examine his photo with me, her arms folded over top one another.
I don’t say anything, just wait for her to go on as I attempt to pick apart as much as possible from the single employment photo on the screen.
“I called dispatch and convinced the girl on the other end of the line that I was a lawyer looking for the report for an upcoming court case.” She turns her gaze to me, shaking her head. “It doesn’t exist.”
“But I saw it,” I argue. The words of the report shuffle through my brain as I think back to the night Lucy came by for my statement.
Maeve shrugs, turning her laptop back to face her. “I can’t find much about him online besides this picture on the department website, but I’m betting Colin falsified the report to protect himself. How else would he explain how he got your blood? He can’t exactly say he took it himself.”
Nodding, I pull my bottom lip between my teeth in thought, staring at the back of Maeve’s laptop. “And he stuck this guy’s name on it? Why not his own?”
Maeve shrugs again, seeming to convey she’s hit a dead end and is simply coming up with a story to explain away the curious report.
It’s a plausible one, but it still makes me wonder, and I never did ask Colin about it after Lucy left.
“To protect himself. Didn’t you say his boss doesn’t want him near you?
” She lifts a shoulder again, mouth pursing. “I really don’t know.”
I blow out a breath and lower the mug in my hands to the countertop.
“And what about the DNA? Who planted that?” Maeve asks me, like I’m supposed to know.
“Colin wouldn’t have done it,” I tell her.
He’s been convinced this whole time that I’m the guilty one—and he’s right.
As much as I sensed a slight change in him after the volunteering we did at Hope House, as willing as he’d been to appease my request and barrel past the No Kissing Allowed sign, I don’t think he’s quite to the point of accepting all of me.
If he knew I was responsible for the deaths of Richard and Grayson, he wouldn’t have covered for me. Not yet.
But someone is.
I take another sip of my coffee, changing the subject. “What about Max and his friends?”
Stella and Stone are the ones who discovered Richard and Grayson were connected to the trafficking ring out of Mt.
Lance. They’d been up north scouting for Stella’s own lead a few months ago, and happened upon a familiar face hanging around the group home for foster kids.
Stella recognized him from the high school here in town, and her interest was piqued at the friendly looking teacher who spent too much time around teenagers during what was supposed to be his summer off.
They followed him for days, noting that he’d hit the streets early in the morning and canvass the neighborhoods near the group homes.
She saw past his attempt at looking helpful and innocent, and noted the flash of hunger in his eyes when he saw a teen looking particularly vulnerable and detached from the rest of their group.
Maeve did the digging from there, connecting him and another Devil’s Peak local who happened to spend a lot of time in Mt.
Lance during the summer, as well. The trail of missing women and children in their wake became glaringly evident, as did the fact that unlike Richard, Grayson seemed to bring his terror home with him—releasing it on his wife and children once he made it back home on the weekends.
Maeve’s expression shifts again, the unease I’d noticed when she stepped foot into my house reverberating off her skin again.
“Max and his friends are actually…brothers,” she explains, turning her laptop around again to show me the three smiling faces of the men we met at the bowling alley.
In the professional headshots on the screen, they look like any normal men; but knowing the truth hidden behind their false grins and deep dimples, the proud smiles on their faces wind painful barbs of disgust around my skin.
I wouldn’t have pegged them as brothers. They all have different colored hair, Max’s being black and the other two a blond and brunette, but the matching dimples and blue eyes they all possess make it obvious once Maeve said it out loud.
“They all work for St. Michael’s Homes,” she continues, scrolling her mouse from the other side of her laptop.
The screen rolls to their bios on the non-profit’s website, and my eyes quickly scan the words as she scrolls, picking up words and phrases that imply the three of them came from broken, addicted homes themselves, though who knows if that’s true.
She turns the laptop back to face her and clicks a couple of times, twisting it back to me to show the connections she’s come up with. “This is the director of St. Michael’s,” she says, pointing to a picture of a middle-aged man above Max and his brothers.
“Is he the leader?”
“I don’t think so.” She leans around the laptop and studies the screen with me.
“He’s definitely involved, though. There are large transactions moving in and out of his personal and business accounts, dating back about five years.
” She points to a white square above the director’s photo with a question mark in place of a photo.
“Whoever this is, I think they’re the one running the show. ”
“And they’re coming after me because I’m taking their workers out,” I surmise.
Maeve shrugs but nods, her demeanor further morphing to uncertainty. “I’m thinking so.”
“Well, looks like we just gotta take them all out then,” I say with a smile, sipping my coffee again.
Maeve sucks in a breath, rolling her lips between her teeth.
“What?” I ask uncertainly.
“Someone may already be working on that…” she says quietly, and I only tilt my head at her in question.
“I got into the department’s system to look for that EMS report and the DNA report for Max.
” Her words come out measured and controlled, and my heart starts beating against my rib cage as I wait for her to go on.
“This crime scene photo was taken a few hours ago.” She swallows as she adjusts her screen again until I’m looking at a picture of the man Maeve had been talking to at the bowling alley—I guess at the party, too, I just don’t remember that.
I bring my hand to my mouth as I stare at the photo of the blond man strung up by his arms between two trees.
Bringing my face closer to the screen, I squint my eyes, studying how he’s secured to the trees.
But then I realize he’s not strung up—he’s nailed up.
His palms are slack, and there’s an unmistakable thick head of a nail in the center of each hand.
The man’s head hangs toward the ground, and he’s completely naked, his body covered in welts and scratches.
Blood drips over almost every inch of him.
“What the fuck, Maeve?” I whisper at the screen. “Now they’re taking their own men out? That doesn’t make any sense.”
I can’t tear my eyes from the screen as I bring my finger to his stomach, tracing over a large, unintelligible word carved into the man’s abdomen.
“What does that say?” I ask her.
She’s quiet for a moment before she whispers, “It’s my name.”