Chapter 14
The smell hit him first. Copper and something rawer beneath it. The air conditioning hummed softly, too clean a sound for a room like this. His boots tracked over the edge of the blood.
Remington didn’t look up.
Her face was blotched from crying. Her hair clung in dark waves to her damp skin. There was blood at her wrist, blood on the hollow of her throat, blood on the delicate curve of her collarbone.
The joy Everett had seen in her face earlier that afternoon, when he'd stood across the lawn from her at Rocco and Jemma's and watched her smile so wide it had broken him open, was gone. In its place was something he had never seen on her. A ruined loveliness. The elegant curves of her face. The molten chocolate eyes that had once undone him with a single glance. The mouth he’d spent years pretending he could forget.
But all of it was sitting behind a film of grief and blood and disbelief, her features pulled into the quiet wreckage of a woman who had discovered what her hands could do.
She was still the most beautiful thing in the room.
And she was destroyed.
Her gaze was fixed on Bobby, like any minute he’d stir, and everything she’d put in motion would be undone. For better or worse.
Everett was close enough to see the full ruin of him.
Bobby lay twisted on his back, shirt ripped and soaked through. There were too many wounds to count at a glance. His blood had spread beneath him in a glossy pool that reflected the lights above.
Everett’s chest tightened.
His mind went to dangerous places. What the hell had Bobby done to make Remington lash out this way, the way she hadn’t years ago in Jamaica? The way Everett knew in his gut she wished she could have.
Had Bobby hurt her? Cornered her? Put his hands on her? Had the bastard become the kind of man Everett had always feared lived under the irreverent brilliance and cocky smile?
“Remington.”
Her head jerked up.
For several seconds, she stared at him.
Shock flashed across her face. Then something softer. Something broken open.
A sound tore out of her, low and wounded, and she surged to her feet so fast he barely had time to brace before she threw herself at him.
He caught her.
Hard.
Her arms locked around his neck. Her body slammed into his chest with enough force to rock him back a step. Blood smeared across his shirt as she clung to him, trembling from head to toe.
“Oh God,” she choked out. “You came. You really came.”
He wrapped both arms around her and held on.
Tighter than he should have.
She trembled in his embrace, her body warm and soft to the touch.
The moment he’d never allowed himself to dream about had come true in the worst moment of Remington’s life. A moment he didn’t deserve and damn sure shouldn’t be thinking about with Bobby’s dead body a few feet away.
“I’m here,” he said into her hair. “I’m here.”
She buried her face against his neck, her breath ragged and wet. “I didn’t know if you would come.”
He pulled back enough to look at her.
Her lashes were stuck together with tears. Blood marked one side of her jaw in a rust-colored smear. Her mouth trembled. She looked young and exhausted and impossibly lovely in a way that made his chest ache.
“I always come when you call,” he said. “No matter what. You know that.”
A sob broke free. She pressed both hands to his chest like she needed proof he was real. “I shouldn’t have called you. I should have left you out of this.” Her head hung low as her tears dripped to the floor between their feet. “I should have called the police. I should have done the right thing.”
He cupped the back of her head. “Look at me.”
She did.
“You did the right thing.”
She shook her head as tears slid down her face. “I killed him, Everett.”
He said nothing.
She looked over her shoulder toward the body, and horror rippled through her features.
“I was so angry. He lied to me. Our whole life was a lie.” Her voice broke.
“I never knew who he truly was. The things he’d done …
I kept waiting for him to be sorry.” Her voice dropped to a raw whisper. “He wasn’t. That’s why I snapped … “
Her eyes flicked back to his.
Everett saw in her the same thing he’d seen in himself years ago after he’d done what she’d asked.
Grief, shame, and under it, a remnant of something colder.
Some part of her had decided Bobby deserved what came next, and she’d assigned herself as judge and executioner of his fate.
He understood that better than anyone. Hadn’t he done the same all those years ago after Jamaica? He knew the scars that kind of judgment left on the soul, and he didn’t want that for her.
She stepped back from him and scrubbed at her face with bloody fingers. “Bobby is gone because of me. I took his life. I did that, and now I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself.”
He moved closer to her. “I will help you. I’m not leaving you alone to deal with this.”
“You have to!” Her gaze searched his face, frantic and pleading. “You have to go before somebody sees you. I will not ruin your life, too.”
“You won’t.”
“How can you say that?” She flung her hands in the air as more tears coursed down her face. “Especially after what happened in Jamaica …”
“Because a life with you in it can never be ruined for me.” It was the real reason he’d moved back to the islands. For his life to orbit hers, even if he could never have direct interaction with her. Didn’t deserve to have her presence with him anymore.
She stared at him, and for one impossible second, the room changed. Something passed between them that belonged to another lifetime. Something familiar and intimate and alive.
Her face crumpled all over again.
“I never wanted this for you,” she whispered. “I promised myself I would never drag you into my darkness again.”
He swallowed hard.
“I promised myself that if you ever reached for me, I’d be there.”
The words were too honest and raw for this moment and still not the whole truth.
Her lower lip trembled. “Why?”
He almost laughed at the cruelty of the question.
Because I have loved you half my life.
Because there has never been an after you.
Because I would bury a body with my bare hands before I let them cage you for killing Bobby.
Instead, he said, “Because it’s you.”
He hadn’t planned to say any of that, and he didn’t intend to say any more of it. This was not the time to make his love another burden for her to carry when she was at her lowest moment, grappling with a crime she never expected to commit.
A distant wail cut through the night.
Sirens.
Both of them froze.
Remington turned toward the open doors. Panic flooded her expression, leaving her warm mahogany skin ashen beneath the blood and tears.
“The cops,” she whispered.
He had no doubts they were headed here.
There was no way for Adonis and his team to get here in time to erase what happened.
He took her face gently between his hands. “Where is the knife, Remington?”
“What?”
“The … knife …” he said, slowly. “The cops are coming. I’m getting you out of here, but we need to take the knife with us.”
She closed her eyes. “It was a machete from outside. The groundskeepers were clearing the path and left them by a tree to pick back up when they come in the morning?—”
“That’s fine, but where is it right now?”
Her gaze swept the room. “I don’t know.”
“Did you leave this room after it … happened?”
Her voice was small. “I don’t know … it’s all a blur. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”
“It’s okay. Stay here. Let me look around.
” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze, then moved fast, scanning the room in widening circles.
He checked beneath the sofa, around the coffee table, behind the chair, then moved through the foyer, the hall bath, the kitchen, and the shadowed edges of the terrace. Nothing.
The absence settled cold in his gut. A murder weapon didn’t walk away on its own, but the sirens were too close now, climbing the hill toward the house. Whatever the missing blade meant, he would have to deal with it later.
“Did you find it?” she asked, words laced with terror.
He shook his head. “We need to go … now.”
“What about … “ Her face turned toward Bobby.
“There’s no time to deal with that. We need to leave now.” He grabbed her hand, lacing his fingers between hers. She followed him willingly as he guided her toward the back of the house.
At the threshold, she stumbled once and tightened her grip on his shirt.
Everett looked down at her.
Remington lifted her face, eyes wide and wrecked and full of the kind of trust he had no right to want from her anymore.
But the exact kind that guaranteed he would never let her down.