Chapter 45
Remi bolted for the gun cabinet.
The intruder stepped farther into the living room, the blood-crusted machete hanging loose in his hand, as if he had all the time in the world to watch her run.
She didn’t care.
Her bare feet slapped against the stone floor. The hem of her maxi dress tangled around her ankles, slowing her enough for terror to claw harder at her throat. She grabbed the edge of the cabinet, yanked the hidden latch beneath the shelf, and pulled open the false back panel.
The lockbox sat where Everett had shown her.
For one wild second, hope punched through the panic.
Remi dragged it out, fingers slipping on the metal, and snapped the lid open.
Empty.
Her mind refused to understand what she was seeing.
The foam slots where weapons should have rested were bare. The extra magazines were gone. The compact pistols, the spare Glock, the knife Everett had tucked beneath the lower tray, all of it had vanished.
Behind her, the intruder laughed.
The sound scraped cold down her spine.
Remi stared into the empty box as the truth settled hard and fast. The guns were gone. All of them.
Except one.
The Glock in the bedroom.
She moved before the thought finished forming.
Remi shoved the lockbox aside and launched herself toward the hallway.
The bedroom door was only twenty feet away.
Maybe less. The weapon was on the dresser where she’d left it after changing.
If she could reach it, if she could get it, she would put a hole in this bastard. Gun beats machete any day of the week?—
A body slammed into her from behind.
The impact knocked the air from her lungs and drove her to the floor. Her shoulder hit first, then her hip. The stone scraped skin from her palm. The hallway tilted out of reach with the bedroom door still open ahead of her.
She clawed toward it anyway.
His weight came down across her hips before she made it another inch.
Remi bucked hard, twisting beneath him, driving an elbow back toward whatever part of him she could reach. He grunted when she caught him in the ribs. The sound gave her a vicious burst of satisfaction.
Then his hand clamped around the back of her neck and shoved her cheek to the floor.
“Easy,” he said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
She kicked backward, heel connecting with his shin.
He swore.
Remi sucked in enough breath to scream, but he grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her head back until pain flashed across her scalp.
“Scream if you want,” he said near her ear. “Everett’s not close enough to hear.”
She screamed anyway.
The sound tore out of her raw and furious. She thrashed beneath him, one hand clawing at the floor, one shoulder twisting up as she tried to roll far enough to get a knee under her.
He shifted his weight lower, pinning one thigh with his knee.
Plastic rasped near her ear.
Zip ties.
“No.” She twisted violently. “No, get off me!”
He caught one ankle before she could kick again and dragged it back. She drove her other foot against the floor, trying to shove herself forward, but he hooked that ankle too and forced both legs together.
Plastic cinched tight around them, biting into her skin.
Remi kept fighting.
She slammed her bound feet against the floor, trying to twist onto her side, trying to drag herself one more inch toward the open bedroom door.
For half a second, his weight lifted.
She scraped forward on her elbows.
He yanked her legs backward, slamming her flat onto her stomach.
Her chin clipped the floor. Pain burst along her jaw. Her teeth snapped together. A copper taste filled her mouth.
“Stop,” he said, breathing harder now.
She didn’t.
Remi shoved with her bound feet, trying to roll, crawl, and make any part of herself useful. He planted a hand between her shoulder blades and pinned her to the stone.
Her wrists were yanked behind her back.
The second zip tie tightened.
Plastic cut into her skin. Too tight. Far too tight. Her fingers tingled almost immediately.
Remi lay on the floor, chest heaving, hair tangled across her face, the stone cold beneath her cheek.
Her body still wanted to fight, but there was nowhere left for the struggle to go.
Ankles bound. Hands trapped behind her. Shoulder screaming.
Jaw throbbing. Every movement only proved how completely he had her.
The intruder rose above her.
His boots moved into her line of sight. Dirty black leather. Dried mud along the seams.
“How did you get our guns?” she asked, forcing the words through jagged breaths.
He crouched beside her, the machete balanced across one knee. “Astonishing how careless people can be when they are in the throes of making love.”
Cold moved through her.
“You and Everett,” he continued, almost conversational. “Up here like this is a romantic hideaway and not a place the police would tear apart if they knew where to look.”
He leaned closer.
“Sloppy.”
Shame and fear collided so hard that she wanted to be sick.
He had been here.
While Everett touched her. While she had laughed, surrendered, let herself feel safe inside stone walls and hidden security. This man had been close enough to steal the weapons. Close enough to watch. Close enough to wait for Everett to leave.
For one terrible moment, fear consumed her, spurred by the awful certainty that he had planned every second of this. Then one thought cut through the noise.
Everett was still out there.
He’d left hurt and angry from learning the truth about Bobby, but he wouldn’t stay gone. She knew he’d come back home to her. When he got here, he’d be armed and lethal, ready to tear this fucker apart for hurting her. All she had to do was stay alive long enough for him to walk through that door.
Remi dragged in a breath and forced herself to look at the man’s face.
“How do you know me?” she asked. Terror stopped her from asking when the first time he’d had the chance to kill her was.
“I don’t really.” He stood, grabbed her under one arm, and hauled her upright.
Pain ripped through her shoulders as her bound wrists pulled awkwardly behind her.
She gasped, stumbling because her ankles were tied too close together to let her balance.
He dragged her across the floor with brutal efficiency and dumped her onto the couch.
She fell on her stomach, the cushions swallowing her enough to make rolling over impossible without her hands.
“But you are critical to what I need to accomplish. You’re not a piece on the board, Remi. You are the whole game.”
“Who are you?” She whispered, not sure she was ready for the answer but needing to know anyway.
The intruder stood over her, the machete dangling at his side. “I’m the man you and Everett have been looking for.”
Her chin quivered as she said, “I don’t understand.”
“Haven’t you spent the last three days here searching frantically for who killed Bobby Zaniewski and Lois Gaston?” He smiled faintly. “Some proof that you’re innocent.”
Her throat tightened.
He tilted his head. “Which you are, by the way. I know that for a fact.”
“You…” She swallowed hard. “You did it?”
The man only watched her.
“Why?” Her voice shook despite every effort to hold it steady. “Why did you kill them?”
“I thought about letting you kill him.”
Remi’s breath caught.
“You were definitely angry enough,” he said. “The machete looked good in your hand. So did the blood.”
She tried to push herself higher on the couch, but the zip ties kept her twisted and helpless.
“But I could see you faltering,” he continued. “Your movements were unsteady. Unsure. In the end, I knew you wouldn’t go through with it. Bobby would wrestle the machete away from you, and all my plans would be delayed.”
The room contracted around her.
“You were there,” she whispered. “At my house in The Bluffs.”
“I was.”
“You saw everything.”
His mouth curved again. “And now you will, too.”
He crossed to the desk.
Remi strained against the zip ties until the plastic bit deeper into her wrists. She twisted her hands, trying to find slack, trying to make her fingers smaller, trying anything. Heat and pain flared where the ties cut into skin.
The intruder slid a jump drive into Everett’s computer.
The monitor brightened.
He clicked through folders with irritating calm, as if he had done this before, as if he had prepared what he wanted her to see and how he wanted her to see it.
A video opened on the screen.
The first image made Remi’s stomach turn over.
Her house in The Bluffs.
The terrace.
The angle was strange, too low and too close, moving with the rhythm of someone breathing. A portable camera. Body-mounted, maybe fixed near his chest or shoulder. The picture was unnervingly clear.
Inside the house, through the open patio doors, Remi saw herself.
She and Bobby were in the living room, screaming at each other.
The sound came through tinny but clear enough to make her blood run cold. Her voice, raw with fury. Bobby’s voice, bitter and ugly as he revealed the truth about why he wanted Everett dead. The half-brother secret. Eric Gilliam. The life Bobby thought had been stolen from him.
The machete was in her hand.
Watching herself with it was worse than remembering.
On-screen, she swung at Bobby again.
He caught her arm before the blade could cut him.
Then Bobby looked past her.
Straight toward the camera.
Straight toward the man who had broken into her safe house.
Remi’s breath stopped.
The view shifted as the intruder raised his machete.
Bobby’s face changed. A flash of anger and something that looked horribly close to resignation.
Then Bobby shoved her out of the way.
On the screen, Remi stumbled backward. Her hip hit the side table. Her head snapped against the edge. She dropped to the floor and didn’t move.
The intruder’s camera angled down for one lingering second, showing Lois Gaston lying there, crumpled near one of the planters. Her body position so similar to Remi’s own inside the house. Lois had been drugged and maybe was already dead. But her clothes were clean. No blood. Yet.
The video shifted back to Bobby.
He stared toward the terrace, then toward Remi on the floor.
“Vadaj is quick to send an enforcer,” Bobby said, his voice strained but steady. “I thought I’d have more time.”
The intruder’s voice came from behind the camera.
“You’re all out of time.”
Bobby lunged toward the duffel bag on the floor. He reached into the bag and pulled out a gun.
But it was too late. The intruder charged.
The first slash cut from Bobby’s left shoulder across his chest toward his right hip.
Blood burst across his shirt.
Bobby staggered, the gun slipping from his hand and clattering across the floor.
Remi made a sound she didn’t recognize, clenching her eyes shut from the gruesome scene.
“Open your eyes. You don’t want to miss the best part,” The intruder said.
Remi opened her eyes slowly. He looked at her as if her horror pleased him.
The video kept going.
The intruder cut Bobby again.
And again.
Each strike was more vicious than the last. Bobby stumbled backward, arms lifting too late, too weakly, his body failing under the force of the attack. The machete rose and fell in brutal flashes. Blood spread fast, dark and wet across the floor.
Bobby’s eyes were wide with shock and pain when he collapsed several feet from where Remi lay unconscious.
The camera moved closer to her.
Remi jerked against the couch, every instinct in her screaming to look away.
She couldn’t.
Gloved hands entered the frame. The intruder grabbed her wrists and dragged her closer to Bobby’s blood. He pressed her palms into it, smeared it over her fingers, her forearms, her clothes. Her limp body shifted under his handling, helpless and unknowing.
Then he brought the bloody machete to her hand.
The angle was wrong.
In the video, Remi could see it now. Her unconscious fingers were forced around the handle in a right-handed grip. The intruder tightened her hand around it, adjusted her thumb, pressed her prints where he wanted them.
Then he stepped back and surveyed the scene.
The camera turned toward the terrace again.
He walked to Lois, bent, and lifted her.
Her head lolled against his shoulder.
The screen moved with his steps as he carried her through the house and up the stairs. The image jolted and swayed, catching flashes of wall, railing, floor, Lois’s limp arm swinging with each step.
In the bedroom, he laid her on the bed.
The camera panned over her body.
Blood had smudged her clothes from being pressed against him. Smears across fabric. Dark fingerprints where he had carried her. Enough to ruin whatever story he had planned.
The intruder cursed.
He pulled a knife from somewhere on his body.
Remi’s stomach twisted.
“No,” she whispered, though the woman on the screen could no longer hear anything.
The blade drove into Lois’s chest so many times that Remi lost count.
Then the camera backed away slowly.
The video ended.
The monitor returned to a frozen black screen.
For several seconds, Remi heard nothing but her breathing.
The intruder turned from the desk.
“Riveting theater, isn’t it?”
Revulsion rolled through her, thick and dizzying. “Why did you do it?”
He only smiled.
“Why did you kill Bobby and Lois?” Her voice cracked as anger pushed through the fear. “Why are you framing me? Who the hell are you?”
“When Everett gets back,” he said, “the answers will become clear. In the meantime, I need to get you ready.”
Remi’s blood went cold.
“Ready for what?”
The intruder picked up the machete and came toward her.
His dark, empty eyes moved over her bound body with patient intent.
“To die.”