14. Eve
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Eve
The interrogation room is cold, and I am freezing, and I don’t think the two things are related.
I watch through the one-way glass as Jake Reiner, thirty-four, two priors, shifts in his chair.
He’s not what I built up in my head over the last week of jumping at every sound in the dark.
He isn’t menacing or muscled, not anyone you’d cross a street to avoid.
Just a tired man in a wrinkled shirt with thinning hair and hands that won’t stay still on the metal table.
A forgettable face you’d pass at a gas station and never think about again.
That’s the part that turns my stomach. I spent days imagining a monster. I lost sleep picturing the man who could stand in my bedroom and gouge my face out of a photograph and paint a death threat where I’d be sure to read it. And he looks like he does my dry cleaning.
“That’s him?” I ask. It comes out smaller than I want it to.
“That’s him.” Dean stands close behind me, near enough that I can feel the warmth of him without touching, which is its own way of holding on. “You don’t have to be in here for this.”
“Yes I do.” I make myself keep my eyes on the glass. “I’ve spent a week feeling hunted by a shadow. I want a face. I want to know exactly how ordinary the person was who decided I deserved to be afraid in my own home.”
Dean doesn’t argue. His hand comes to rest at the small of my back, light, steady, an anchor and nothing more, and I lean back into it half an inch and let myself be anchored.
“Okay. Okay, I’ll tell you everything.” Jake’s voice comes thin through the speaker, the posture of a man who knows he’s caught and is shopping for a deal. “Look, I was just supposed to scare her. Trash the place, leave the message. That’s it. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. I don’t hurt people.”
“You break into their homes and tell them they’re going to die,” Rodriguez says across the table, flat. “But you don’t hurt people.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Who hired you?”
“Went through a middleman. Guy named Vince, I don’t have a last name, I swear.” Jake swallows hard, his throat bobbing. “But I know who was actually paying. She didn’t trust Vince to get the details right. She met me herself to give instructions.”
“She.”
“Said her name was Kiara.”
My knees go out from under me.
I don’t even feel myself start to fall. One second I’m standing and the next Dean’s arm is around my waist, hauling me back up against his chest, his other hand splayed wide and warm between my shoulder blades, and I realize distantly that he must have already been moving before I dropped, that some part of him is always watching for the moment I go down.
“I’ve got you,” he says against my ear, low, just for me. “I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I breathe. Through the glass the questioning keeps going, but the words turn to underwater noise, smeared and distant.
Kiara. Kiara hired him. Not Simon, hiding behind lawyers and a leash on his temper. Kiara, who looked me in the eye at my own wedding and slapped me, who has wanted me erased from the start, who actually picked up a phone and paid a stranger to come stand in my bedroom in the dark.
“She wanted it personal,” Jake is saying, and the word personal cuts through the underwater haze and lands somewhere it’ll stay.
“Said the target ruined her life. Said she wanted her scared. Wanted her to understand there was nowhere she’d be safe.
The message had to be a threat, not just a mess.
Those were the words. A threat, not just a mess. ”
“And the storage fire?”
“Before my time. But Vince said they’d already sent one message and it didn’t take, so this time they needed to go bigger.” Jake spreads his hands. “I told him that was a bad idea. Escalating. I told him.”
“You’re a real conscientious objector,” Rodriguez says.
He slides a DMV photo across the table.
“This her?”
Jake takes his time. Studies it. Then nods, certain. “Yeah. That’s her. I’d know her anywhere. She was very specific.”
I don’t catch the rest. I’m just leaning back into Dean, feeling his heartbeat steady and even against my spine, the one fixed point while everything else confirms what I already knew but couldn’t make anyone believe.
His arm stays around me. He doesn’t tell me it’s okay, because it isn’t, and he’s never once lied to me. He just holds on.
“You were right,” I say quietly. “When you said she was the predator. I kept thinking it was Simon. I kept bracing for him.”
“Simon’s a coward who pays other people to be cruel for him,” Dean says. “Kiara does it with her own hands and signs her name. In a strange way she’s the more honest of the two.” His arms tighten. “Doesn’t make her less dangerous. Makes her more.”
Rodriguez comes out, grim but satisfied. “We’ve got enough for a warrant. Units are heading to pick her up now.”
“And Simon?”
“Reiner never dealt with him directly. Only Nash.” He sighs like a man wishing for better news to give. “We can’t tie him to the break-in. But his trial starts next week, and between the stealing and the way he just behaved in that courtroom, he’s not walking away clean. Small comfort, I know.”
“It’s some comfort,” I say. But it sits wrong, and Dean feels me go tense, and he looks down at me.
Because Simon will answer for the money.
He’ll answer for the lies, for the years, for the public ruin of me at an altar in front of everyone I loved.
But he’s not the one who’s been hunting me through the dark.
That’s been her. Her smug smile, her bridal gown, her certainty she’d already won everything worth winning.
“I want to be there,” I hear myself say. “When you take her.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“I need to see it.” Steadier now, the words finding their feet. “I have spent every night this week listening for a sound that wasn’t there. I need to see her put in a car. I need to watch the door close. I need it to be real, or I’m never going to sleep again.”
Rodriguez studies my face a beat longer than is comfortable, and whatever he finds there makes him relent. “Stay in the car. Don’t engage. The second it goes sideways, you’re gone. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
We drive to Simon’s townhouse, the one his family’s money bought, the one where Kiara’s been holed up since the wedding that wasn’t.
Dean’s hand stays wrapped around mine the whole way, his thumb moving slow over my knuckles, and neither of us says anything, because there’s nothing to say that the held hand isn’t already saying.
The street is quiet, expensive, lined with topiary and German cars. A street where nobody’s apartment gets vandalized, where the monsters wear good suits and wave to the neighbors and recycle on the right day.
I sit in the back of an unmarked car with Dean’s hand around mine and watch officers approach the door, two of them, careful, one hand near each hip. My heart’s in my throat. This is it. This is the moment I get to watch the door close on her.
But the door’s already open.
The lead officer pushes it wide with two fingers, calls out, waits. Nothing comes back but the sound of his own voice in an empty house.
“She’s not here.” The radio crackles, sour with frustration, and then catches itself. “Place is cleared out. Closet’s empty, drawers are open. Looks like she left in a hurry. Hours ago, maybe more.”
The cold goes all the way through me, down to somewhere the heater can’t reach.
“She ran,” I say, and it comes out hollow. “She knew we were coming, somehow, and she ran.”
Dean’s grip tightens around mine. “She can’t run forever. She’s got no money, no Simon, no plan. People like that don’t disappear. They surface. They always surface, because they can’t stand not being seen.”
I want to believe him. I look at the open door of that empty house, standing wide on nothing, the dark of the hallway behind it, and I am not sure I do.
Because a woman with nothing left to lose isn’t a woman who runs and keeps running.
She’s a woman who comes back.