Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mud dripped onto the coffin. Into it as he clawed at the wood, fighting desperately to pry those slabs off the top. To get inside. His fingernails ripped. His hands bled.
He broke the wood. Tossed it aside.
The rain fell down. The mud fell down…into the coffin.
Onto her.
Sloane was in the coffin. Still. Pale. Dead.
Because he’d been too late. He’d lost her.
“Sloane!” Preston jerked upright in bed, his heart racing. That stupid vision—that tormenting, fucking nightmare still vivid in his head.
“I’m here.” She sat up beside him. Her arms wrapped around him. Her sweet strawberry scent filled his nose as her soft skin pressed to him. “We’re both here. We’re safe. It’s over.”
A shudder ripped through his body.
Her lips brushed against his shoulder. A tender kiss. “Were you back there?” she whispered, voice careful. “Were you back in the coffin?”
His head turned toward her. A soft glow came from the lamp in the corner. They were in his house. In his bedroom. Five days had passed since he’d killed Adam East in the woods. Not that Adam East had even been his real name.
Adam East and Eugene Calvin had both died that day. Sloane had survived, but the image of her death tormented him. He hadn’t told her that, not yet. He didn’t tell her that each time he closed his eyes, she died and that he lived in hell.
“You aren’t going back.” Another brush of her lips against him. “Not ever. It’s over.”
It was. Adam’s body was cold at the coroner’s office. So was Eugene’s. Both shoved in the storage drawers where Debra had once been trapped. Debra, meanwhile, was better. Home from the hospital. Furious that one of her own deputies had been involved in the crimes that had rattled her town.
There were more dead victims. So many more. Not in North Carolina but spread throughout the country.
Sloane’s friend Josie had found the online chat room used by both Adam and Eugene on the dark web.
She’d been able to dig up their messages.
Able to see the pictures that Adam had shared.
From those pictures, she was trying to use background images—images from the woods, details embedded in the pictures themselves—in order to search for the other victims.
Two additional victims had already been found in California. And those victims? Adam had carved their initials into trees near their graves. His calling card, of sorts.
He’d done the same thing for Bridget Russell. Once the storm finally cleared completely and the roads dried up, the FBI had found a tree with br carved roughly into the wood. That tree had been about fifteen feet from Bridget’s grave.
The FBI believed that Adam East had been copying the work of the Last Breath Killer for a very, very long time. He’d murdered far more people than the original monster.
And he was my brother.
“Preston?” Her fingers swept lightly over his arm. “It is over.”
He wasn’t sure about that. Evil was in him. Surging through his veins. Like father, like son. She knew about his demons, and yet she was still with him. Still in his bed. The covers were tangled around his feet. The air feeling too tight and too hot in that room.
“You’re not trapped,” Sloane told him. She pulled her hands from his body, as if she feared that just the pressure of her touch against him might be setting him off. Making him feel like the walls were closing in.
His hand flew out and caught hers. Her touch never made him panic. Her touch was the one thing in the world that soothed him. “The nightmares aren’t about me.” Finally, a confession to her. Because it was time for him to confess. “They’re about you.”
“Me?”
He had to get them out of there. Naked, Preston rose from the bed. She’d put on one of his white t-shirts, and it swallowed her. His hands reached out as she sat in the middle of the bed, and he scooped her into his arms.
She feels right.
He carried her down the stairs. She nestled against him.
They didn’t speak, not until they were in the den.
In the oversized armchair. Her on his lap.
His arms around her. He pulled in her scent, just needing to have that sweet strawberry smell close.
Needing to feel her breathing. Her. Warm, soft, alive.
His angel.
I couldn’t get to the woods fast enough. Couldn’t run to her fast enough. Couldn’t kill that bastard Adam fast enough.
Adam had been dead the minute he’d taken Sloane, brother or not. Even if Preston had known the truth about the guy before he’d picked up that shovel and swung it, nothing would have changed.
No one hurt Sloane in this world. No one.
She came before blood. She came before any other bond out there.
She was his family. His future. If she’d have him…
Even if I will never feel like I deserve her.
“Talk to me,” she whispered. She kissed his cheek. She sat in his lap, with her gorgeous legs sliding off the side of the chair. Her hands were in front of her. Two of the fingers on her right hand—her pinky and her ring finger—were in a splint. Because the bastard broke her bones.
“I would do it all again.” She needed to know this. So he spoke deliberately. “I would kill again in an instant and have no hesitation.”
A swift inhale from Sloane. “Even knowing…who he was to you?”
“Yes. Because you are more to me.” His head turned. His lips pressed to hers. A soft, brief kiss. For now, because that was all he could allow himself.
For now.
Confession first, and then…
Preston tried to relax the tense muscles in his body.
“He grew up with the Last Breath Killer. He grew up in hell. In a nightmare. I can only imagine how twisted and dark and…” Fuck.
This was the part that ate at him. Things could have been different.
If he’d known about Adam, then maybe he could have gotten his younger brother to come live with him and his adoptive family.
Maybe…maybe they could have changed things for Adam. Gotten therapy, help, gotten…
“Mourn for the boy he was,” she told him. “That’s what you should do. That’s okay. That’s normal. You lost someone—”
“He killed our mother.” Because, yes, Sloane had told him that terrible part, too. “He was a serial killer with victims across the US. He was twisted and sadistic and evil…and how do I know that I will not wind up exactly like him?”
“Preston.”
Soft lights sent a gentle glow through the den. Not too many lights. Not too many…
“You will never be like him. You don’t hurt people.”
Oh, but he’d wanted to hurt those who’d taken her. He’d wanted to rip Adam apart. Wanted to destroy the deputy when he realized that the bastard was part of the whole twisted mess.
So when he’d seen Eugene lunging for Sloane and Noble, Preston had fired his gun, again and again. He’d killed the deputy. He’d killed Adam.
When he’d held the shovel in his hands, he’d wanted to keep swinging it at Adam.
To keep beating him. Until there was no chance that Adam could ever hurt Sloane again.
“I am twisted,” he confessed to her. “And you know, angel, you know that the Last Breath Killer succeeded with me, so long ago. He killed part of me, and he brought something else to life.” A shake of his head even as his hands tightened around her.
He was hugging her, pulling her closer, when he should be letting go. “I will never be like everyone else.”
“I don’t want you to be. I don’t need you to be.”
What did she need?
“Preston…” A gentle sigh. Then she was kissing him again. Feathering her lips over his. Soft, sensual, open-mouthed kisses. Her tongue darted inside his mouth. Teased. Promised. Then slipped away. “I knew you were going to find me in those woods.”
A hard feat, considering that her tracker had been left behind at the hospital.
He’d already gotten her another one. A permanent bracelet that she wore around her left wrist.
“I knew you would not give up, so I didn’t give up. I knew you’d come…and I knew that you would kill to keep me safe.”
Because she knew he was a killer.
“Just as I hope you know…” Sloane’s husky voice continued, “that I would do the same for you in a heartbeat. If you were taken, if you were threatened, I would never give up. I would find you. I would find the people who took you. I would make them pay.”
His heart rate kicked up.
“We are more alike than you seem to realize. Any darkness that you carry? Oh, Preston, that darkness does not scare me. It draws me closer. You control the dark. You make it do what you want, not the other way around. Don’t you see that?
You are not like Adam. You will never be like him.
You would never hurt anyone who was innocent.
You would never terrorize or torture a woman or a child or anyone just because you wanted the sick thrill that came from breaking another human being.
That isn’t who you are. You hunt. You protect.
Protect. You save. You saved me in the woods. ”
“You saved me….” He had to swallow. Twice. “When I first woke up in that coffin, and you kissed me.” He’d started to come back to life with her. No more just going through the motions. But actually feeling, wanting, yearning, needing…
Her.
“Adam would have killed us both.” Very definite words from Sloane.
“If your nightmares haunt you with images of his death, please know this truth—he would have killed us both. The boy that he’d been was lost long ago.
The man you saw in those woods was a serial murderer.
He would have left me dead in that coffin.
He would have watched you grieve and then he would have come for you.
All along, you were his goal. He would not have stopped until you were in the ground. ”
“I know.” She was warm against him. One of his hands slid over her thigh.
The other remained near her waist. “I haven’t been dreaming about me being in the ground, not these last few nights.
” That wasn’t the image that woke him up, sweat covering his body.
“I don’t dream about killing him.” He didn’t.
“Then what is it? Before…you said it was me…”