Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Hugo
I’ve waited for Rue for so long.
So fucking long.
And here I am again, sitting in the dark. Still waiting.
It took me just over two hours to find the tubes when I got back to my half of the duplex and couldn’t banish the niggling little thought that she might not have been joking about blackmail material.
Never in my life have I so badly wanted to be wrong, but in the time it took her to cover up a murder, my own heart has stopped beating.
The garage door rumbles open around three a.m., and she steps inside the kitchen. Her silhouette stiffens, one hand reaching for her knife as the other reaches for the light switch.
She relaxes when she realizes it’s me at her table in my Dr. Mohr costume.
“Honey, I’m home,” she says with a tired grin, flopping into the chair across from me. She’s changed into a red plaid flannel shirt that’s far too big for her. “Everything’s handled. Cleanup, body, car. The guy’s name was Daniel Vartan, and he was crooked as shit.”
Her smile falters when I don’t respond, but she keeps chattering. “I made Pell promise that he’d find a good home for Cosmo. I figure it’s the least we can do after…”
Her voice trails off at the clink of glass hitting the table.
“I found your blackmail material,” I say dully.
She stares down at the two tubes labeled “GOMEZ” before her gaze cuts to the refrigerator, where she stored my blood and DNA in a sealed bag that she buried in an open box of baking soda.
“That’s not—”
“—what it looks like?” My hands curl into fists on the tabletop, and when her eyes dart nervously to them, I force my fingers flat.
“Because it looks like I was more open with you than I’ve been with anyone in my life, and you were collecting blackmail against me.
Or maybe it was supposed to be evidence. Which is it, Rue?”
Her hand trembles when she reaches for the vials. “Both? Neither? I don’t know.”
I snatch them back as I’m struck by a third, worse option, the one Quinn voiced as she checked my pupils and fed me homemade stew.
“Did you know who I was when you moved in?”
Have I been in love with a woman who saw me as a mark the whole time?
“What? No!” she cries, her expression stricken. “How could you think that?”
“What am I supposed to think?” I slam my palm on the table, making her jump and the tubes roll until one of the labels is facing me. A silent reminder.
I exhale and soften my voice, all but begging her for an explanation I can make peace with.
“I could understand the first night. Gomez was a stranger, and you were being careful. But after the second night? After we made plans to meet a third time? After I made you laugh and made you come? I know having sex isn’t necessarily a reason to trust someone—”
Her laugh is cruel. “You can say that again.”
That shuts me up. I try to catch her gaze so I can search for a trace of the woman I thought I knew, but she refuses to meet my eyes.
“So I’m the only one who thought what they had—what we had—was different?” I ask. “Morticia made me think about living a life with someone who saw all of me. Didn’t you feel the same about Gomez?”
I’ve never been this nakedly vulnerable, and she’s looking at me with unreadable eyes.
“Maybe,” she finally says. “But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be ready to take care of myself.”
“By planting my DNA at a crime scene?” I ask incredulously. “Turning me over to the police?”
“That’s not why I… My literal job is collecting evidence,” she says. “I did it out of habit.”
“Habit.” My voice cracks. I’m too gutted to care. “A habit is something you do without thinking about it, like biting your nails—which you don’t do, by the way. This was intentional.”
Her eyes harden.
“If you knew my mother, you’d understand.”
Her mother. The blank spot in her history.
“Okay, Rue.” I lean back in the chair and cross my legs, clinging to the safety of my professional mask. “Let’s talk about your mother.”
“Now you want to do talk therapy?” She shoots me a disbelieving look. “When a man had a gun to my head, you went straight to ‘Hulk smash.’”
“Please.” I hold the tubes up. “Help me understand.”
Her jaw tenses, flexes, and I hold my breath until her gaze swings back to mine. “Fine. But it’s ugly.”
She’s gone so rigid that I almost stop her, almost tell her she doesn’t have to do this. But I need to know.
“Bellamy’s the name they gave me in foster care,” she says in a too-even voice. “I was born Ruby Lynn Alsop.”
It takes me a beat, and then it clicks.
It clicks hard.
“You’re Jennifer Alsop’s daughter,” I breathe.
When she nods tightly, I dredge up everything I can remember about the case from my research into other people like me.
Jennifer Alsop. Sex worker and drug addict. Disorganized to the extreme. Killed several clients. Died when one of her intended victims set fire to her house, coincidentally on the same date Joan of Arc was burned at the—
Fuck.
“Mary Glenn. Howard Marshall.”
She gives me a sarcastic golf clap. “Congratulations, Dr. Mohr. You’ve pinpointed the source of my trauma.”
I know her preferred brand of animal cookie, but I didn’t know her real name.
A horrible thought grabs me. “Were you in the house that night?”
“Yes.” She lifts her chin and meets my gaze, her expression fierce. “So you could say I learned some fucked-up lessons about men and managing risk.”
Another memory surfaces: an old news article about the case that included a mention of Jennifer Alsop’s daughter.
No. Not daughter. Daughters.
“There were two of you,” I say. “Twins.”
Her head snaps up, her eyes glittering dangerously. “Leave my sister out of this.”
But I can’t. The explanation I’ve been groping for all week hits me harder than Overton’s fist did.
“That wasn’t you on Sunday, was it? That was—”
Her knife is out, and quicker than I can blink, she’s around the table, her knee dangerously close to my dick and her blade against my neck.
“Leave my sister out of this,” she hisses. “She got adopted. She has a life. Her hands are clean. Got it?”
Everything she’s not saying seeps into my chest, filling the cracks that formed when I found the tubes of evidence. Rue didn’t get adopted. Rue doesn’t have a life. Rue’s hands are filthy.
“Baby,” I say roughly. “I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t want you to know.” Her words emerge like they’re being dragged over razors, making me think she’s never said any of this out loud before. “Maybe I did trust Gomez. But trust isn’t what keeps me safe, and I did what I had to do.”
“So you would’ve destroyed my life if you had to?”
“I would’ve destroyed Gomez’s life,” she says sharply.
“Same thing,” I bite back.
“Why the fuck would I ever have guessed you were the same people?”
I gesture down my body. “I don’t know, my height? My eyes? My voice?”
“Your voice,” she says in an exaggerated low growl that’s apparently supposed to be me. Then she flops back in the chair and folds her arms over her chest. “Besides, it’s not like you recognized me.”
I did, though. Morticia drew me in like nobody other than Rue ever has. I think some part of me always knew. Why else would it feel like my whole world is collapsing right now?
“How did I not see it?” I mumble more to myself than to her. “How did I miss that Rue Bellamy’s a killer?”
She looks at me like I’ve lost a step. “You don’t know me well enough to be surprised.”
Wow. She’s questioning my devotion. “I found your hiding place easily enough,” I remind her, but it’s met with a dismissive laugh.
“If you actually knew me, you’d know I never keep all the important things in the same place.”
A distant warning bell starts clanging in my head.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” She lifts her chin, but I’ve been watching her for a long time. Her eyes cut downward, and the fingers of her left hand twitch against her leg. She’s lying.
“Is there more?” I lurch to my feet in alarm. “More shit about me you’ve got hidden away?”
Not just me, but Quinn. My friend said it herself; there’s a straight line from my kills to her. I could ruin both our lives by trusting the wrong person.
Rue’s mouth opens, then snaps shut, which is all the answer I need.
“Where is it?” I demand.
“Where’s what?” she asks sweetly.
I walk to the center of the kitchen, my mind spinning. She’s not going to voluntarily hand over whatever it is she doesn’t want me to find. I’d have to hurt her, and I’m not going to fucking do that. So I focus every bit of my training on everything I know about Rue. About Morticia.
Bad mom. Orphaned young. Foster care. No stability. Distrust of authority figures. A need for autonomy. She’d find someplace outside the home, where an intrusive mother couldn’t look, but she’d want direct access to it.
I spin on my heel and stalk toward the garage.
“What are you doing?” Rue’s voice lifts in panic as she runs after me, grabbing my arm.
When I shake her off, she and her knife step in front of me to block the door.
I change trajectories and wrap my fingers high on her wrist, holding her arm out in front of her.
With just enough pressure on the back of her hand, I force her grip open and drop the knife into my waiting palm.
She immediately sidesteps, aiming the heel of her hand at my solar plexus and positioning herself to topple me with a leg hook, but I sweep aside the blow, dodge her foot, and crouch to push my shoulder into her stomach so I can carry her into the garage draped over my chest, her head hanging down my back.
“Put me the fuck down,” she fumes.
I wrap an arm around her calves to control her kicks.
“Want to tell me what you’re hiding?”
“Fuck you.”
“Then I’m not putting you down.”
I’m slipping into survival mode, retreating behind my emotionless mask to assess the threat to me. To Quinn. It’s what lets me ignore the punches she tries to land on my kidneys.
“Let’s see how well I know you after all.
” I set her down when we reach her car, trapping her back against my front, aware that a few short hours ago, I killed the man who held her just like this.
“You’ve convinced yourself that planning and rules keep you from being her, but I’ve seen you embrace your mother’s chaos, Morticia. ”
She jolts as if I slapped her, and I know my hurt is making me cruel, but I can’t stop myself.
Of course, Rue’s perfectly capable of hitting back.
“And what about you, Dr. Mohr?” she spits out. “I bet you therapize your victims to death. What’s lurking in your past that has their hearts giving out in self-protection while you just drone on and on and fucking on?”
She wants my childhood trauma? Fine.
“My parents were cold and absent and rich, and then they died.” I open the driver’s side door and lean around her to find the trunk release. “I went to the funeral. I met with the lawyers. I took the inheritance.”
It requires nothing for me to share this. There’s no emotion attached to my history. The words slip free as I lift her a few inches off the ground, walking us to the back of the silver Honda I’ve watched come and go down our driveway countless times.
“I used some of the money for this duplex and some to set up a few fake identities and a few safe houses. I could disappear tonight if I need to.”
“Great. Start packing, motherfucker.”
I look over her head at the mountain of garbage in her trunk: jumper cables, broken ice scrapers, running shoes caked with dried mud, old shopping bags and takeout menus.
“Here’s the thing, neighbor girl,” I say as I lean us both forward so I can dig through her pile of defense mechanisms. “I’m not your chaotic, narcissistic mom, and I’m not one of your bad foster dads, either.”
Unlike them, I have the patience to look. And a moment later, my fingers land on the thing that shouldn’t be here.
The small digital recorder has a note taped to it, the words in bold, block letters: “For Felicity. If I disappear, use this to restock the Chamber of Consequences.”
“Come on, that’s nothing.” She gives a strained laugh. “Just a running joke with my sister.”
“I bet you wish I was stupid enough to believe that.”
I’m holding her postmortem revenge list. The question is, how much of me is on it?