Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Rue
“Don’t do this. I’m begging you. We can take the time to come up with a safe plan, but this is crazy. We don’t do crazy. I swear to god, Ruby Lynn, you’d better call me back.”
Fi’s voicemail isn’t quite the pep talk a girl hopes to hear as she’s about to sneak across a massive backyard that may or may not be equipped with motion-sensor floodlights.
Does she have a point that I’m rushing into this? Maybe. But if I wait, Lindsay Overton’s husband will end up in a justice system stacked in favor of wealthy, powerful men like him, and I can’t leave that to chance.
Ray Overton dies tonight, with or without Felicity’s approval.
“Here goes nothing,” I whisper, pulling out the jammer I grabbed from the barn’s supply closet before storming out. I flip it on and scramble all the RF signals in the vicinity, including—I hope—Overton’s Wi-Fi-only security system.
My breath fogs in the December air as I skulk around the perimeter of the property in my ski mask, and when I hit the open stretch of lawn I need to cross, I pause to toss a small branch toward the house. The three motion sensors stay blessedly dark.
How’s that for taking a fucking second to think before I act? I ask the phantom Fi in my head as I make my way to the back of the three-car garage without triggering any brighter-than-the-sun lights. If the snow can just hold off until I’m done, I’ll consider myself one lucky little killer.
Once I’ve picked the lock, slipped inside, and locked it behind me, I flatten myself against the garage wall.
No lights outside means no signal inside as well, so I’m free to move about the cabin.
And I’m doing it all without an alibi, because Felicity refused to help me.
Always having each other’s back was more conditional than I realized.
Sliding past the row of rakes and snow shovels hanging from the pegboard, I ease open the door to the house and step inside.
Lindsay’s absence as the decorator-in-chief means that, unlike every other house on this block, the Overtons have no Christmas tree, no holiday wreaths or bows, so I don’t need to watch for motion-activated singing Santas as I creep up the stairs.
My tread’s no more than a whisper on the carpeted steps, and when I reach the dark landing, I wait until I hear a steady humming from the door at the end of the hall.
Overton’s bedroom overlooks the backyard. Perfect. I’ll hit him with my NCU breath spray while he’s asleep and wait the handful of minutes it’ll take for him to die of apparent natural causes. Then I’m gone.
As always, my pockets are full of contingency plans: Pell’s fast-acting compliance spray, the big-daddy dial-a-dose, and, of course, my knife. But I won’t need them. This’ll be an easy in and out.
Using that same barely there footfall, I enter the bedroom and see a lump under the covers. I didn’t take the time to deep-dive into his work habits and sleep schedule, but as expected, he’s alone and sleeping far too well for someone who recently strangled his wife.
I move deeper into the room to stand over him. The faint light coming from the en suite bathroom shows him asleep on his back, mouth hanging open, a Top Gun-looking CPAP mask clamped over his nose. One arm’s draped over his eyes, and the other’s flung across the empty half of the mattress.
Jesus, he’s big. Clearly tall, beefy, with fists the size of canned hams. He’s the one who punched Hugo? And not only did Hugo let him do it, he never circled back to finish the job as Gomez. I hate that he’s going to blame himself when he hears about Lindsay.
I’m positioning the lethal breath spray over Overton’s wide-open mouth when an electronic female voice shatters the quiet.
“Reminder: Zoom call in thirty minutes between Ray Overton and the International Development Team in Berlin.”
I’m so startled I nearly drop the bottle, and phantom Fi makes an I told you so face.
Guess I should’ve researched his goddamn schedule.
It’s okay. The spray can still—
“Hey Farrah, bedroom on,” Ray Overton’s muffled voice says.
The room lights blaze to life, and I’m bent over a no-longer-sleeping man. For the longest three seconds in history, we squint at each other under the five-thousand lumens bearing down on us from overhead. Then Overton bolts upright.
“What the hell?” His eyes bulge over the edge of his mask.
What the hell? my brain screams back. He shouldn’t have been able to use his smart speaker to turn on those lights, not if the jammer was doing its job.
Pivot. Get this man under control, immediately.
I fumble into my left pocket and swap my tools. NCU is too slow. The pink bottle works fast. But I don’t hit Ray Overton right in the face with a massive dose of Pell’s compliance spray.
No, I hit Ray Overton right in the CPAP mask with a massive dose of Pell’s compliance spray, then watch as it beads on the plastic before harmlessly dripping onto his baggy T-shirt.
Foiled by sleep apnea.
My misstep gives Overton time to fully wake up, and he rips the mask off his face, his legs tangling in the sheets as he launches himself out of bed, knocking the bottle out of my gloved hands.
“The fuck are you doing here?” he growls, that meaty hand shooting out to grab me.
I dart backward, recalculating. The compliance spray is out of reach, and no way is he letting me NCU him and then wait around until he shuffles off the mortal coil.
Pell’s big-daddy dial-a-dose it is. A guy this size’ll need two clicks to lock his muscles down.
Then again… I eye the beast in front of me and consider dialing up three clicks just to make sure he’s on the fucking floor.
But even Pell’s chemist doesn’t know what that would do, and I don’t want to risk actually killing him with a substance neither of us fully understands.
I set the dial to two and swing the injection pen toward his arm, but he jerks away, popping me right in the cheek as he flails.
The impact knocks me back, out of injection range, and even though I know it’s not a physiological possibility, he seems to get even bigger, like rage and fear are inflating his muscles.
So much for anything resembling natural causes. Keeping the dial-a-dose pen in my left hand, I pull my knife from my right-hand pocket and dart forward, slicing upward in a smooth arc that catches Overton across his left hip.
“Bitch,” he hisses, swinging at me again as blood wells along the eight-inch slice in his faded boxers. I dodge the blow and step into his body, jamming my knife up toward his armpit. But his baggy shirt catches the edge of the blade, preventing it from piercing one of the arteries there.
At least the second thrust cut something, and he tumbles onto the bed, half rolling, half crawling away from me, leaving blood in his wake. I take the chance to grab the pink bottle because no way am I leaving it behind.
When I straighten, Overton’s unsteady on his feet as he faces me across the king-size mattress, hand pressed to the cut under his arm. “Who are you?”
“Death,” I snarl as I stalk around the foot of the bed toward him. “Justice.”
His eyes widen, and under my mask, I smile. He’s bigger, much bigger, but he’s bleeding. And I’m trained, I’m armed, I’m pissed, and my cheek fucking hurts.
“Lindsay Marie Carruthers,” I say. “That was your wife’s name before she made the mistake of marrying you, correct?”
I walk past the windows overlooking the dark backyard, and that’s when I’m hit with a flicker from earlier tonight: dark.
The jammer’s charging light was dark when I pulled it off the dock, and I read it as full.
But a dark light on a dead strip means it hasn’t charged in weeks.
Means I likely burned the last of the battery crossing the lawn. Means the jammer’s—
“What about Lindsay?” Overton’s eyes dart from side to side. “I haven’t heard from that bitch since she ran out on me.”
Oh good. This is how we’re playing it.
“Liar.” I come to a stop just out of arm’s reach. “She’s dead. You killed her. We both know it.”
“What?” He gasps theatrically. “My wife is dead?”
I roll my eyes. “Don’t spend your last minutes on earth pretending to be a decent husband, you piece of shit.”
When I take another step toward him, he flinches, and yeah, I’m loving this.
Usually they’re too incapacitated to show real fear, but this makes me feel fucking powerful.
And since he’s already dripping blood in two spots, I put away the dial-a-dose and let the lights play over the wicked edge of my knife so he can take a look at what’s going to end his life.
“Lindsay’s not the first person you hurt,” I remind him. “You even attacked someone at the women’s shelter, too.”
Overton’s face goes blank, then he throws his head back and fucking laughs.
“That little prick?” Overton sneers. “I barely touched him, and he went down like a bitch.”
White-hot static crackles through my brain as this worm of a human laughs about hurting Hugo, my Hugo. As I battle my temper, his amusement fades to awareness.
“Oh, this isn’t about my whore wife, is it?” he says, watching me closely. “What’s this guy to you?”
Even with just my eyes showing through my mask, I must do a bad job of controlling my reaction because Overton gives me a cruel smile.
“Your boyfriend, huh? Dr. Hugo Francis Mohr?”
Shock and fury tangle in my gut. I didn’t know Hugo’s middle name. How dare this man drop it so casually? And dear god, has he been researching Hugo? What else has he found?
Overton uses my distraction to pick up a vase on his nightstand.
I should’ve been prepared for him to throw it.
I wasn’t.
The heavy marble hits my collarbone, and I barely swallow my gasp. While I’m absorbing the pain—goddamn, does that thing weigh nine thousand pounds?—Overton tackles me.
Goddamn, does Overton weigh nine thousand pounds?
Unlike when Hugo used his careful strength to pin me down, Overton’s bulk flattens every part of me, forcing the air from my lungs.
Worse, I landed on my right shoulder, and the skin grafts start to complain—too tight, too thin.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to push him off me from this angle.
But I still have my knife. My shoulder burning, I swing my hand up. Like always, the grafted tissue hampers my range of motion, and the blade doesn’t land as deep as I wanted. The fire that took inches off my reach eighteen years ago may finally finish the job tonight.
I make another desperate swipe with my blade, and it catches him in his biceps. He roars in pain, wraps his hands around my throat, and starts to squeeze.
“After I kill you, I’m coming for your boyfriend,” he pants against my mask.
“If you kill me,” I gasp out, “he won’t j-just slit your throat. He’ll make it hurt.”
I know without a doubt that this is true, just like a moment later, I know that, true or not, I should never have said it.
“Oh. He’s like you.” The fingers on either side of my windpipe loosen as his piggy eyes fill with speculation. “Then maybe I’ll call my friends on the force. Let him rot in prison knowing I killed two women he couldn’t protect.”
I grit my teeth, tighten my fingers around the handle, and swing my knife at him again because fuck this man for thinking he could hurt Hugo through me.
My blade slides along his ribs, and he jerks away, crawling up my body and pinning my right upper arm with his knee. Then he leans over me until we’re nose to nose.
“I know what to do with cunts like you,” he hisses, so close that I feel his hot breath through my mask as his thick fingers tighten around my neck again.
“You guys.” I choke, cough. “Always so q-quick with that insult.”
He bears down on my throat with his full weight.
Tears leak from the corners of my eyes as I drive my knife into his flank, his side, his arm, the skin on my right shoulder screaming with each twist and jab.
His breathing grows ragged, and my glove turns slippery from his blood, but he doesn’t. stop. squeezing.
When the pressure lets up out of nowhere, I collapse, pulling oxygen into my burning lungs. Then Overton delivers a different kind of blow, looking over his shoulder and shouting, “Hey, Farrah, call 911. A crazy woman’s trying to kill me.”
The electronic voice responds with a cheerful, “Okay!” as the outside floodlights fire to life, sending fresh waves of dread spiraling through me.
Overton turns back to me with a snarl, lifting his lower body off my hips and placing all his weight on his hands where they dig into the sides of my neck.
Wrong angle for my hyoid, motherfucker. But my burst of smugness crumbles fast. Even a panicked novice with enough strength can crush a larynx, and that’ll kill me just as dead.
So I take advantage of his ass-in-the-air position, bucking and twisting until I have enough room to maneuver.
With my airway constricting and my strength fading, I summon all the strength I have left and drive my knee into his balls, and I swear my kneecap goes through his scrotum to make contact with his pubic bone.
I’m not my mother’s daughter for nothing.
Overton squeals and slides off me while I roll in the opposite direction, gasping and sucking in air.
Once I can mostly breathe again, I throw myself across his body and carve a long slice across his neck.
But the handle slips midcut in my slick glove, so it’s not the killing blow I intended.
I grip it harder and try again, sawing away to deepen the existing cut until blood starts flowing freely over both of us.
His struggles are finally slowing, but he still manages to grin up at me with shiny red teeth before he flops onto his stomach and attempts to crawl toward the bed.
This is my chance. I could be out the door to safety in under two minutes.
But he’s still breathing, isn’t he? This man killed his wife and hurt Hugo—he laughed about hurting Hugo. He researched him and knows things about Hugo I don’t.
No. I won’t be leaving this room until he does.
It’s not to confirm that the threat to Hugo is over.
His lifeblood has already saturated the carpet underneath him.
I’m staying because I want to watch as Overton’s heart stops pumping.
He had the audacity to make threats against Hugo Mohr, to bruise his skin and leave a scar on his forehead. To call him by his full name.
Watching him die from wounds I made will be a privilege.
As I weakly push myself to my feet, movement to my right catches my attention, and I glance through the window and see it’s started to snow. Big, fat flakes drift from the dark sky to land on the back lawn, which is lit up like a football field at night.
My escape just got harder. But that’s not my problem right now.
Ignoring my sore cheek and my throbbing shoulder, I force words past the pain in my throat to address the man who refuses to stop. fucking. breathing.
“Which one of us is this going worse for, do you think? You or me?”