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Rhea chuckles, glancing at me from the corner of her eye, and smooths her hair. “I’ll pass the message along to the one who organized it. I like event planning, but this,” she gestures to the doors behind us, boxed in by two gigantic floral arrangements. “This isn’t my cup of tea.”
“Of course not.” Wes nods aggressively. “I mean, who wants to plan funerals for a living? It’s one of the darkest professions I can think of.”
I don’t bother hiding the laugh that his words draw out of me. “I can think of worse.” I cross my arms, glancing at Dimitri knowingly. “It’s getting late. We should really get back to the house before Elaine gets upset that we’re late for dinner.”
“Remy,” Rhea scolds me. “I think Elaine will understand, today of all days, if we don’t make it in time for dinner. I am, however, pretty drained, so we should be going soon.”
“You’re right,” I concede, “Elaine understands our obligations, but we’d best get going anyway.” I fix her with a pointed look that she accepts with no further objections… until she turns to Wes.
“You should come for dinner. It would be rude of us to send you all the way back to the states without having you as our guest.”
“I’d love to!” Wes’ response comes so quickly, it’s like he planned for Rhea to invite him. He probably did.
“That’s a nice thought, but I’m sure Wes has a flight to catch.” I deadpan. “Isn’t that right, Wes?”
“Oh, no. The perks of flying private.” He laughs, his dark hair bouncing obnoxiously as if he’s telling some grand joke that requires his whole body to get into the gesture. His eyes fix on me when his face stills. “I can leave whenever I want.”
Chapter twelve
Claire
Poisoned.
Hours after the doctor left, the word still haunts me.
Somebody is trying to kill me.
Maybe it shouldn’t come as a shock. When I think about the complete one-eighty my life has done in the past week, it’s actually terrifying. I’ve gone from stressing over what I’m going to do with the rest of my life—which is no small decision—to near-constant fear for my life.
From the first moment Remington Boudreaux came smoldering into my life, nothing has been the same. He put me in a chokehold and interrogated me like he truly thought I was some sort of inept assassin. He threw me to the ground to spare me a bullet. He held me at gunpoint while he expressed his distrust of me. I was kidnapped, assaulted, sold off to some rich, likely sadistic fuck on the other side of the world, and committed murder in at least the second degree. And now to top it all off, I’m being fucking poisoned?
My head is the clearest it has been in days. It’s like Remy’s absence allows me to think, like when he isn’t here, I’m able to focus on things beyond him. Maybe it’s because I’ve been out of it for the last week or so, and now I’m inaccessible. Remy has given me a dozen reasons not to trust him—he’s wrapped up in a darkness so deep that light doesn’t even try to penetrate his world—and precious few reasons to think that he wouldn’t try to kill me. After all, he’s spilled his most insidious secret to me. Now that I know what he does, what his family has done, is it really far-fetched to believe that he may regret that decision to come clean and try to shut me up preemptively?
But as much as Remy is the most likely suspect to poison me, it doesn’t make sense. A man who has no qualms about killing— a man who I watched stab someone to death—wouldn’t have qualms about killing me any other way. Besides, if I’m honest with myself, there is someone far more likely to be up to something than Remy.
They say poison is a woman’s weapon, after all.
Elaine has looked at me funny from the very first time she saw me. She’s tried to hide it, but she went to great effort to disregard me during that first night here, and—even more suspicious—she was totally different the next morning, offering me breakfast and coffee, calling me dear.
She offered me the last of the coffee, I remember. Remy and Rhea and Rhea’s guest for the night had all drunk from a different pot of coffee than me. Did she pour out some of it to convince me she’d drank it, too?
I didn’t experience any symptoms that day, but that was the beginning of the downfall for me. Maybe she worked with Jovich in devising a plan to get rid of me. It wouldn’t be the craziest thing to happen since I’ve come to Costa Rica.
The doctor didn’t want me to go back to Remy’s, but it isn’t exactly her choice. I’m not going to tell anyone the truth about what landed me in the hospital. Sure, Elaine’s careful stitches did get infected… probably not until Remy and I fucked in a sweaty, bloody tangle. But that’s not what was making me so sick. That was the methanol poisoning.
I have no clue where it could have come from if not from Elaine. She brought me what was supposed to be a sleep aid, and I did fall asleep. I assume her intention was for me to stay that way forever.
The knock on the door startles me out of my thoughts just in time to see Rhea toe the door open and poke her head in. “Come in.” I say, leaning back against the pillows.
“Claire!” She sighs, rushing in and letting the door click closed behind her. Her words are muffled when she wraps her arms around me, liquid from the cup in her hand sloshing on the sheets as she squeezes me without reservation. “Thank God! You look so much better!”
“I feel so much better.” I laugh, hoping it will ease the bubble of tension that sinks in my chest.
“I was so scared.” She shakes her head, banishing the thought as she disentangles herself from the IV and drops into the chair next to the bed. I see her eyes shining with tears for a second before she banishes those too. “I really don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Well,” I shrug, trying to make myself look more put together than I feel. “You aren’t getting rid of me that easily.”
“Easy.” Rhea laughs, her fingers drumming along the top of the cup in her hand. We both know that there is nothing easy about the last few weeks of our lives. Nothing has been easy since Remy walked into our lives… since her father died.
