No.
No, the schedule had been empty for weeks. Bertram had barely been at work. His out-of-office autoresponder flashed through her brain. She’d seen him on the LaGuardia airstrip for the first time since…
Fletcher wound her elbow forward and thrust it into his abdomen. Right up against the still-soft stitches from his gallbladder surgery.
Bertram moaned, immediately releasing her, and Fletcher scrambled forward. She braced herself against the bar as the ache in her neck radiated down her shoulders, her rib cage. There was no time to be relieved. Wild fury lit in Bertram’s dark brown eyes.
Waylon’s arms quaked as he struggled off the parquet floor, and Deepti lurked behind him, all too ready to shock him again. Beyond him lay a very squished Brian and a very puffy Other Brian, both of them very, very dead.
Fletcher and Waylon would be next.
Then, the study’s door swung open to an alarmed attorney, and Melv blinked unwittingly at the horror movie he’d walked into. “What the hell is happening here?”
His entrance was all the distraction Deepti needed to make the first move, lunging toward a weak-kneed Waylon. Electricityzapped. Before she could make contact with his skin, Waylon drove his elbow into the crook of Deepti’s arm and pried the stun gun from her grasp. The Taser flew across the room, landing in a rum puddle with an igniting spark.
Flames burst, hot and hungry. With the amount of liquor in this room…
Waylon clearly had the same thought. He snatched Fletcher out of the fire’s path as it snaked toward the bar. As soon as cinders hit the bottles, everything exploded in a blood-orange blast. Smoke cloaked the room quickly in a choking gray.
Deepti barged past Melv, whose horrified trance had lodged him squarely in the doorway. She raced down the hall and out of sight. Her movement jostled Melv back to himself. “Everyone, follow me.”
“It’s okay,” Fletcher said, scratchy against the fumes. “The sprinklers should turn on soon.”
Smoke detectors wailed and sprinklers ejected from the ceiling, but the omnipresent robotic voice that would cameo in all of Fletcher’s future nightmares snarked: “Fire protection system deactivated. Sprinklers disabled.”
“Never mind.”
Thanks a lot, Dyer.
Melv and his marathon-running lungs were far more prepared for this than Fletcher and her expired-gym-membership lungs. His fast clip had Fletcher cursing her choice of heels.
“Do I even want to know what just happened in there?” he asked.
“No,” Waylon and Fletcher answered in unison.
Smoke ribboned into the hall. Booze and burnt flesh were a terrible combo. When Fletcher glanced over her shoulder, Bertram’s silhouette faded as the soot thickened.
“We lost Bertram and Deepti,” she said between hacking coughs.
“Good,” Waylon muttered.
A fair response given all the recent maiming and Tasing and asphyxiating. Unfortunately, Fletcher’s overactive conscience failed to get the memo. “If the fire spreads…”
“I’ll worry about the others,” Melv coughed, already turning back. “You two get out while you can. Go.Go!”
How they ended up in the garage was a blur of adrenaline, from the chase and the warmth of Waylon’s fingers against her skin in equal measure. The next thing Fletcher knew was the crank of the garage door opening, the nectar-sweet breeze lifting the loose hair off her neck but not strong enough to mask the scent of gasoline.
Someone had been here already.
An engine revved as the only Jeep speared across the grasslands. Jackie’s silk scarf billowed behind her as she veered across the savanna, kicking up dust. Fletcher’s countdown ticking, ticking, ticking.
Waylon snagged their backpacks from a cabinet he’d hid them in. He could have left without her, could have stranded her at the estate and stolen Carlotta’s master key for himself. And instead, he…came back for her.
They started running as Lydell Manor burned. She couldn’t help but think it wasn’t just the estate on fire—it was her future going up in smoke.
But if Fletcher didn’t get off this island, she wouldn’t have a future at all.
14
