“Why? Why did you do this?” she whispers, between maddening kisses.
“Isn’t it fucking obvious?” I grit, sucking on her bottom lip. “I’ve fallen for you. And that’s exactly how you planned it, didn’t you?”
Her eyes widen in shock, and she pulls away, lips still red, stained with the same lipstick she used to bury her enemies … now slathered all over my face.
She’s so beautiful, it’s mesmerizing, and I can’t stop touching her face to gently wipe away the excess lipstick I messed up.
“How did you know?” she asks.
“When you said you trusted me, I knew,” I respond. “You made me a pawn in your game long ago. With the lipstick stain on all the bodies … you were looking for someone to find you. Me.”
A smirk more cunning than any I’ve ever seen before forms on her face, and my God, it brings chills to my body.
“Yet you still did exactly what I’d hoped you’d do …” she muses.
I throw her back a lopsided grin. “I had no choice. Keeping you in jail would’ve destroyed me just as it was destroying you.”
She licks her lips, like she’s possessed by the fact that she’s managed to sway me, a cop, from doing his duty. Precisely how she envisioned it from the beginning.
And it is insane.
It’s absolutely fucking insane, but I’ve been converted.
Justice used to be my calling, but my justice has a female form, and it is the end of me as I once knew it.
I tower over her, but in her presence I feel trivial. “José was a suspect I was hunting for a very long time. I just didn’t want to risk it. But when I found out what happened to you … I knew I had to find a solution. He was the perfect end to the madness you’d spun.”
A wicked smile forms on her face. “You chose to lie for me.”
“It wasn’t a lie. He was guilty of many things, including murder,” I respond, placing my hands beside her on the desk. “Just not the random string of lipstick murders all around the city.”
She grabs my tie and starts playing with it, just like she did when she first came into my apartment. “How did you get him to confess?”
“I gave him a choice. Go to prison and keep the secret or die. It was easy from there.”
The smirk on her face grows wider. “Connivingly evil … So unlike you, Detective Foley.”
“I’ve done worse things,” I reply.
“You let me get away with a crime.”
“After what those men did to you, they deserved everything you gave to them,” I say.
“What about Bob?” she asks, tilting her head.
“You didn’t kill him, did you?”
She shakes her head, and I already know it must’ve been Xavier or Orion.
“But if I tell you who did, you would put them in jail …”
“And then you’d kill me,” I reply.
She bites her lip, and it’s so tantalizing that I want nothing more than to slam my lips right back onto hers.
But I need to set the record straight first. “Your boys actually helped me.”
Her brows furrow. “What do you mean?”
