Stone already has a variety of drinks on the table in front of our lane, and Stella and Maeve are already deep in conversation on the leather couch beside him. He and Colin shake hands when we make it over to the group and find seats, waiting for the tournament to begin.
We’re one body short, but the judges are letting us play with a five-man team until we can get a sixth person to join.
“Do you think Micah will be back in time for the next tournament?” Maeve asks Colin, her eyes round with hope. She takes her bottom lip between her teeth, and I know she’s trying hard to not seem as interested as she is.
After he carried her unconscious body from the warehouse, he drove her straight to the hospital. The same one that batty-ass nurse doped me up with extra pain meds and kept me knocked out for hours. The very next day, Micah took leave from the department, and hasn’t returned. Colin doesn’t even think he’s in town anymore and says he hasn’t had any contact with him, but he did say the leave he took wasn’t permanent, that he should be back eventually.
His absence is curious, especially because I’d seen the look in his eyes when we were talking about saving Maeve. He looked on the verge of going feral over her, and he’s never even met her before. Of course, I told Maeve that, and she’s been very eager to meet the handsome, tattooed man who saved her life.
Colin gives me his attempt at a simultaneously sad and reassuring smile, but he’s shit at that one. He takes my hand in his before responding to Maeve. “Maybe,” he says, shrugging. I kick him in the ankle and he’s quick to change his tune. “Yeah,” he says, his voice high because he’s also a shit liar. He nods too quickly. “He’ll be back.”
“Okay, apparently you can’t yell whammy when you get a strike,” Stella says, her voice hushed as she leans into us and reads the local bowling league rules.
“No way that’s in the rules!” I argue. “Whammyis my thing. How are people going to know I got a strike?”
Her brows pinch together as she stares at her phone screen, reading the rules Mickey emailed us over the weekend. “It’s bad taste, Chlo. No excessive celebration.”
“It is not that serious, Jesus Christ.” I roll my eyes, eyeing the other teams across the lanes. Just as we’d argued before, it’s mostly old men.
Mickey’s voice comes over the loudspeaker as she does team introductions, and each lane takes turns waving when theirs is announced. Everyone was in agreement on the team name except Colin, but majority rules.
The four of us cheer—and I force Colin’s arm into the air—when Mickey shoutsLaw & Horror,dragging out the second half of the name and following it up with the echo of her drumroll against the bar top.
Ten minutes later when it’s my turn to bowl, I slap my hands onto my thighs, blowing out a breath in preparation before I stand. Colin’s warm hand grips my wrist before I can pull away. He tugs me back to him, forcing me to lean forward and press my hands to his thighs for balance.
“Do you know what your weapon is?” he whispers.
I tilt my head as I stare down at him, and I can’t resist glancing from his eyes to his lips and back. “What?”
“You’re so beautiful from far away. So innocent looking. They’ll never see you coming.” He winks, and nods at me to go, but I hesitate, a weightlessness washing through my body.
“What about up close?”
“Up close?” he repeats, reaching up and tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. His voice drops to a breathy hush that fans across my lips when he says, “Dangerously blinding.”
And then he urges me off him and toward the lane to kick some ass.
Epilogue 1
The Peak
Black Widow Wins Appeal, Baby Widow Goes on Honeymoon
Interview with Colin Mills and Chloe Mills, née Stark, by Barry MacGregor
Three months after the death of Lucy Wheeler, the human trafficking ringleader out of Mt. Lance who impersonated a police detective in Devil’s Peak, I sat down with two people whose stories I’ve been following for over two years.
They’ve been married for just over a month, and to say I was surprised by their nuptials would be an understatement.
On an unseasonably hot spring morning much like today, Chloe Mills’ mother, Caroline Stark, was arrested for the murders of her three husbands spanning over the course of eleven years. The Peak was the first media outlet to dub Caroline Stark the Black Widow, and it’s a notorious nickname that scrolled across the bottom of television screens across the nation after her arrest and during her trial.
Colin Mills, the Devil’s Peak detective responsible for Caroline’s arrest, kept such close tabs on the Black Widow’s daughter in the months after herarrest that various journalists, including myself, started to notice. Eventually, we identified Chloe as the Baby Widow, and that nickname landed just as well as her mother’s did—at least for us.
“I absolutely hate that name,” Chloe told me during our interview. When I asked her why, she went on to explain that since her mother’s successful appeal, the Black Widow moniker isn’t even a logical one anymore, considering the medical examiner who raised the red flag on her third husband’s death withdrew his original report, changing the man’s manner of death fromhomicidetoaccidental. “Since there’s no Black Widow, there should be no Baby Widow,” she argued. And I can’t say I don’t agree with her. “I also hate spiders,” she added, shivering dramatically. Her new husband laughed beside her, reaching over and resting his hand in her lap.
The production lights gleamed off their shiny, new wedding bands, and I couldn’t resist asking the hard questions.
Multiple journalists had photographed Chloe and Colin in the year after her mother’s sentencing, and while Chloe generally appeared calm and content—deviously delighted even, some might say—in Colin’s presence, Colin’s scowl was hard to miss. So, I wondered, what changed?
