Death is sudden.
One sniff of this rose.
And your body is frozen.
I’m coming for you.
You’ve been a nasty lass.
Thanks to that, press conference,
You will watch one of them pass.’
Well, she’d been expecting him to lash out, so that wasn’t shocking. Unfortunately, it had been her only way of trapping him in one location. She couldn’t keep chasing him all over the country.
There were still clues from the last scene she couldn’t figure out.
The one-hundred-dollar bill, mostly. She knew it meant something, but Elizabeth wasn’t sure what. It was percolating in the back of her head, driving her crazy.
“Oh, no,” she said.
He wasn’t done.
“Vivian carried them in, and she was smelling them. Think back,” he said. “Remember that case we had where that man was poisoning his true loves, over and over again.”
The sleep was still clouding her mind, clearly. She’d forgotten about that.
“Oh, yeah,” she began, and then knew what Chris wasn’t telling her.
And she was scared.
“Vivian is dead, isn’t she?” she asked, as she felt like vomiting.
He nodded.
“We couldn’t save her. We couldn’t touch her. He dug into our cases and used Aconite. He doused the roses with it, and her body was overwhelmed with the poison. We had to watch her die,” he said, his voice filled with emotion.
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the icy-blue eyes were filled with tears.
“This is all my fault,” she said.
Chris went to stop her from saying that, but she wasn’t having it.
“I can’t,” she said. “I have to go. I’ll see you when I land. Right now, Christopher, I’m about to break. I need to regroup and get my balance.”
He opened his mouth, trying to soothe her, but she cut off the call.
When the call went black, she tossed the tablet onto the bed and began crying.
In the bedroom cabin of the luxury jet, Elizabeth broke down. While she didn’t mind risking her life, she absolutely abhorred costing anyone else theirs.
And that’s what she’d done.
With each choice she made in this game, it was a matter of protecting those around her or her family. He’d backed her into a corner, and each decision was haunting her.
This was the true way to break her.
