He wasn’t anywhere.
I went the last place I thought he would be… downstairs in the ring. I smiled thinking of a repeat of this morning.
He wasn’t there either, but our clothes still were.
A feeling of dread enveloped me as I made my way back to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. I staved it off as best as I could, but every second, every minute that passed without him bounding into the room to annoy me made the facts harder to ignore.
By the time my second cup of coffee was drained, the razorblades were back in my belly. He wasn’t here. He left. He literally made it impossible not to love him and then he did the one thing he said he wasn’t going to do: he let Olly run away.
Where he went I didn’t know.
All I knew was that he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Taunt - to reproach in a mocking, insulting, or contemptuous manner.”
Charming
I got all of an entire hour of living before I was reminded that I wasn’t allowed to live. That my life was over and technically it belonged to someone else.
Someone who just happened to be Death.
But I was done taking orders from him.
As soon as the coffee began brewing, I took the stairs two at a time, thinking I would slip into the shower with Frankie and have a little fun…
But I never made it that far.
I got close. Close enough that I was able to toss some clothes onto her bed.
But then I was yanked right out of my body. It dropped onto the thick carpeting like a stone and I was left—nothing but a red cloud—hovering above it.
“The state of your undress and the fact there is a woman in the shower makes me think you have other priorities besides your job,” said an all too familiar voice from behind.
How in the hell did he find this place? The one place I thought I was actually free of him.
I turned. “I don’t really think you care about me completing this job.”
“You don’t think I care about thirty million dollars?”
“I think you knew from the very beginning… The only reason you chose thesenator’s daughteras a Target was because the only thing you cared about was seeing me fail.”
He smiled. “That’s right. I knew you would fail. Just like I knew you were here. Did you think I didn’t know about this house? Where you spend your time off? You should know by now that I know everything.”
“You don’t know where your secret bodies are.”
That wiped every ounce of smugness right off his boney old face. I resisted the urge to look toward the bathroom, not wanting to show that I was worried for Frankie. If she came out here…
No.I wasn’t going to let her get caught up in this. It was the reason I brought her here in the first place. Yes, I wanted to keep an eye on her, but not for the reasons she thought. I wanted to make sure she was safe from him.
“And what bodies would that be?” he asked like he was bored, but I saw the flicker in his eye… the fear.
“The ones you keep hidden. The ones you didn’t want anyone to know about,” I said casually.
“What do you know about those?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing into barely there slits.
“I know where they are. But otherwise, not as much as I want to. Unfortunately, the soul you have wandering around your house wouldn’t tell me a thing.”
