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There was something tucked inside the towel, and he sat it on the counter to unwrap it, a curse slipping from his mouth when he saw the severed finger in the middle. Shit. What the hell was going on, and most importantly, whose finger was it?
Lord, please don’t let it be Justin’s. If it was, his cousin was in even more trouble than he’d thought.
“Hey, I found some papers in the trashcan in here,” Katia called, her voice getting louder as she came nearer. “Maybe they can help you…”
He spun toward the door to stop her from coming inside and seeing the mess, but he was too late. Her voice trailed off as she came to an abrupt halt in the doorway, her wide eyes going to the sink and then the finger still sitting on its nest of bloodied towels.
“Is… is that a finger?” she asked faintly as the blood drained from her face, pausing to swallow hard. “Please tell me that’s not real.”
He slanted a look at the severed digit, shaking his head. “I wish I could.”
“Holy shit. They
really were the Russian mafia.”
Chapter Three
Feeling queasier than she’d been in a long time, Katia tore her eyes away from the gruesome sight of the finger and bloody towels, turning to make her way back into the bedroom. Walking over to the table in the corner, she sank down onto one of the chairs and blew out a shaky breath.
What the hell had gone on in this room? She hadn’t had any complaints of noise disturbances, and George, the night manager, hadn’t mentioned getting any either when she first went on duty. But how could someone have their finger cut off and not scream fit to wake the dead?
“The Russian mafia?”
Glancing up, she watched Colton as he walked into the main room—sans finger, thankfully. Shrugging, she ran her hand through her curls as she shook her head.
“I mean, that was my first thought when I saw them in the diner last night, but I didn’t honestly think I was right. I was positive my imagination was just running wild. Something felt off about them, though. I had a bad feeling in my gut, both last night when I waited on their table and then again when they checked out of here earlier.”
There was still a part of her that was saying she was crazy to even entertain the thought that the creepy dudes were the mob—because that shit didn’t happen in real life, right?—but there was a freakin’ severed finger sitting on a pile of bloody towels in the bathroom that said she probably wasn’t too far off the mark.
Maybe they weren’t the mafia, but they were sure as hell Bad Guys with capital letters, so her gut hadn’t been wrong when she saw them.
It was just so different from her normal, mind numbingly boring life that she hadn’t been willing to entertain the thought that it was anything other than a combination of too many suspense novels, her uncle’s crazy stories, and her own wild imagination.
Colton brought her attention back to the present as he sat on the edge of the bed, gazing at her intently. She took a moment to just drink him in, desperate to get her mind off how crazy her life had become in the space of the past twelve hours.
If there was ever anything that could make her think about something other than what was sitting on the bathroom counter, it was him. God, he was gorgeous. She’d never thought she had a thing for cowboys before, but he was sexier than a man had a right to be, from his black cowboy hat all the way down to the worn boots on his feet.
His hazel eyes were still greener than she remembered them being when she first saw him, but at least she wasn’t imagining that his pupils were elongating this time. He reached up a large, calloused hand, running it across the short brown beard on his face that perfectly highlighted his lips. The bottom was slightly fuller than the top, and they looked incredibly soft.
“Just how many jobs do you have, Katia?”
She blinked, coming out of the short-lived daydream she’d been starting to have about feeling those lips pressed against hers. Dammit. Now she was back in reality, where men like Colton didn’t go around kissing women like her—and where there was someone’s finger sitting a few feet away in the bathroom.
Her imagination always had been way better than her real life.
“I have two. Here and the diner. And I go to night school, too.”
His eyebrows rose as he nodded slowly. “You’re a busy woman. So, you saw them in the diner last night? Does that mean Justin wasn’t alone? Who were the people he was with?”
Shrugging her shoulders helplessly, she shook her head. “I don’t know who any of them are. There were three of them, all men. They came in to eat last night, and I got a bad feeling about them right away. Two of them were keeping the third close to them. When they walked in and when they left, one of them kept his hand on the man’s arm the whole time. It made me uncomfortable, but I tried my best to ignore them.
“I only looked at them directly when I took their order. I wanted to make sure the one they were keeping close wasn’t in distress, and when I couldn’t see any obvious signs, I kept my gaze away from them until one of them paid the tab. It was the same when they checked out earlier. This time, the other man paid, but the one who paid last night looked at me like he recognized me, and it creeped me out.”
“You think maybe he did recognize you?”
She couldn’t hold back a shudder. “I sincerely hope not.”
“But you recognized the car they were driving, right?”
