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She had never seen this man. He was in his mid-forties, barrel chested as a comic book villain. His shoulders and arms were swollen with muscle, his belly thick with fat. He wore an overly tight black T-shirt. His face might have been beefcake handsome when he was younger, but it had coarsened, puffy under the eyes, skin pitted, broken veins. The way he looked at her body made her curl into a ball.
“Oh, no, sweetheart.” He pushed up her blouse ’til his fingers found warm, shrinking skin. He pulled out a wicked looking knife.
Liv’s blood froze. His shiny lips stretched out over big teeth. “We need to talk.” His tone was conversational. She stared at him, blinking.
He laughed. “Oops. I forgot all about that little detail.” He grabbed the tape on her mouth and ripped it off.
Air hit her dry throat, making her cough and hack. She barely recognized the thin, high, quavering voice as her own. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one who asks the questions.” He touched her face with the tip of his knife, tracing patterns on her cheekbone.
She stared, hypnotized, at the blade. It tickled. Her mind raced. What could she know that would interest him? She was a librarian, for God’s sake. A would-be bookseller. What could she say that would keep her alive long enough to hope for rescue?
Yeah, right. She had organized her own doom, sneaking away hours before anyone might sound the alarm. “What do you want? Did you send the e-mails? And burn my store? And set that bomb?”
“Of course. Who else loves you so much?” His voice had a singsong lilt. “Don’t bother screaming. There’s no one around for miles.”
“You were watching me?” She tried to swallow. “This morning?”
“I’ve been watching you for weeks,” he said. “It was all so easy. You sneaky girl. You crept off all alone. Silly Olivia. I put pressure switches under all the car seats. I knew the second you got into that car. I thought of everything, you see. It’s because I care so much.”
His friendly tone was a bizarre contrast to the senseless things he said. “Listen up, baby-doll. We have to be brisk, if we want time for the passionate physical encounter that I’ve been dreaming of.” He giggled when she cringed away from him. “I love it when they play hard to get.”
“What do you want to know?” she whispered.
He pressed the tip of the knife under her ear. She stared at his knife hand, frozen. “Where is the video?” he asked.
She blinked, utterly blank. “Video?”
The knife broke the skin. A bead of blood trickled down her neck. Hot, slow and ticklish. “It’s not in your best interests to play dumb.”
“I swear, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The man heaved a theatrical sigh. “Tell me what McCloud told you. Tell me about his notebook. What was in it, where it went.”
“McCloud? I haven’t seen Sean for fifteen years, and he didn’t—”
Whack. The slap made her ears ring. “Not Sean. The other one. His brother. Don’t be thick, Olivia. It makes me angry. I’m being sweet and gentle now. You wouldn’t like to see me angry. Trust me on this.”
“I don’t know his brothers! Davy and Con are both older than him. They’d already left town when I met Sean, so I never even—”
Slap, slap,an openhand and a sharp backhand batted her head back and forth. Her eyes flooded with tears. “Not them.” The fake friendliness was gone from his voice. “The other brother.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “You mean…Sean’s twin? Kev?” she faltered. “But Kev—Kev’s dead.”
“Twin?” The knife lifted away. “They were twins?”
“Y-y-yes,” she said, teeth chattering. “Identical.”
“Hmm. Interesting. They didn’t look like twins.”
She was pathetically grateful to have given him something he wanted, but the reprieve was all too brief.
“Kevin McCloud told you where he hid the video,” he said. “I had you in my rifle scope. I saw that son-of-a-bitch hand you that notebook. I never forget a face. Particularly not a pretty one.”
His words blew her mind wide open and three hundred and sixty degrees around with their terrible implications. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You’re talking about fifteen years ago? Those guys chasing Kev, trying to kill him…it was all true?”
“You know damn well it’s true,” the man snarled. “We didn’t know your name, or I would have taken care of you then. And that stubborn fuck Kevin never told us dick, no matter what we did to him. And we were creative. You would not believe the crazy shit we tried on that kid.”
