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EPILOGUE
Minka
The television pulses in my living room as newsreels cycle between video of me and Miranda London outside Copeland Memorial, then footage of me outside the same hospital a few hours later on crutches. Recordings show the hundreds of waiting press outside the O’Dey house, and after that, reporters chasing Archer and Fletch all the way to the front doors of the police station. More footage of an ambulance, loading Ethan up after my antidote saved his life, and later, as he’s escorted into the hospital for treatment and a compulsory seventy-two-hour hold, guarded by two Copeland City police officers.
He’ll end up a ward of the city psych facility, and not a general population prison, but his mental instability isn’t enough to excuse him from answering questions the detectives wish to ask.
Which is why the news also cycles footage of them heading into the hospital late this afternoon.
My knees ache as I putter around my apartment, but I manage to get around without my crutches, and revel in the way I can bend all of my joints. An ultrasound this afternoon proves all I need is to rest and wait for the swelling to go down for me to be back to normal.
It means I’m fine. Everyone I know is fine—even Miranda—and a killer is off the street.
It means Archer and Fletch have the next forty-eight hours off-duty to rest. To recharge. And, in Archer’s case… to date.
Standing at my kitchen counter and placing most of my weight on my good leg, I fist a couple ibuprofens and fill a cup with water from the tap. Twenty feet across the room, my crutches wait in judgmental silence. They lean against the wall, while I lean against the counter. They hang out in companionable damnation, while I hang out on my side of the apartment in a mood that swings from sleepy and cranky, to relieved that Ethan O’Dey will never again be a free man.
He considered himself in love with me. He believed we would have a future as some kind of Bonnie and Clyde. He told his mother about us, and soon after that, he killed her and three other women.
All in the name of unrequited love.
The relationship he conjured in his mind feels, to me, invasive. It’s a violation. And since Archer isn’t here yet, and my knee still aches, I intend to ride my cranky exhaustion all the way to the end.
Tipping my head back and taking the painkillers, I chase them with water and swallow it all down, while on the news, Tiffany Hewitt talks about a murderer no longer free. A killer no longer on the loose.
A knock at my front door brings my attention up, then a hand on the knob, jiggling it, makes my heart pound for just a moment. Then I hear him.
Hell, I smell him.
“You decent, Mayet?” Archer’s voice is deep and delicious enough to have me reconsider our plans for tonight. “I’m coming in.”
I set my empty glass on the counter and wait as he picks my locks.
He doesn’t have keys, and I know for a damn fact I flipped the locks on the way in here. Which means, as the door opens now, his method of entry is obvious.
A cop who picks locks. An oxymoron, I suppose.
Archer steps into my apartment and twists to close the door, and while his back is turned, I study him.
His jeans that always fit so well, and his coat that sits just below his hipbones. The thick, black fabricalwaystempts me to step closer and wrap my arms around his torso, but his smug grin, his all-knowing arrogance, always sets me on the defensive.
Are we together? Are we fighting?
I honestly have no clue where our relationship is at—nor do I know what I want from it—but he swears love, and he asked me out to dinner.
Now he’s here, and he looks so good, he makes it impossible for me not to push away from the counter.
Archer, finishing with the locks, turns with a seductive smile, but that smile transforms into a mean scowl when his eyes drop to my knee, and further up, the absence of my crutches. “Seriously, lady?”
He breaks away from the door and swoops in to meet me in the kitchen. He covers twenty feet in the time it takes me to cover three, but then he wraps his arms around my torso and buries his lips against the warm skin behind my ear.
“You insist on being obnoxiously independent?”
“I’m fine.” But I let my eyes close and my head fall to the side to give him room to kiss. To touch. To taste. “Completely okay.”
“I missed the shit out of you.” He nibbles along the warm flesh of my neck and gently bites. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” I wrap my arms over his shoulders and twine my fingers in his hair. “Did you tie everything up with O’Dey?”
