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“Didn’t you think it was odd they both died the same way?”
Shrugging, she answered, “Not really. They died years apart, and to be honest, I didn’t really think about it at all. Besides, what possible reason would my dad have for killing them? They were divorced, when Selene died, he had already moved on with Claudia, and when Claudia died, he had already moved on with Emily. I don’t see why he would want them dead.”
“What about Emily?”
“Nick said that she was missing.” Shaking her head when she realized something. “That was probably why Nick had his partner break in here the other night.”
“Wait, what?” Summer’s dark brown eyes grew wide. “Someone broke in here the other night while you were here?”
“Yes,” she admitted a little guiltily, she shouldn’t have blurted that out like that.
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I'm sorry, Summer, I didn’t want to believe it, I was in denial. I told Nick just like he probably planned. He said that they weren’t expecting Emily to go missing this quickly. He thought he had more time to play me, but then when she disappeared, he probably thought he better fast-track things a little more, and what better way than to further terrify me? I can't believe I was so stupid for him. I made it all so easy. And wanting to meet my dad wasn't because he liked me and wanted to get to know my family, it was so he could grill him for information to try and prove he has Emily.”
The more things fell into place the worse she felt. Had Nick really lost his parents? It was a great way to get to her given that she had lost her mom. And the addition of the loss of his foster father and then a foster brother really gave him the sympathy vote. What she couldn’t understand, not that any of this made sense, was why he would tell her he loved her. Was that just to get her into bed? Because that was taking this to a whole other level of cold and calculating. The entire thing left her feeling rotten and dirty from the inside out. He hadn’t just violated her body by having sex with her under false pretenses, he had also violated her heart and her soul by leading her along and letting, no encouraging, her to fall in love with him.
He was filth.
Worse than filth.
She couldn’t come up with a bad enough word to describe him and what he had put her through.
More tears came. Stinging her red, puffy eyes and drenching her already wet face. Aggie didn’t want to cry anymore, and yet at the same time, all she wanted to do was cry until she dissolved into a puddle of tears. Summer wrapped her up in a tight hug and she clung to her friend. So she didn’t have a man, she had a fabulously amazing friend and a family she loved. Two out of three wasn't so bad. Right?
* * * * *
3:11 P.M.
“Come on, I have apologized a million times already.”
Nick glanced at his partner, puzzled.
“I didn’t know that you hadn’t told her yet, you said you were going to tell her last night. And I certainly didn’t know that she would be there. I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer your phone. I assumed you would be home alone, that she would be angry with you when you told her the truth and kick you out. If I had known that she was there, I would have waited. I'm sorry, since she thinks I tried to kill her me being there when she found out made it worse. I'm sorry.”
Miller was right, he had apologized a ton of times already. But Nick didn’t blame him. Culpability for the mess this investigation had collapsed into rested fully on him. He knew he should have insisted on telling Aggie who he really was and the truth about how they'd met before they made love, even if it meant that they never ended up sleeping together.
And yet he wouldn’t take that back.
What hewouldtake back was pretty much everything else. If only he had told her before Miller arrived, then he could have cushioned the blow. When he had woken up to find the bed empty, he had determined to tell her over breakfast, he’d been half-dressed when he heard the doorbell ring. Finding out the way she had, thinking the man she believed had tried to kill her had managed to track her down, had compacted the issue exponentially.
Still, there had to be a way to fix things, to make things right. It was all he could think about.
“Do you want me to say it again? I feel horrible, I'm sorry,” Miller said.
“No. It’s not your fault. This whole thing was my idea. I'm the one who wanted to try and get to Aggie. I'm the one who thought up the idea of faking an attack on her so I could get close to her. I'm the one who ruined things by falling for her. I'm the one who didn’t tell her when I should. I think it’s safe to say that this is all my fault.”
“I was right there beside you all the way. I could have stopped you from starting this or refused to help. But right now, it is what it is. If you really do love her and if she really does love you then somehow, you'll figure it out. Right now though, you need to get it together. You have been a mess all day, that isn’t helping.”
“I'm trying.”
“Well, try harder because you are about to get another dose of anger over what we did when we go in there.”
Nick knew that, but Sebastian Candella’s anger didn’t bother him. It was to be expected that as Aggie’s father he wouldn’t be pleased with the whole ploy, but his attention would be more focused on himself and the likelihood of impending kidnapping and possible murder charges. It was Aggie’s anger and pain that cut at his heart, that he couldn’t shut out of his mind no matter how hard he tried. Not that he was trying all that hard, he completely deserved every bit of anger Aggie directed at him.
“I wish that we could put this off, do it later, but now that Aggie knows who we are and what we believe her father did, we need to get to him while we still have the element of surprise,” Miller continued.
Aggie’s father had been asked to come in to answer some questions about his missing ex-wife. Sebastian didn’t yet know either that they knew he had killed his other exes and abducted Emily or that they had used his daughter. They couldn’t risk Aggie tipping him off and him fleeing. Once he knew they were on to him, there was nothing stopping him from going and killing Emily immediately, but hopefully, when he knew they were on to him he would be extra vigilant. At least for the time being. They were hoping that they would have a small window between letting Sebastian know they knew what he’d done and him killing Emily, a window big enough to let them find Emily before it was too late.
