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I stride toward the steps that lead to our bedroom.
Kane catches my hand and pulls me in front of him. Before he can even speak, I say, “I don’t know what is going on with me, Kane. That’s the problem. I mean, the guy used a chainsaw, and the person was in pieces, but I’ve seen as bad before.”
His cellphone buzzes and his jaw flexes. “You know—”
“I do know,” I say. “Take the call. I need a shower like I have never needed a shower.”
He studies me for a period of time that defies his ringing phone before he seems to understand that I am not okay and I will not be okay without that shower. It’s not like him the other night, when he showered, to get me inside with him and naked. I need to be clean. Now. He releases me and says, “I’ll be up in a few minutes.” It’s that statement that tells me he’s read me right. He knows what I know and that what I need is just a minute. I don’t need his assent from this picture. I just need a minute alone.
And I don’t know why.
I turn and hurry up the stairs only to freeze as I hear Kane say, “She’s currently occupied. Yes, even for her own father.”
I turn and meet Kane’s gaze as the conversation continues. “I have a meeting tomorrow,” Kane replies. “But my men are at your disposal, and Enrique has been told to make security recommendations.” He listens for a moment and then says, “Don’t thank me. Thank your daughter. Because everything I do, I do for her. I’d kill for her. Everyone around you would be good to remember as much. I certainly will offer her father protection.” With that, he disconnects.
And just like that, Kane has made sure my father knows he’s not his little bitch.
But somehow, despite how well planned this scenario of my father depending on us was and is, it still feels dirty.
In reality, the one thing I know about this night is that everything about it is exactly that—dirty. And I’m not sure we know just how dirty yet, but we can’t afford to not find out. I turn away from Kane and walk up the stairs toward our bedroom. There is more to all of this than meets the eye—the murder, my father’s attempted assassination, Kane’s uncle showing up, and me. There isalwaysmore than meets the eye where I’m concerned. I just like to think me, myself, and I, as well as my husband, know what others do not.
But I’m not sure we do.
Chapter Twenty
I don’t know how long I stand under the scorching hot shower with my mind fixated on blood, but time stretches eternally. My memories travel back to LA, to that first crime scene that set me off, only it wasn’t the crime scene itself that was the root of my reaction. There was something inside me that reacted to the pool of blood. And it’s that “something” I desperately need to understand.
Some people might say that discomfort in such a situation is normal, but I really do see dead people, and I really do feel more comfortable with them than most of the living. Because they have no agenda but peace through justice. And that’s a request I can honor by listening to what they have to tell me and I can’t do that if I’m operating from a place of fear or disgust. I have simply learned to find my zone, my Otherland I step into, and nothing bothers me.
I can’t do that with large quantities of blood.
But as far back as I can mentally reach, I find nothing that might have stirred such a reaction to blood. And just large quantities of blood.
I squeeze my eyes shut and push myself, trying to understand me, of all people, instead of my case. I have a serial killer on the loose. Why is this even a thing for me right now? Why can’t I move on from it? But as the water turns icy, I’m still at it and suddenly I’m back on the beach with Kane holding my attacker, and me holding a knife I slam into his chest with an unnatural force. A lot of people don’t know that stabbing someone to death isn’t actually an easy thing to do. It takes natural strength or the adrenaline rush of someone fighting for their life, as I did that night on the beach, even that day on the boat with Roger, the serial killer. But an investigator with experience such as myself would also say that someone of my size would need to make the right knife placement and have the knowledge to know where that would be, as I do. To do so under duress would have to be natural as if it’s second nature to stab someone to death.
Using my firearm, which I’ve spent countless hours shooting in a range, is second nature. But stabbing someone is not. Or is it? My mind conjures an image of me on top of Roger, stabbing him, and as I visualize that now, many of those wounds were in his neck. Calculated, the way a trained killer would kill. I shiver and hug myself.
The door to the shower opens and I jerk back into the present, facing the door to find Kane standing there, fully clothed aside from his jacket and tie, a towel in his hands.
“Come out before you freeze to death, bella.” He pulls me forward, outside of the shower, and turns it off before he begins the process of drying me off. And I let him. Because he’s the only thing that makes me feel warm, now or ever. I’m naked in his arms and there is nothing sexual about the moment, but there is trust between us that I never believed I could have with anyone. I think of the night he took me out to that special spot by the water in the Hamptons and told me things about his father. Things he feared would become his story.
Trust.
It’s something we’ve shared with each other when we trust no one.
And yet, I turned on him after my attack, when he was the one who saved my life.
He wraps a soft cotton robe around me and I shove my arms inside. “This should keep you warm,” he murmurs.
I’ve forgotten my vow to trigger him to avoid a real conversation, to yell at him, to fuck like rabbits, to work my case, and just bury my phobia like he did my attacker’s body. He’ll never let me.
I twist out of his reach, my hair wet and dangling at my shoulders. His shirt is wet and clinging to his chest. I have a flashback to the past, to the night I killed my attacker. Kane had carried me inside my cottage, what had been my sacred sanctuary inherited from my mother until that night, while he took care of things. Things, being my attacker’s lifeless body on the beach. I’d been sitting on the couch, waiting on his return, and when the sliding doors had opened and he’d appeared, relief had washed over me until I’d seen his loose tie, and his white shirt streaked with red, with blood.
My gaze seeks out his now, and I say, “You know when I went to LA that was never about you, right? I wasn’t running from you. I was running from me.”
“The ‘you,’ you thought I created in you, Lilah. That still equates to me.”
“No,” I say, rejecting that answer. “No, it was about me. About how easily I killed that man and how little guilt I felt. This brings me to a confession. I have a phobia, Kane. Something I’ve never told you about.”
