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Of course she doesn’t. She’s not Mackenzie. That’s the only way she can be this cruel.
“Noah nearly got shot,” I spit at her. My fists clench at my sides. I’m not violent, but I want to punch a hole through Howard Malloy’s dark mahogany desk, to hurl furniture across the room, to destroy something precious to her in the same way she’d done to me. I suppose I have in a way – I exposed her secret. Too bad I’m collateral damage. “Damn right I’m going to the cops, unless you give me a compelling reason not to. Since you’re a murderer who’s committed fraud and theft and possibly a million other things, I don’t see that happening. How is it you look so much like her? Is it plastic surgery or natural-born subterfuge? Did you just happen to open a newspaper one day and see an opportunity to con your way into the Malloy coffers?”
“The latter. Eli, I can explain—”
“Hey God Almighty, did you find Mac?” Gabe pokes his head through the door. “My dear, your bar is woefully understocked. I’m trying to teach your gorilla-friend how to make a half-decent martini, but your vermouth tastes suspiciously like floor polish—”
“She’s not Mackenzie,” I hiss through gritted teeth.
“You going blind, mate?” Gabe’s hand on my shoulder is a bolt of fire. His voice is too loud, his gestures exaggerated. He’s drunk. I register that I’m supposed to be concerned about this, but I can’t make myself care. “Blonde hair, ice-cold eyes, that distinctive and shaggable arse. Of course that’s Mackenzie. You need a stiff drink. Let Dr. Gabriel take care of you, my friend, as soon as I locate the old man’s vermouth…”
Gabriel’s words trail off as he nudges the locket with his boot. He stares at the picture, then at the family portrait in the heavy gilded frame behind the desk, then back at the locket again. His face twists as the recognition sets in. “Mac? What’s going on? Why do you have two strangers in your locket?”
Not-Mackenzie shakes her head, her blonde waves tumbling over her shoulders. The movement nearly undoes me. “I can explain. Just give me—”
I struggle for breath. The ringing in my ears obliterates whatever she says next. I don’t want to be here in this house, surrounded by my memories and the girl who’s grinding them to dust under her spike-heels.
I sense a looming presence behind me. No one looms like Noah Marlowe, especially now he’s bulked up. “What’s going on? I heard raised voices. Eli never raises his voice.”
Not-Mackenzie waves her hand at me. “Help Eli. He looks like he’s going to keel over.”
Noah’s hands go under my shoulders just as my body pitches forward. The locket lurches toward me, those two random faces like mocking clowns at a county fair. Mackenzie says something else, but I can’t hear it. My head spins and the room recedes as I fall backward through a tunnel. The darkness swirls around me, and I welcome it. At least in oblivion, my life makes sense.
The last thing I hear before the abyss swallows me is Noah’s voice calling, “I got you, man.”
Noah and Gabriel must’ve dragged me back to the ballroom, because when I open my eyes again, I’m slumped on the sofa, staring at a pitch-black cat racing around a multi-story castle. I don’t remember the journey – one moment I’m staring at the locket as the floor rushes up to meet me. The next Gabriel, Noah, and I are lined up on the sofa like criminals before the firing squad, facing Not-Mackenzie, who sits upright in a leather armchair, flanked by her two hulking cronies.
My head feels like I slammed it into a wall. I incline it slightly, and my brain bounces off the sides.
Ow. I won’t do that again.
“Right.” Not-Mackenzie clears her throat. “Now that Eli’s done being dramatic… I’ll tell you about the locket. But first, you need to know that I didn’t kill anyone.”
Her voice cracks on the word kill. Her voice and eyes are hard, but there’s something else – a note of pleading. She wants us to believe her. But that’s ridiculous. A sociopath who pretends to be someone else and takes over their life doesn’t give a fuck what we think of her.
Noah tosses the locket on the coffee table so hard the chain scratches the wood.
I look to him and take strength from the dark rage in his eyes. Noah’s spent so long hating Mackenzie Malloy, it’s easy for him to flick that switch to hating this stranger, too. Although… her scent still clings to his body, and I wonder if his hatred has become something else. Has Noah been so consumed by his own fire that he’s collapsed and crumbled into himself and emerged anew?
A phoenix can’t be born of sin and shadow. It would starve without the fire that feeds it.
Not-Mackenzie wrings her hands, and everything wrong about her stands out. She’s always seemed different from the girl I fell in love with all those years ago. She forgot everything about her life, about me, about us. She tried to make me believe she had amnesia, but all my reading about her symptoms never quite matched up.
She broke into my house and wrote those things on my walls.
She expected me to protect her even though she’s nothing to me.
She branded her initials into Alec LeMarque’s forehead.
No. Not her initials. She tried to make Mackenzie guilty of her crime.
She could be a cold-blooded killer.
Killer.
Killer.
She doesn’t deserve to wear Mackenzie’s name like a designer scarf.
