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I hurried up the steps, wanting to check what was up before I sent any worried texts. When I burst into the third-floor hallway, my breath rushed out of me in relief.
Jasper was standing right there at the threshold of our apartment, the door open in front of him. For a second, I thought I’d caught him just as he was about to step inside.
But rather than walking on in, he glanced over at me. The sight of his sallow face made my heart lurch.
As I dashed over to see what was wrong, Rafael thundered up the stairs and charged into the hall after me. He must have noticed my sudden urgency and been afraid something was wrong.
Well, that wasn’t incorrect, even if I hadn’t known exactly how wrong at the time.
“Lou,” Jasper croaked, stumbling backward. My eyes trailed from his unnerved face to his trembling hands and through the doorway.
Something lay on the floor in the beam of light that spilled from the hallway. Something white and red and feathery.
I blinked a few times before my mind fully processed the shape.
It was a dead dove.
Its body had been placed carefully in the apartment’s front hall, its wings spread wide in a pool of dark blood that stained the tips of its pale feathers. And a rose lay next to it… No,throughit.
The thorny stem had been shoved straight through the bird’s neck.
My stomach lurched. I backed up too, colliding with Rafael who’d come up behind me.
“Shit.” I ran my hands through my hair, brushing my bangs away from my face. “Shit, shit,shit.”
Rafael’s voice came out in a growl. “Stay here. I need to make sure whoever left that isn’t still in the apartment.”
He strode into the apartment, radiating protective fury. If the intruderhadstuck around, they’d regret it very soon.
As Rafael’s feet creaked through the apartment, the facts of the situation sank in with icy clarity. By the time he’d returned to us with a grim shake of his head indicating the space was all clear, my stomach had balled into a twist of anxiety.
“He followed us all the way here,” I said, hugging myself. “That fucking psycho figured out where we went—he found the exact apartment in all of Boston…”
“He isn’t going to get away with this,” Rafael insisted, but I could see the concern in his dark gaze too. He didn’t like this development any more than I did.
Jasper sucked in a breath, bracing his hand against the wall to steady himself. “We’ll figure this out, Lou. We’ll find a way to make sure he doesn’t come back.”
I swallowed thickly, my arms tightening around my torso. “I don’t know if getting rid of him would be enough to keep us safe.”
My partner peered at me. “What do you mean?”
Rafael would have already figured it out, but I had to say it out loud for Jasper’s benefit.
“The rose… My mother’s name, as part of her empire, is the Deadly Rose. The only reason he’d have included that detail is if he knows who I am.”
And if this unhinged lunatic knew I was my mother’s daughter… how long would it be before he tippedheroff about my new life, and everything I’d achieved came crashing down?
NINE
Luciana
By the timeNiko arrived back home with a few bags full of groceries, most of our collective shock had faded into a foggy confusion and burning fury. Rafael had gone through the apartment several times, yanking open closet doors and checking underneath all of our beds, examining every fixture for recording bugs.
At the very least, the stalker wasn’t in our home anymore. It was another question entirely whether or not he was still nearby, but the only clue he’d left us was the dove itself.
Rafael and I had cleaned up the mess, but the horror that crossed my coach’s face when we filled him in was like he’d seen it himself. My stomach twisted, half expecting Niko to rush to his room and start packing his things.
I’d told him about the “gifts” my stalker had left me before, but that’d been well after the fact. And we’d hoped we’d left the sicko behind.
