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She doesn’t believe me that the man searching for us in her room is Thane, but she’s too scared to argue. “Uncle Thane?”
“Uh-huh. Remember Daddy asked him to come over before he kissed me? You were listening then, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” Her lip quivers as she peers out the crack in the warped wood. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, you have nothing to be sorry for. I just need you to be really quiet so we’re not found. Can you do that for me?”
When she nods again, I lift the phone to my ear and say, “We’re in the closet.”
Before Brodie can reply, the intruder I only know as the Night Killer taunts me again. “You know this would be much easier if you just came out. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk.”
When my silence angers him, he takes something to the wall of photographs. Glass splintering booms into the closet, hardening Lucy’s whimpers to sobs.
“Don’t listen to him,” Brodie pleads when the Night Killer tries to convince me to come out by promising not to hurt Lucy. “You can’t trust anything he says.”
“If you don’t, I’ll gut her like I did her mother.” His steps get closer as he continues to taunt. “Did he tell you that, Lucy? Did he mention how he found you surrounded by your mother’s insides?”
“Cup your ears really tight, baby. Then you’ll be able to hear your heartbeats.” I tighten Lucy’s grip around her ears before asking, “Can you hear them?”
When she nods, I fight not to sob.
She’s so damn brave.
Unlike me.
I swore if I had the chance to confront the man who killed my mother so inhumanely that I would terrorize him as he had her. Yet here I am, hiding in a closet with a little girl who would still have her mother if a high alcohol reading hadn’t hindered my ability to be a witness.
Agent Moses laughed in my face when I told him I could sketch the assailant.
“He was wearing all black clothes, a hoodie, a full facemask, and sunglasses. You didn’t see anything but a black blob,” he shouted that day.
“I saw his tattoo,” I fought back. “And his—”
The words had barely left my mouth when my father arrived out of nowhere and declared Agent Moses’s interview over. “She saw nothing,” he agreed with him, shocking me.
I thought he was calling me a liar until he asked me to describe the tattoo the following morning. His sketch was so perfect, I hoped he would be the key to finding my mother’s killer, but years went by before it was mentioned again, and I was the person bringing it up while shouting at Agent Moses that my mother’s killer was at my boyfriend’s home earlier that day.
He said he believed me, but he needed more, that we’d never get a conviction without at least a name to go off. He convinced me the easiest way to do that was to go “undercover” as Beau’s girlfriend.
I only learned there were no official details of my “stings” when Agent Moses was killed by a fellow agent. I’d felt like an idiot, and I do now as well.
“I have to go out there,” I whisper to Brodie when the bang of the bathroom door hitting the tub from being opened too quickly sounds through my ears. “He’s here because of me. I didn’t know. I swear to you I didn’t know who you were when I sent your nanny away. I just saw Lucy and I wanted to help her. I wouldn’t have come if I had known.”
It takes Brodie three goes for me to realize he’s shouting my name, but my mind is made up, so there’s only one way for me to respond. “I’m sorry.”
28
BRODIE
“Henley… Henley!”
The silence is deafening and heartbreaking.
Even more so when it is ended with the soft sob of my daughter. “Daddy…”
“Hey, honey.” The relief in my tone can’t be missed, and neither can the fret. “Is Henley with you?”
Her sobs louden. “No, she’s with the bad man.” A crash sounds down the line before Lucy’s loud whimper. “He’s hurting her, Daddy. I need to help her—”
“No, baby, no. Stay where you are.” I whizz my motorcycle down a side street so fast that I startle a homeless man pushing a shopping cart. He cusses at me in a manner I assume Grayson does when the black SUV he’s tailing me with can’t fit down the sidewalk I take at a million miles an hour.
My bike only just fits, the handlebars inches from the brickwork of multiple recent developments.
“Daddy is on his way. I’m just around the corner. But I need you to stay in the closet—”
The clang of our call disconnecting sounds through my ears a second too late.
It came after Lucy’s frantic squeal bellowed through my helmet speaker.
