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“No.”
“Do you want to think about it?” he snarks, letting out a small glimpse of the man hidden beneath the agent exterior.
“No,” I repeat. “Listen, Agent Hayes—”
“Matty,” he corrects me.
“Agent Hayes,” I say and look at him pointedly. “I don’t care who Sal was. All I need to know is that Sal was good to me and my brother in ways no one else was. We came here with nothing, and he and the people of this town took me in. They cared for me, and Sal is a huge part of that.” I swallow my tears before I choke on them. “Was a huge part of that. So no, I don’t care who he is to you or the cops or the FBI.”
He nods once, his tongue rolling over the front of his teeth. His gaze becomes distant before he focuses back on me. “What if I told you there was an order for Sal’s death?”
I blink at him slowly before blowing out an unsteady breath. Turning around, I walk across the street. “You said as much.”
“And you aren’t curious why?” He almost sounds disappointed I’m not asking a thousand questions.
“No,” I answer honestly. “Curiosity gets you killed.” I have enough self-preservation to keep my thoughts to myself, especially for Milo. Even if deep down inside, I have a thousand questions.
“What if I told you the hit came from another family?” Agent Hayes says.
He thinks he’s leaving me crumbs. He isn’t. “What do you want from me, Agent Hayes?” I see my street and pick up my pace, thankful I’m almost home.
“I want you to tell me what you saw tonight, Charlotte,” he says in a voice so damn honest, it burns through me, and I stop walking.
The streetlight blinks before buzzing back to its ambient state. I can taste the cold in the air and feel the breeze as it kisses my exposed cheeks. “Listen, Agent Hayes, I already told the cops everything.” I turn to Agent Hayes and glare at him.
“Except I’m not a cop.” He doesn’t believe me. I can see it in the way he assesses me, and in the way his heavy-lidded gaze takes in my features as they pinch and relax. “You told the cop that you were counting money and heard a thud.”
“What I assumed was the milk crate getting placed at the backdoor,” I repeat myself for the hundredth time. I won’t tell him that as I sat there, waiting to get dismissed, I repeatedly replayed every second in my head until I knew I’d never forget.
It just isn’t what he thinks.
“Then you went to the dining room and crept into the kitchen, where you found Sal’s body,” he says, relaying my story back to me word for word. I don’t say a damn thing to him. I just watch and wait. “So why then, Charlotte Hart, did the camera show you going into the kitchen before the gunshot went off ten minutes after?”
All I can do is stare at him. I forgot about the surveillance camera that Sal installed at the backdoor. It only shows the hall straight to the front door, not the dining room or the kitchen. It remains focused on the cash register and bar.
I didn’t realize it picked up sound.
“There it is, Miss Hart,” Agent Hayes says, knowing he caught me.
“I didn’t kill Sal,” I say softly and with a shaking voice. My dry lips suddenly feel even drier than usual, and I nibble on their chapped surface, tearing away layers of dry skin. “I would never.”
“Oh, I don’t think you killed him, Charlotte,” he drawls, “but I do think you interacted with a very dangerous killer.”
Yeah, so do I.
“What are you implying, Agent Hayes?” Until this moment, all I could think about washowthe man made me feel. How my body reacted in the worst of ways. How taboo it all felt. I won’t tell this man that the danger the hitman oozed turned me on. I’ll leave that fact for my darkest fantasies, where they will stay for the rest of my life.
“I’m implying that this hitman doesn’t leave witnesses, yet here you are.” His oceanic blue-green eyes sparkle with mischief under the streetlight. “Why?”
I don’t know.
“I need to go home.” Pushing past him, I walk down the sidewalk. He takes two seconds before he continues to follow me, and this time, I snap at him when I turn to him. “Why are you following me?”
“Oh, it’s not obvious?” He smirks as though he knows something I don’t, and I hate that. I feel like with Sal’s death, someone threw me into the ocean to drown, only I’m too stubborn to let that happen. “You, Charlotte, are about to get really interesting to a lot of people—me, the rest of the FBI, the police department, and even those who live in the shadows.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I want to rip my hair out as I ask the question. I’ve strived for normalcy for so long. That is the goal, a happy life for Milo, not death and surely not murder.
“You’re going to need protection, Charlotte Hart,” he says my name in a lower timbre, which shouldn’t interest me because he’s annoying and I’m tired. “This one is yours, right?” He points to my home, making my skin itch.
