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Fucking bastard. His casual indifference stung. He pushed me into the women’s toilets and into the first stall, gathering my long hair up off my face as I dry-retched over the bowl.
‘I’m more used to holding your hair when my dick’s in your mouth,’ he said, and I would have cringed had there not been a steady stream of vomit coming out of my mouth. My stomach roiled again, once, twice. False alarms. I flushed, jerking back from Dornan’s grip as I pushed past him and out of the cubicle.
A woman was washing her hands, wearing a wedding dress so enormous it took up most of the square footage in the small area. She looked at Dornan in the mirror, and he stared back until she cast her gaze to the ground.
‘You feeling better, honey?’ he asked, rubbing my back in mock concern.
I could tell he was mocking me because of the pissy look on his face. I looked at his nose and wanted to punch it again. He glared at the woman and she scurried out of the bathroom, her dress bunching up as she got stuck in the door before she popped out onto the other side like a champagne cork being let free. The door swung shut again and we were alone.
‘I’m not marrying you,’ I said.
Dornan didn’t say anything, just looked at the ceiling. I glanced at his fists. Yeah. He was about to fucking rage.
‘Give me one of those bullets,’ I said, gesturing to his pants pocket. ‘I’ll put it right in my head. You won’t have to worry about me causing problems anymore.’
I’d put the bullet in him first, but he didn’t need to know that, did he?
‘That sweet act back at the apartment, what was that?’ I was hurting. I felt like he’d stabbed me right in the chest. He’d been soft and tender and I had fallen for it, so desperate to believe that there was still some good in him. I’d been betraying him for months. I was in love with another man. But the way he had been with me – tender – it tore my soul to shreds. He had tricked me. I had fallen for it.
‘Do you know where Murphy is?’ he asked me, his tone deathly calm. Too calm.
Oh, God. My stomach lurched again as I remembered the taste of Murphy’s blood in my mouth, the way he’d bled everywhere. All over me, all over my bed, all over the floor.
Dominoes. We’d piled them up, he and I, and they were starting to fall. One by one, the lies would set us free, even if that freedom meant certain death.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘No, I don’t.’
And the truth was, I didn’t know. John had handled the burning of his body. And, I assumed, the disposal of whatever had been left over. Gravel and ash. Hell, maybe he was still at the same crematorium where Guillermo and I had taken the baby only yesterday. As far as I was concerned, the whereabouts of Christopher Murphy – what was left of him – was a mystery to me.
I would have to ask John what he did with Murphy’s remains, assuming I made it out of Vegas alive.
‘The FBI are looking for him,’ Dornan said, taking my hand again and squeezing my wrist.
I didn’t bother pulling away, the image of Agent Lindsay Price clear in my mind – the FBI agent who’d cornered me in the locker room at the gym Guillermo and I frequented, stolen my towel, and asked me where Murphy was. I’d never told Dornan. I couldn’t. I no longer trusted the man who, once upon a time, would have laid down his life to protect me.
‘The FBI are looking for him,’ Dornan repeated, ‘and they’re getting closer.’
‘Great,’ I replied. ‘Maybe when they find him, they can ask him where he stashed hundreds of thousands of dollars of your father’s money.’
Dornan turned and smashed his fist into the mirror. Shards exploded in a rain of cold glass, sharp and tacky.
‘They’re going to call you as a witness, you stupid bitch,’ he said, ignoring his bleeding knuckles as they dripped all over the floor.
Something reached into my chest and squeezed violently, the part of me that screamed MURDERER. I killed Murphy. The blood was on my hands, in my apartment, in the grout between my bathroom tiles. And even though John had it swept clean by a specialist crew, I’d watched enough TV to know that it’d only take a single missed speck of blood to put me away for the rest of my natural life.
And I couldn’t be in prison. I could plot and thieve and run from the Gypsy Brothers and Il Sangue, but I couldn’t break out of a federal penitentiary. That was beyond my particular set of skills. I couldn’t ever, ever be caught for the terrible things I had done in the name of survival. Two police officers – Murphy, and his squeeze and DEA partner, Allie Baxter – were both dead by my hand.
Dornan must have seen something on my face. ‘You know where he is, don’t you?’
I shook my head vehemently. ‘No.’
‘Then why do you look like you’re about to pee all over the fucking floor?’ he growled.
‘They’ll arrest me for money laundering,’ I said quietly, my eyes wide, my breathing laboured. I wasn’t putting on an act. They really would arrest me for that. And ironically, the sentences for white-collar crimes like funnelling money – profits of drug supply and human trafficking at that – to every known tax haven in the world were probably harsher than if I’d just stepped out onto the strip with a machete and started hacking gamblehappy tourists to pieces.
America, the land of the free, really fucking liked collecting taxes. It didn’t like it when you tried to hide money. Especially when you got that money for doing very bad things.
‘Why do you think we’re here?’ Dornan asked, his anger subsiding for the moment. I glanced at the broken mirror, the remaining shards casting a haunting image of us, shattered and warped a thousand times over as our reflections existed in tiny slices of glass.
