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I tried once more to twist away but failed.
“Where iswhat?” I shot back, looking at Dominic’s chest, which desperately needed compressions.
“You play stupid, it ain’t going to end well for you.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about. Now let me go so I can try to save your cousin!”
Instead, Franco grabbed my throat.
CHAPTER3
Luna
“And then what happened?” Detective Rinaldi asked.
Her blonde hair was slicked back into a bun so tight, it pulled the skin of her cheekbones up, compensating for the crow’s feet around her eyes.
I took a deep, shaky breath. You would think I’d be an expert on how to handle trauma. Turns out, not so much.
“A car drove by, and it scared Franco off. He shoved me down.” I’d landed in Dominic’s blood. “I resumed CPR but…”
It was too late. I couldn’t believe Dominic was dead—it was surreal, like I’d wake up any second and someone would tell me this was all a nightmare. He was still alive when I’d stumbled across him. What if I hadn’t wasted so much time walking toward the reporters? If I’d taken a direct route, could I have saved him? Would my presence have been enough to deter the Vigilante’s attack, or would I have fallen victim to him, too?
The questions and what-ifs haunted me, lingering in my mind like a ghost, tearing at my soul and leaving me with a sense of emptiness that seemed to swallow me whole.
“And you have no idea what Franco was looking for?”
“No.” Why had I been the one to stumble across Dominic, anyway? Shouldn’t Franco have been the one to find him? “Francowalkedup to us.” I shook my head. “But he was supposed to pick Dominic up in his car.”
Was that a clue to his strange behavior?
“Deputies found Franco’s car with slashed tires,” she explained. “We believe the Vigilante did it to give him time to carry out his attack.”
I clenched my teeth. The damn Vigilante. It wasn’t bad enough that he’d slaughtered Dominic in broad daylight—brazen and arrogant, by the way, to do it in the back of a courthouse. He went through the extra effort to set up his spider’s web, slashing tires so no one would come to Dominic’s rescue.
What a vile, repulsive excuse of a human. A coward who didn’t want his victims to be able to fight back—ambushing them like this and cutting off any chance of hope.
This wasn’t just a murder.
It was an execution. And that broke my heart and burned it with white-hot rage in equal parts.
“Is there any evidence on the security cameras?” I asked.
“We’re looking into it. Nothing helpful so far,” she said.
Of course not. The Vigilante was meticulous in his attacks, never being stupid enough to have his car pop up on street cameras or anything.
“Why would he do this at the courthouse?” I asked. “It’s a risky place to kill someone.”
“Perhaps he thought this would be his only chance to get to Dominic.”
“Or maybe he thinks he’s invincible.” My voice came out low and biting. “He’s gotten away with killing people for two years and counting.”
But he wasn’t invincible. He would make a mistake someday, and maybe that day was today. Maybe they would finally catch him.
“What the hell happened?” Hunter Lockwood muscled his way past the police officers, their protests falling on deaf ears as he pushed his way through the small crowd gathering—who stood at the far end of the parking lot, gaping at the dead body. Police had already sectioned off the crime scene with two layers. Yellow tape sectioned off the official crime scene while cops manned another layer, to hold people thirty feet away from it.
Only someone with immense influence with law enforcement could get away with breaching that line of cops.
