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“You’re not terrible company,” he placates. Drawing a smile to my lips. “You’re just—”
“Hostile?” I offer. “Annoying. Depressing?”
“You’re stuck in a house all alone,” he counters sweetly. “With a guy you don’t know. For hours, and days, and weeks on end. You’re being told you’re free, but you’re not really.” He wrinkles his nose so the lines fan across to his cheeks and up into his eyes. “You’re in a prison, Ms. Swanson. Fancy house, good food, shiny things. But the jail walls remain, regardless.”
“How long do you think we have to stay here?” I sigh. “Have they told you?”
He shakes his head side-to-side, apologetic in his expression and relaxed as he leans back against the column that holds the patio roof up. “I just know Detectives Malone, Fletcher, and Banks are following down every lead and looking for the man responsible for putting you in this position.”
“We had a plan,” I rasp, swallowing the emotion clogging my throat and bringing my focus back down to the water. “Show my execution on the news. Make everyone believe I was dead. Vallejo goes away and I can get on with my life. But it’s not working out that way. Drake is still worried about me. He’s still searching. And though he said I was free, he lied.” A single tear slips from between my lashes and plops onto my cheek. “He promised to always be straight with me. But this time—”
“It’s interesting to me that Banks feels this deeply for any one woman.”
A stranger’s voice brings me around with a gasp, my feet shaky enough to threaten a dip into the freezing pool, but it’s the gun pressed to Officer Spears’ temple that has my stomach rolling.
I meet the eyes of a murderer, the eyes that stared into mine from across the street that night of Lombardo’s execution. But in the light of the setting sun, now that I’m actually paying attention, it’s easily apparent that he’s not Gregory Vallejo at all.
Not even close.
Vallejo is in his sixties. This man, perhaps forty.
He wears a shiny gold Rolex on his left wrist and the look in his eyes makes the blood run cold in my veins. “Hello, Aurora Swanson.” Then he looks at a terrified Aaron and grins. “We don’t need you, son.” He squeezes the trigger, his gun exploding against the side of Spears’ skull so blood sprays the patio floor, and nausea sprints along my throat.
I turn on my heels in a panic, only to come to a screeching halt when I find two more men stepping outside of the house.
“Don’t run away now, Aurora.” The man whose name I don’t know shoots another round, my breath bursting out on a scream when the floor by my feet explodes, concrete spraying up and biting at my legs. “I’m a very good shot,” he warns, his voice sickeningly calm. Almost kind. “The first was your only warning.” He tosses Aaron’s body to the right, letting him drop with a thud that will forever haunt my dreams. “The second will be your death.”
“W-why are you hunting me?” I turn from the burly men, soldiers, I suppose, and face my pursuer with faux bravado in my eyes. If I’m to die, I’ll do it with a bullet in my front, not my back. “What did I ever do to you?”
“You saw me.” He wears a suit, much like Felix did that day. Taking a stark white handkerchief from his breast pocket and flipping it open, he uses it to wipe the crimson blood from his hands. “You looked into my eyes, Aurora. You know people that matter to me.”
“I don’t even know your name!” Anger courses through my veins and replaces the ice with fire. “Even now, all this time later, I don’t know your name. So why the hell are you so bent out of shape and tracking me down?”
“Loose ends sink ships.” Finishing with his clean-up, he bunches the handkerchief and slides it into his pocket. But his right hand remains free, a shiny, silver gun like Drake’s, clasped in his fist. “Or however the saying goes.”
“Is Vallejo here?” I twist where I stand and look at the other two who work their way closer. Like I’m a trapped little bird, and they’re the hungry foxes readying to pounce. “D-did he send you?”
The man barks out a laugh loud enough to make me jump. “Vallejo is dead, kid. He has been since your detective put him down.”
“But he’s not.” I search desperately for a way out of here. Back into the house. I could get my knife, and search for that panic room Archer mentioned our first day here.
Did I listen?Not well.
Did I think, during all my time of boredom over the last few weeks, to go searching?Nope. Not once.
“Gregory Vallejo is alive,” I tell him, frantically wondering if I can outrun a bullet. And knowing, even without a steel rod in my leg, I stand no chance. “The morgue dug his casket up.” I raise my hands, like the action will somehow save me. But then I take a step away from the pool’s edge. A second step, as the possibility of being shot and falling into the water’s depth, death by drowning and not from blood loss, becoming my newest, greatest fear. “His body wasn’t in the box. He’s alive.”
“He’s dead,” the man seethes. “He deserved to die. But he’s in my box instead.”
Stunned, I refocus on his eyes and narrow mine. “What?”
“My casket.” His lips curl high, creating an expression that scorches itself on the backs of my eyes. “Someone had to go in the ground, Aurora. Someone had to be buried beneath my headstone.”
“I don’t…” My heart thunders in my chest, burning so it aches, and hammering until I fear it’ll give out completely. “I don’t understand. Wh…” I risk a glance over my shoulder and whimper when I find his men circling closer. Closer. “Who are you?” I look him up and down and try to place him.
Why is he familiar?
Do I know him?
