by Cynthia Eden
“Bullshit.” Like he’d believe anything this asshole said.
“Do you know who killed Chloe’s parents?”
The one-eighty question made Joel tense even more.
“I do. Chloe does, too. If she honestly cared for you, wouldn’t she tell you the truth? She told me.”
Joel braced his feet apart. Got ready for the attack he knew was coming. And he decided to use some of the tools Chloe had given him. His plan was to attempt to handle this…shit, like she would have done. “You wanted her on the yacht with you.”
Silence.
Yeah. I can throw out my one-eighty shit, too. “But Chloe knew what you were. Oh, sure, perhaps you fooled her at first, but she eventually saw through you. She always sees through the monsters, doesn’t she? She found evidence that proved what you really were. A criminal defense attorney…who was a criminal.”
Again, more silence. So Joel plowed on. He took what he’d learned and pushed. “If Chloe had wanted to be on that yacht, she would have been. You knew when she canceled, that all of your plans were about to fall apart. She had incriminating evidence on you. Enough to ruin your life.”
“I didn’t leave evidence behind,” Morgan snapped out. Definitely not sounding so controlled any longer. “Chloe had her guesses. That’s all.”
Joel smiled. “Chloe doesn’t guess, and we both know it. So when she wasn’t there, you knew that you had to disappear. Faked your death. Got to say, that seems rather dramatic.”
“You have no idea who you are dealing with. You’re an amateur. A fool who got lucky because he didn’t die when he was tossed in a grave. You don’t understand Chloe, and you will never understand me.”
“No? Well, news flash. I don’t give a shit about understanding you.” He’d be happy to never see the man again. “But when it comes to Chloe, I think I’m starting to figure things out. And if you were listening to us tonight—the way I suspect you were—then you know that Chloe loves me. That pushed your buttons, didn’t it? It’s what drove you to seek me out. It—”
“You left her crying. Chloe cries for no one.”
Her tears. His chest burned once more.
“She didn’t even cry when she killed her own brother,” Morgan said. “Didn’t shed a tear.”
His heartbeat was too loud.
“You won’t last.” Morgan took a slow step back. “I’ll make sure of that.”
Joel thought the bastard was going to dive for the gun. He surged toward it, too—
But instead of going for the gun, Morgan yanked out a knife. He lifted it up high with his left hand and brought it down toward Joel’s body as—
Another knife flew from the darkness. Spun end over end until it lodged in Morgan’s shoulder. He dropped the blade he’d been holding. It clattered to the alley’s floor.
Joel’s head immediately whipped toward the thick darkness at the end of the alley.
Morgan barreled past him. Bleeding, swearing…
Joel wanted to rush after him, but what other threat waited in the alley? Had that knife been meant for Morgan or for him and what did—
Footsteps crunched over loose gravel. Marie strolled out of the darkness. “I was aiming for him, in case you were worried.”
The gun was near his foot. Joel started to pick it up—
“Nope. You should leave it there. Knowing Morgan, it was probably used in a crime and if you touch it and get your fingerprints on it, then you’ll be hauled to jail.” She waved a hand vaguely around the alley. “This whole scene is probably a setup. He wanted the cops to catch you assaulting him, so it’s a good thing you decided to let the jerk get out of here.”
It didn’t feel like a good thing. It felt like a terrible mistake. “The bastard faked his own death. I’m sure the cops would like to know he was here. Why he faked it. And—”
“He’ll have a complete new identity. Chloe told me once that no one would ever be able to prove who he really is. So if Morgan was out, in public, and he was luring you to this alley, it was all so he could spring a trap on you.”
As if on cue, a police siren screamed.
“We should leave,” Marie advised. “I think they’re coming here.” She took his elbow. Tucked her arm through the crook. “Looks like we’re a couple this way.” They walked out of the alley, arm-in-arm, all casual-like. “Nope. Not going for your ride.” She steered him away from the motorcycle. “Morgan probably said the guy who assaulted him was riding that beast.”
“When would he have said that? He just ran out. He didn’t have time to call the cops—”
“I’m sure he alerted them before he ever said hello to you. Then his entire exchange with you was calculated. Designed to draw you out and get you exactly where he wanted you. Chloe told me that he was always very good at predicting behavior.”
“Chloe didn’t tell me jack shit about him.” Well, except for the fact that he’d been psycho. True. He seemed to be.
“Chloe was probably trying not to scare you. You’re kinda dealing with enough stuff already. Turn here. My car is just around the corner.”
A police cruiser was rushing toward them.
They kept strolling, nice and slow.
The vehicle passed them.
“I’m not scared of that asshole.”
“Good.”
“Why are you here?” Joel asked her.
“Because Chloe sent me to protect you. I was wondering why she didn’t come herself—she said something about you not wanting to be around her.”
I left her. I shouldn’t have left.
“Then I heard that little convo between you and Morgan. Cleared some things up.”
A red sports car waited a few feet away. She directed him straight to it.
“I didn’t need protecting,” Joel pointed out.
She let him go. Beamed at him. “You know, I have to say, your skills impressed me. You might be able to keep up with Chloe, after all.”
“You’re being nice to me. It worries me.” That bright smile made him nervous.
Her laughter rang out. “You just had an alley face-off with Chloe’s crazy ex, and I’m the one who worries you?”
“How did you know where I was? And how are you so good with knives?”
She pointed to the car. “Get in.”
He didn’t want to get in. He wanted to tear off and search for Morgan. Fucking jerk came at me with a gun. Morgan was obviously obsessed with Chloe. Hell, no wonder Reese and Marie had warned Joel that he needed to keep Chloe safe.
And I left her alone.
Now Morgan was on the streets and Chloe…
He yanked open the passenger door. “Get me back to Chloe.”
“Great life choice there, doc.” She slid behind the wheel. Turned the car on and had soft blue lighting filling the interior. Rock music blasted as she got them on the road and maneuvered through the city.
Joel stared out of the window and thought about Chloe. If that bastard is going after her…
“I was going to be just like him.” Marie’s voice was soft. Joel could barely hear it over the pounding radio. “I didn’t want to be. But I’d grown up only with him. He trained me. He taught me. He groomed me to take his place.”
His head turned toward her. “Who did?”
“My father. He killed one hundred men.”
Holy—
“He was a hitman. Knives were his specialty. He wanted them to be mine, too.” She stopped at a red light. Her hands tightened around the wheel. “I was on my first job. I knew what to do. How to do it. It would have been easy. Killing was the only thing I’d ever been taught to do.”
“Marie…”
The light changed—a moment before it changed, she was already surging forward. “Chloe found me. She walked right up to me. I was like two minutes away from completing the kill. She came to me. Said there was still time. Different options were out there.”
“She found you at your darkest time,” he mumbled. “You…told me that once.”
“I thought she was crazy.”
Despite what she was telling him, he almost smiled. “So did I, the first time we met.”
“Told her to get away from me. Told her…there was nothing different. I had no idea how to do anything else. No idea of anything else I could be.” Her attention stayed focused on the road even as she kept talking in her low, soft voice. “And Chloe, she told me…said I could stay with her while I figured it all out. She’d give me a job. I would be safe. All I had to do was just make the call.”
Another turn. The music kept blaring.
“I’ve been with her since then. Want to hear the wildest part? I even started taking cooking classes last fall.”
They were almost home.
Home.
“Turns out,” Marie murmured, “you can use knives for more than just killing. And I’m very, very good with my knives.”
“I can attest to that.”
She didn’t speak again. Not until they were back on the property. Her finger pressed the button to turn off the radio. “Aren’t you going to ask why I shared all that?”
“I’m guessing Chloe told you to tell me the truth?”
“No. Chloe doesn’t tell her friends what to do. That’s not who she is. Haven’t you figured that shit out yet? Stop being slow.” Her head angled toward him.
“Why did you tell me?”
“Because Chloe loves you. If she said it, she meant it. And you’re here right now—instead of running in the opposite direction after meeting that freak Morgan—and I think I know what that means.” A pause. “Do you?”
“I don’t want him to hurt her.”
“I don’t think he ever would. He has an attachment to her.”
“Yeah, fucking noticed.”
“That attachment is love to him. Not to everyone else. But, it’s as close as he can get.” She toyed with her keys. “Tell me, how close to love can you get?”
His breath sawed out. “It’s only been a few days. She’s only been in my life a few days.”
“Came in with hurricane force, didn’t she?”
Damn straight she did.
Marie slid out of the car.
He followed quickly. He needed to find Chloe. He needed—
Marie put her hand out, blocking his path when he headed for the main house. “She was with Morgan for six months. He asked her to marry him. Morgan is very good at saying the right things. At doing the right things. If he doesn’t want you to see the monster inside, you don’t. Even Chloe was fooled for a while. She doesn’t like being wrong.”
“I noticed that trait.”
“In that whole six months, she never told Morgan that she loved him.”
She told me. “She lied to me.”
“I tried to warn you about that. Even gave you clues. Said that with Chloe, what she says—”
“Isn’t as important as what she doesn’t say. Check. Got it now.”
“So why don’t you go figure out all of the things she hasn’t said? Go see her for who she really is. And if you’re not going to be here for the long haul, then do us all a favor, would you?” Her hand dropped. “Be gone by the time the sun rises. Don’t ever drag your ass back.” With that, she began walking away. Toward the main house.
He started to follow.
“Chloe won’t be in there.” She didn’t look back.
“Then were the hell is she?”
“If she was worried about you, don’t you think she’d be waiting in your place?”
He whirled around.
“Don’t forget. Be gone by—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he shouted back. “Except straight to Chloe.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
She was sitting on the couch when he opened the door. Chloe’s spine was perfectly straight, her hands were folded in her lap, and her chin was up. She wore loose, cotton jogging shorts and a blue top. Her feet were bare, and he noticed that her toes were curling against the floor.
Her only sign of nerves.
At least, the only sign Joel could see.
He shut the door. Flipped the lock. Leaned his shoulders back against the wood and tried to figure out where to start—
“I hope you don’t mind that I was waiting inside. I’m sure this is me overstepping, but…” Her voice trailed away.
“You’re not overstepping. You own the property.” Some gift deal that he’d never figured out.
“But this is your home, and you shouldn’t invade someone’s home.”
“Why the hell not?” He couldn’t take his eyes off her. “You invaded every other part of my life.”
She sucked in a breath.
Wrong thing to say. Came out wrong. “Chloe—”
“I only came inside because I wanted to make certain you were safe. After I received the card from Morgan, I was afraid he might try to wait for you in here. I sent Marie to look for you, and I came here.” She rose. “Morgan isn’t here, obviously, so I’ll get out of your way.” She headed for the door.
Morgan. He didn’t like hearing the bastard’s name on her lips. “You’re not going anywhere, sweetheart.”
Her hair slid over her shoulders.
“Met the ex tonight,” he drawled. “Got to say, he strikes me as a real prick.”
“You have no idea.”
His posture was relaxed but tension knifed through his entire body. “Because you didn’t tell me about him.”
“Yes, well, it is hard to drop certain points in a conversation. You don’t get to just say lines like… ‘Oh, by the way, I have an ex-fiancé out there who faked his own murder. He has extreme issues letting go, so I worry that he might be stalking me.’”
“Is that what he’s doing? Stalking you?” The sonofabitch.
“Morgan does many things.”
“Like pretend to be dead.”
A nod.
“Why?” But he had his suspicions, as he’d said to the bastard in the alley. Joel wanted to see if he was right.
“I’m different.”
That hadn’t been the response he’d expected from her.
“I’ve been different my whole life. I don’t think like everyone else. I can’t. I see people, and I’m constantly trying to figure out what’s driving them. I always tend to favor darker motives. I understand those motives. I understand darkness. All of the bad impulses that people have. The impulses that drive them to hurt and kill.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach. Bowed her head.
She’s death and moonlight.
“Morgan Fletcher was a criminal defense attorney. He took the biggest cases, the most sensational ones. His clients—they were some of the worst killers out there. The first time we met, I was sure I wouldn’t like him at all. How could I? He defended the people I wanted to put away.” Her hair had slid over her face. “But when we talked, he understood me. No, he understood them.”
Yeah. The jealousy is back. I know the guy is a straight-up bastard, and I’m still jealous. How rational was that? Not at all. But who cared? With Chloe, Joel was far past the point of being rational.
“We could talk about killers for hours. About what drove people to commit horrible crimes. About the demons inside of us all. He could figure out what was happening at a crime scene as quickly as I could. He didn’t mind when I got lost in my own head. He didn’t mind when I spent days hunting a murderer. He liked to hear every detail about what I was doing. And I didn’t realize, until too late, that he liked it all too much.”
“The sonofabitch pulled a gun on me tonight, Chloe.”
Her head whipped up.
“And I broke his hand. A few fingers. Maybe his wrist. I also gave him a few other mementos to remember me by.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Marie said he had probably already called them. That he’d arranged the whole scene so it would look as if I’d assaulted him—and, yeah, guilty, but only because he made the first move and I was defending myself.”
“I’v
e never seen anyone as good at manipulation as Morgan. He could have a jury believing a mass murderer was a choir boy. He could have me believing that the devil was prince charming.”
Joel wished he’d given the dick a few more mementos. “When did you realize the truth?”
“The night before I was supposed to go out on that yacht with him. Everything he said and did was perfect—when he was with me. Like each response was designed to please me. To match me. But no one is perfect, and it was that very perfection that made me so nervous. I started digging into his past. At first, everything was fine. So I had to look deeper and deeper. I had to go back more and more. It was only when I went back to his time in high school that I found my answer.”
“And you found it the night before the yacht trip?”
“His high school girlfriend vanished. Just disappeared one day. No trace of her was ever found.”
“How do you know he was involved? How’d you get proof?” A rough bark of laughter escaped him. “Another cadaver-sniffing dog—”
“I didn’t get proof. I had no proof. I had nothing but every instinct I possessed telling me that I had been wrong about him.” She was still hugging herself. “I don’t like to be wrong.”
“I have noticed that, sweetheart.”
She flinched. “She looked like me.”
“What?”
“Dark hair, blue eyes, similar build. She looked like me.”
He shoved away from the door. He wanted to pull her into his arms—
“I had no proof. No option. Just…fine, for the first time, I guessed. I called him. I told Morgan—I lied to him and said I knew what he’d done. One of my tests. Always testing people, yes? That’s me.” Chloe rocked back onto the balls of her feet. “I said I had proof. I said her name. I wanted his reaction.” Her breath had turned ragged.
“And what was his reaction?”
“Morgan said that the moment he met me, he knew I’d be the one.”
“The one fucking what?”
“The one who would understand him. The one who would see every part of him and understand what he was.”
I should have never let him get away. “So he admitted—”
“No, he never came out and admitted anything. But the next day, his yacht sank, and he was supposedly dead. I went to the police. Told them what I suspected, but his family was well connected in the area. He was well respected. Money and power can turn the tide on most stories.” A bitter laugh. “I’ve certainly seen that happen more than once in my life.”