by Ava Kendrick
I opened the door and ran down the stairs.
My heart sank as I glanced around Tully’s. At this time in the afternoon, it was as empty as I would have expected. Five or six people were dotted around the tables, but that was it. No Cleo. I sighed. I had no idea where else to go look for her. The library would be closed by now, and I didn’t know where her interview had been. Not that that was an option, not if I wanted to avoid making a scene.
My heart sank even further when I realized that the bartender was gesturing something at me.
“What’s that?” I muttered.
“What can I get you?” he yelled in his loud drawl.
“Nothing, I—” I started to turn around and then stopped.
“Change your mind easily, dontcha,” he smirked as I walked toward the bar.
The smile fell from his face the moment he saw my expression.
“Bad day?” he asked.
I shook my head in wonder at how this guy had managed to keep himself alive for thirty-plus years. He really had no sense of when to shut his stupid mouth. This time, though, I couldn’t say the same thing. I would never have thought of it if he hadn’t gotten my attention.
“Have you seen Cleo?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light.
He seemed to think about it for a moment. “Naw, man. Doesn’t she spend most of her time at your place these days?” he asked with a wink.
My fingers clenched into fists; I had to physically restrain myself from launching them at him, reminding myself that he wasn’t the problem here. The Soldier was. And I wasn’t going to be that powerless asshole that took his anger out on innocents because he couldn’t touch the real cause; no matter how annoying those innocents were.
“Yeah I know. But I got home early and she wasn’t there.”
He glanced around wide-eyed. “Well, she’s not there.”
I wanted to roll my eyes, but I resisted the urge.
“I can see that, Tony. You haven’t seen her today?”
He shook his head. “Naw. She doesn’t come in here much now that she’s not staying at Julia’s.”
I could have kissed the damn moron on the head right then. That had to be it. There was nowhere else I could think of. “Julia,” I said thoughtfully. “Where’s her place at?”
He frowned. At first I thought he was deciding whether to tell a dangerous asshole like me where his girlfriend lived, but that wasn’t it at all. He was simply trying to remember the address.
“101 4th Street. Apartment 23.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“You don’t want a drink?” he asked.
For once I didn’t want to throw a punch at the stupid fuck.
Thirty-One
Cleo
I still couldn’t believe it even though I remembered everything now.
“What happened then?” Julia asked softly, tearing me away from my self-loathing.
I shook my head. “You must think I’m a fucking idiot. Not seeing what he was all those years and then not trying to fight him off.”
She came around the table and knelt beside me, wrapping her arms around me. “No. I don’t. I’m glad you didn’t fight. I might be standing at your graveside right now.”
“But I might have got away.”
“Cleo,” she soothed. “You did get away. You’re alive. You remember everything. Let me go find the detective’s card. I’ve got it in my purse.”
“No.” I grabbed her arm as she tried to stand up. “You can’t.”
She looked at me confused. “We have to call the cops, Cleo.”
“We can’t,” I said miserably. “We can’t.”
“Oh, darling. You’re safe now.”
My hands were shaking out of control then. “No. I’m not. The cops, Julia.”
She smiled as if I wasn’t making any sense. “Yeah, sweetie. We’ve got to call them.”
I clenched my fists. It all made sense in my mind, but somehow I couldn’t get the words to come out. Hey, it wasn’t like I’d dealt with murderous boyfriends and dirty cops before, was it?
“If we go to the cops, he’ll know.”
Julia’s eyes opened wide. “What do you mean?” she asked cautiously. “Cleo, he may have frightened you, but he’s out of your life now. He doesn’t know what you’re doing. How could he?”
By now I was struggling to breathe normally and not hyperventilate. “No, Julia. You don’t understand. He’s got cops; he told me.”
“What?”
I nodded.
She sighed gravely, glancing around the room. “Tell me everything, Cleo. The whole story. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”
I wanted to protest, to tell her there was nothing we could do. But I didn’t. What was the point?
I sighed and tried to remember where I was in the story. “He started talking, but not in his usual voice. It was like I was with a different guy. ‘I went downstairs to get the tapes,’ he told me. ‘And isn’t it lucky I did?’ There was this vicious snarl to his voice that I’d never heard before. I just couldn’t stop looking at him, wondering who in the hell I’d been living with.”
“He pushed me into the lounge. ‘What did you think you were going to do?’”
I shivered. Talking about it out loud was sending me right back there, to my old apartment. It wasn’t hazy anymore.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I had said, forcing myself to meet his eyes.
He had sneered. “Oh yeah? Come on Cleo, you’re no fool. That’s why I liked you. You were different to the other women in my life.”
His tone was so hateful, so dismissive that I couldn’t help but feel angry. “Other women?” I’d said, making a face. “How the fuck did you manage that? You barely had libido enough for me.”
His face changed in an instant. I was looking at a stranger. His hand swept through the air and clattered across my cheek leaving a painful sting in its place. I stared at him in disbelief. He’d never laid a hand on me before.
“Surprised?” he grinned.
My hands balled into fists. But then I released them. Because right then, I was terrified of him. I opened my mouth to answer, but no words came out.
He smiled; satisfied. “I knew you wouldn’t speak to me like that if you knew who I really was.”
I looked away. I couldn’t bear to see that stranger’s face any longer. But I knew I had to keep him talking if I had any chance of getting out of there. “Who are you, Ben? And why bother with all of this?”
He shrugged and turned to take in our apartment. “Why’d you have to come back when you did? Even then, if you’d just stayed here I might have forgiven it. But no. You were on your way to the cops, weren’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t lie to me. It’s what people like you do, ain’t it?”
I bristled. People like me? Up until that afternoon, he’d been a person like me—young, educated, professional. Now, all of a sudden, even his accent sounded different. “Why would you go to all the trouble to pretend? For me? You can’t have. You barely showed an interest in me. And the brokerage. You talked about it in so much detail.”
“Yeah. Well. I sat my series 7 exams, you know. I’m not the fucking moron you think I am.” Anger flashed through his eyes.
“What? I don’t think you’re a moron. I just don’t know who the hell you are. You just shot a guy in our apartment for fuck’s sake.”
We both fell silent. The sounds of the city were muffled by the double-glazed windows and the fact that we were high above street level. I could have screamed, but it was likely that nobody would even hear me. I swallowed.
“The truth comes out now,” he snarled.
I shook my head, past caring. Because I needed to know; needed to know why someone would live a false life like that for so long. “Why did you insist we move in together? What was the point?”
He thought about it. “I wanted to see what it was like—life on the other side. What with the brokerage
front, it had really got me thinking.”
“I was an experiment?” I said softly, looking around the room.
It had dawned on me that I didn’t know what or whom I was dealing with. A tad too late to realize, some might say. Yeah, well—you try finding out your boyfriend of two years was a cold-blooded killer.
“Kinda.” I could tell from his tone that he was growing impatient.
I realized the window of opportunity was narrowing. I pulled away.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he snarled.
My heart rate accelerated. “To the bathroom.”
“Yeah.” He took a step closer to me and smirked—this awful, evil smile I’d never seen before. “You mean calling the cops.”
I shook my head. “I need to go to the bathroom, Ben.”
He snorted with laughter. “Sure. You go ahead. Call the cops. It won’t make a difference.”
I swung around, more surprised than anything. He didn’t care if I called the cops? After what I’d seen him do?
“Tell them I said hi. After all, they’re probably on my payroll.”
“Bullshit,” I gasped, unable to believe what I was hearing from the man who, up until that afternoon, had been my largely absent, slightly arrogant live-in boyfriend.
He smiled. “Try. See what happens.”
I turned back around, stunned. I needed to get away from him; to work out what to do. I took a step toward the door, thinking I’d get away; get to safety. And that was it. I didn’t even see him pick it up; I only knew it was the door stop because the doctors told me he’d hit me with something blunt and heavy. I didn’t hear a thing, just felt a sharp crack across the back of my head that sent me crashing to the floor. I didn’t even feel anything; no pain. Nothing.
I could hear him standing over me, out of breath from the exertion. And I felt myself start to fade. My head was cold; cold and wet. But I was still conscious. I fought the urge to open my eyes; then I fought the panic that they were open and I just couldn’t see. I knew the most important thing I could do right then was to stay still and play dead.
That’s the last thing I remembered; him standing over me, breathing. Working out his next move, probably. Next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed hooked up to god only knew how many tubes and monitors.
“Whoa,” Julia breathed.
“So you believe me?”
She nodded. “Of course. I mean, I thought you were going crazy when you called me earlier, because you weren’t making sense. But I believe you. Fuck. Do you think that’s why you repressed the memory?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s one for the doctors, if…”
“If?”
I sighed. This was the part I didn’t get. “Why didn’t he come after me again? You said he visited in the hospital. He could have killed me then, or several times after I got out. If the cops weren’t an issue, then…”
“It would’ve been suspicious, wouldn’t it? To attack you twice. Even if he had some cops. They’re not all corrupt.” She wiped her eyes with her fingers. “Now that I remember it, he asked lots of questions. Would you ever wake up? Would you remember? At the time, the doctors’ outlook was grim.”
“And he took that as a good sign,” I said flatly.
She reached over and rubbed my arm. “Look, let’s call the cops. He can’t have every cop in this city on his side. Nobody does. Not even the mayor.”
I shook my head. “What if we pick the wrong one? We have no way of knowing. He’s dangerous, Julia.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay…”
My heart sank. For some irrational reason, I’d been holding out hope that she’d have the answers. But she didn’t. And she was the only person I had in this city, now that…
“What about Roman?” Julia said, seemingly reading my mind.
I felt the corners of my mouth turn down. I looked away.
“Cleo?”
I shook my head. “I just saw him. With Ben.”
“Roman? Your Roman?”
“Yeah.”
“What? Maybe…”
I shook my head.
“They could be friends from… I dunno…”
“Really?” I smiled sadly. I’d tried and failed to come up with a rational explanation, just like she was now.
She shrugged. “It’s a big city.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t think it was any coincidence that I met him like that.”
“You mean…”
“Yeah.” I shuddered. For some reason, Roman’s betrayal felt more raw, even though I barely knew him. “I saw them together. That’s one hell of a coincidence, right?”
“There’s no way they could…”
I shook my head. No. Enough. I decided then. No more trying to make excuses for the men in my life. There was no way they went to school together. I wasn’t risking my life on that theory.
“What do I do, Jules? I’m a fucking accountant. There was no CPA module covering what to do when the guys you date turn out to be homicidal maniacs and you can’t go to the cops.”
Julia snorted. “You’re asking me?”
I shrugged and leaned my chin into my palm. I needed a plan, and I needed one fast.
Thirty-Two
Roman
The door swung open and I came face-to-face with Julia. I’d never even spoken to her before but she was looking at me like she wanted to kill me. I glanced over her shoulder and saw that Cleo was standing behind her. She stepped backward—a slight movement, but I one that I noticed.
My heart sank.
She knows.
I tried to reason with myself. How the hell could she possibly have known? She was an accountant, not a private detective. And I kept my nose clean. There were probably nuns who appeared shadier than I did.
I stared in her eyes looking for some kind of light; some trace of the humor I was used to. But there was nothing. All I saw was fear and darkness. I took a step forward, but Julia moved quickly and tried to close the door in my face. I blocked it with my foot. She leaned all her weight against it anyway.
There was no doubt in my mind now. They knew.
“Cleo,” I said through the crack in the door, keeping my voice as calm as I could.
“Leave me alone,” she snapped.
I felt a surge of protectiveness so strong it almost knocked me over. She sounded so afraid; so lost. I leaned against the doorjamb, hating myself more than I’d ever hated anyone in my life. She was afraid of me. And with good reason.
Walk away.
But I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t save her. I couldn’t just walk away knowing what he’d do to her when he found her.
“I said—”
“I heard what you said,” I said miserably.
Julia turned back to Cleo and whispered something. I couldn’t hear what she said, but there was an urgency to her tone that I didn’t like. I had a feeling it was something along the lines of ‘Roman is a fucking asshole, call the cops now.’
I couldn’t believe I was in that situation. Did she have any idea how much danger she was in? I balled my fist and made to slam the door, stopping when I was just inches from crashing through it. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to let her see my anger, but I was struggling to hold it back.
I cared about this girl. I cared about her more than I’d ever cared about anyone. It killed me that I couldn’t protect her.
“How do you know him?”
I glanced up in astonishment. The door was still pushing against my foot, but it was Cleo who stood behind the door now.
She pushed against it, trapping my foot between the door and its frame.
I pushed back half-heartedly. It was taking most of my concentration to try and work out what the fuck was going on in my mind. If I’d wanted to open that door? It would have taken five men to stop me. But I couldn’t. There was a reason why I was glad to be the one the Soldier had come to, even though it tore me up inside—I was going to make this as quick and pa
inless as possible. She wasn’t going to know terror, not if I had anything to do with it.
She pushed back, groaning from the exertion. My heart tugged at the sound. It sent me straight back to my bedroom; to long mornings spent seeing how long I could tease her with my tongue before she went crazy with frustration. My heart cried out for one more moment like that; even just a minute. It felt like a long time ago now.
“Let me in, Cleo,” I said, as calmly as possible.
Did I feel like an asshole for trying to make her feel like everything was okay? Of course I did. But what did it matter? Why not make her last moments bearable.
I sighed. I loved this woman and the only thing I could do was make her dead quick and painless? To say that tore me up inside was an understatement.
“No. You’re not coming in here,” she said, pushing back against me.
Rage swelled up inside me then. Why was it that he could click his fingers and destroy two lives, just like that? Even if I gave her an easy way out, I’d never get over it. I’d never forgive myself.
I looked at her again. Her face was sweating from the exertion; her hair plastered to her face. But goddamn it she was beautiful still.
I can’t do it.
I can’t.
I let go of the door and pulled my foot back.
Do it, Roman, do it. You don’t want to leave it to him.
But I couldn’t. It was all wrong. I loved her. I loved her with all my heart. And I was supposed to just kill her?
Thirty-Three
Roman
I walked along the corridor, my brain racing and fuzzy like I’d just come down with a fever. I wish I had—whatever it was, it was likely to be a whole lot less deadly than the situation I found myself in now.