Waving it in the air in invitation, she held out a hand, motioned him toward her. “Come on, you son of a bitch! You know you want to. Come on. Finish me off.”
At the challenge, Henry lunged. When she stuck out the blade, she aimed for his chest. As it ripped through flesh and muscle, Henry dropped to his knees. She brought her knee up again and landed a blow under his chin. Reeling, he finally went down, toppling backward.
Still gripping the knife, she ran to the front door, flung it open and walked out onto the porch, straight into Thane’s arms.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Thane wrapped her up, noting the blood on her face first, the splatter on her tank top, and the streaks of red running down her bare legs. Since she was shivering from the chill, he took off his jacket, draped it around her shaky shoulders. “Are you okay? Thank God you’re alive.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “A little woozy still but… Where’s Jazz? Is she okay?”
Before Thane could answer, Brent rushed past them and into the house, leaving Logan standing in the doorway taking in the grisly scene inside.
A man lay on the living room floor in a puddle of blood.
Thane shot an angry look at Logan. “Looks like you got what you wanted. You both did.” He sucked in his anger for the time being and yelled out to Brent’s back, “Do you need any help in there?”
Brent appeared back on the porch, shook his head, his cell phone already at his ear. “Don’t go in there. No one goes in there,” he repeated. “I found Cleef’s body in the hall closet. Looks like the old guy’s had his throat cut, been dead a couple days at least, maybe longer.”
“Poor old guy. That must be where the foul smell is coming from,” Thane stated, turning to spare a look at Isabella. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look pale, like you might faint any minute.”
Isabella grabbed her stomach thinking she might be sick at hearing Henry had killed that sweet old man. When she did finally manage to speak the string of words came out scattered. “I’m…I’m okay. It looks worse than it is. The blood isn’t mine. It belongs to…Henry. Is he…is Henry dead…did I kill him?”
Brent didn’t answer right away but kept to his official call, telling the 9-1-1 operator that he needed an ambulance. As soon as he disconnected though, he stared at Isabella. “Navarro will live. He’s coughing up blood which means you probably nicked a lung. The paramedics are on their way, so we’ll know something more concrete when they get here.”
She angled her head toward Logan. “Looks like our plan finally worked.” At that statement, however, Isabella saw the irritation come into Thane’s eyes. “This is what I wanted to talk to you about earlier tonight. But you were so busy at the restaurant…”
“Well, the whole thing came unglued before you could, huh? Funny how that works sometimes.” Thane took a step back from her, looked over at Brent. “If you’re staying here to wait for the sheriff’s department to show up, shouldn’t someone get Isabella over to Doc’s, have him check her out?”
“Good idea,” Brent said in agreement. “Since Cleef’s house is now a crime scene, use my truck and take Isabella back to town. Looks like I’ll be here for hours.”
“Are you coming, Logan?” Thane asked as he took Brent’s keys.
Logan shook his head, noting Thane’s body language spoke volumes—getting in the truck at this point didn’t seem like a good idea. “That’s okay. I’ll call Troy to give me a ride back home.”
“Suit yourself.” Thane led Isabella to the vehicle, helped her inside. Once he started up the engine, they drove in relative silence until she finally uttered, “If you’ll just let me explain.”
Thane took his eyes off the road long enough to send her a stony stare. “Sure. I deserve the truth now because you got kidnapped by a crazy psychopath that I didn’t know existed until tonight when he almost killed you. Well, thanks for that.”
“Just hear me out.”
“Hear you out? For starters, your name isn’t Isabella. How’s that for starters? I’m in love with a woman and, wait for it, I don’t even know her real name or anything real about her. The truth is I’m not sure I want to hear some bullshit story or anything you have to say to me right now.”
“I know you’re angry.”
He blew out a breath. “Unless you suddenly became a parent in the last two hours, you don’t know shit. Tell me this before you get into your explanation though. How in the world did two smart people like you and Logan ever cook up this scheme and hope to pull off such a crazy plan? How does staking you out like bait work exactly?” He held up a hand before she could answer. “Oh, I know. The nut kidnaps you. You stab him. That’s how it ends.”
“If you’ll just listen long enough for me to explain, I’ll walk you through what happened.” Before he could object, she went into her detailed story. “My real name is Marisa Isabella Vidalgo. Just after my twenty-second birthday, I married a much older man named Garth Lattimer. Even though we lived in a nice house in Denver, Garth had a horrible, horrible temper and a problem letting go. That is Marisa Lattimer’s truth, a truth very similar to Isabella’s truth, which you already know about.” She took a deep, calming breath to get her balance so she could continue.
“Garth was abusive and controlled my every move. I had to account for every minute of the day, every dime that I spent, he tracked. He kept up with how much time I spent on the computer, where I went, how long I was gone. That day at the car lot when I told you that he wouldn’t let me have my own car, was the truth. Marisa’s truth. Garth wouldn’t allow me to get a job. He owned his own business so he worked out of the house most of the time. I spent my days depressed and my nights miserable and catering to his every whim. After twenty months of that, I started plotting how and when I would get away from him. It took me another eight months to build up the courage to go through with the plan and then to take my chance when the opportunity presented itself.”
She shoved her hair out of her face and went on, “It didn’t go quite like I thought it would go but I did eventually make it into Canada with the help of a very kind stranger. You’d never believe that part of it anyway.”
“Try me.”
She’d never seen Thane’s jaw as set as it was right that minute so she sucked in another deep breath and fought to control her emotions. “The night I left Denver I crashed Garth’s car. The roads were slick. I wandered off into the woods where I was forced to spend the night. The next day I came across this cabin. A man was outside chopping wood. He took one look at my face and realized I’d taken a beating. I’m not sure what exactly he thought, but for whatever reason, he decided to help me. He got me across the border into Canada. I ended up at a women’s shelter in Calgary. I’d been there four days when Isabella Rialto walked in. The two of us connected almost immediately. We had the same tastes in food, the same tastes in clothes. We even had similar features—enough that people there thought we were sisters. At times, we pretended we were.”
“I’m beginning to see where this is going. Pretending seems to come natural to you. It must be your true nature, what you’re all about.”
“I don’t blame you for being angry.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t need your approval for that. I knew something was off about you. I sensed it. I should’ve listened to my gut instincts early on from that first day and stayed away from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve been evasive with everyone. But you’d think if you cared so much about me and Jonah, remember Jonah, the little boy you offered to tuck into bed tonight? If you cared so much about us you would’ve found a way to tell me the truth. You see, that’s what I don’t understand. You pretended all this time to be someone else? Why would a sane person do that? Or better yet, an honest one?”
“You have a right to be upset. If you care for me at all, you’ll give me a chance to explain, to explain all of it. Now, where was I?”
“You were back in Canada where
the two Isabellas were pretending to be sisters,” Thane repeated, his voice laced with as much sarcasm as he could pull off.
“We were a lot alike, Thane. I hadn’t been allowed to have friends in such a long time it was like being handed a gift. The two of us had been through so much that very few people could understand. There were times we didn’t even get why we put up with the abuse for as long as we did. Anyway, after Isabella got settled at the shelter, Logan started sending her money with the idea that she’d come to Pelican Pointe.”
“And you’d go with her.”
“Exactly. We couldn’t take up space for any longer than necessary there because, let’s face it, neither one of us were even Canadian citizens. Hiding there for me had always been a temporary fix anyway. So Isabella and I started to make long-range plans. Logan put us up in an apartment for a couple weeks until we could figure things out from there.”
“Then why not just head to Pelican Pointe?”
“Because Henry knew that’s the first place Isabella would go, the same place where Logan had relocated. He knew Logan was very much a part of Isabella’s life. It wouldn’t do to commit to going there when Henry would surely figure that out in a couple hours and come after her. But that delay cost us…her…dearly. It cost Isabella her life.”
She wiped back tears and went on, “The night it happened we’d planned to stay in. The weather was bad, it was snowing like mad. We didn’t want to leave the apartment and for safety reasons we’d made the decision to pair up whenever we went out. But that night we decided to make chocolate pudding. We didn’t have any cornstarch on hand. Who keeps cornstarch in the pantry, right?”
Tears continued to run down her cheeks at the memory. “The store was at the end of the block, at most, a five-minute roundtrip walk from our place. I let Isabella go out alone and she never came back. Henry had more than likely been waiting for his opportunity to get at her right outside our door. And that night with one bad decision, we handed it to him on a silver platter.”
“Look, the tears are a nice touch. But they don’t change how angry I am right now at the fact that you lied to me.”
Desperate for him to get it, she went on, “I wasn’t with her when that bastard tried to kill her with his own hands, when he beat her to death. When she didn’t come back I called the police. I alerted Logan. I had no idea at the time that Henry had intercepted her at the market, dumped her in a remote location. Or that he had dragged her out of the grocery store in front of witnesses while no one did anything. If you don’t believe me there’s surveillance video that shows him doing it.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t get it. I understand Henry’s a bad guy, that he murdered your friend. That doesn’t explain your ruse, living here day after day lying to me.”
She grabbed Thane’s arm. “Don’t you see? Henry left her there, alive. Isabella fought to live that night. She was alive when he left her in that ditch. And I wasn’t there to help her.”
“But you made up for it tonight when you kicked his ass, didn’t you? Kudos to you for hanging in there and getting justice the way you deemed.”
“You really don’t get it. She died two days after they brought her in. Logan and I managed to keep that information private. At the time we were both grieving and while we wallowed in what might have been, we came up with a plan. What if Isabella had survived? What if she’d lived? Sure it was pure fantasy on our part, but it’s a nice one to have. Don’t you think? There was all this ‘what if’ stuff going back and forth between us until finally Logan and I looked at each other and we both knew what we had to do.”
“Do you realize how crazy that sounds? Which just proves that smart people have an irrational side to them.”
“Crazy? Irrational? Not so much when you realize Henry did show up here. I’d almost given up on it working. But it did. Work that is. By the time we’d cooked up the plan Henry had already snuck out of the country. He couldn’t have known how it all ended up because Isabella’s death didn’t make the papers. We both made sure of that. Wherever Henry was headed, however long he lived, he couldn’t be entirely certain, not a hundred percent anyway, that Isabella couldn’t identify him as her attacker. If there was one little nugget of doubt in his psychopathic brain, we wanted to foster that, to let it grow into full-blown uncertainty. Without solid confirmation, for all Henry knew, Isabella had survived her injuries.”
“And the Canadian authorities went along with this?”
She sucked in a breath knowing it was finally over. “A week after her death, they charged Henry with kidnapping based on the security camera video. But by then it was too late. For the next several years, Henry made certain he hid behind his phony diplomatic status. He’s been on the run ever since. Two years ago I sent him a wire telling him that I was alive. I signed it, Isabella Rialto, and added a caveat that only the two of them knew about, something she’d told me they used as children, a four-leaf clover with two crossed swords in the middle.”
“The one on your ankle? That’s why you got it? Between two friends you said. You went to those kinds of lengths to carry out this cockamamie plan to lure him, another convincing piece to use as bait, knowing if you were successful, if you played the part well enough, you’d put yourself and everyone around you in danger.”
“Please, try to understand. I had to do something. The bastard’s been hiding with help from a long list of people on his side. He uses the diplomatic immunity angle, his family’s wealth, money from Basque causes. He’s relied on them to help him every step of the way. This was the only thing we could think of doing that might draw him out, out of his snake hole.”
Thane pulled up in front of Doc’s, cut the engine. He ran nervous fingers through his hair and said what had to be said. “Well, if it counts, no matter how many ways you say the same thing it still doesn’t make any sense to me at all. How’s that? How about coming clean with this? Just how long have you been waiting to give Henry this chance to get to you? A year? Two? How long have you lived like this in actress-mode?”
“Three years. Two primed inside the Rialto estate in Oyster Bay, the last six months here.”
Thane’s mouth gaped open. “Three years?” His mind ran through the implications until he narrowed his eyes, glared at her. “Logan left you alone at this estate with no backup? My God. It’s one thing to spend that long pretending but to fool yourselves into believing that you could have taken on this guy alone is completely unreasonable…crazy.”
“I did it, didn’t I? I took him out tonight.”
“Yeah, sure, you did. But at what price? All this time you’ve spent lying to me, to Jonah, that’s the bottom line for me, Izzy, or whatever the hell your name is. I can’t be involved with anyone like that. Someone who has no regard for the truth is someone I want to avoid. I’ve been through that with other people, a long list of other people. Some irrational person out for revenge willing to sit out three years of her life isn’t what I want for myself. It damned sure isn’t what I want for my son. This whole thing amounts to a crazy side to you I didn’t know existed until tonight.”
Instead of calming down, he kept building up to his point. “And you know what occurs to me most of all, other than you putting my son in jeopardy for months? It’s one thing for Henry to fall for the trick. You got him here. But it’s another to put my son in harm’s way knowing you were dealing with a demented killer. You had that information locked away. Logan knew. You think I’m stupid? The Canadian authorities had to know who they were dealing with, too. At any time you and Logan could’ve dropped this entire thing and let the authorities handle it. From what Logan said, the guy’s practically a serial killer. And you think this bolsters your case? Hardly.”
Her ire was beginning to take shape and hold. Because of that, she raised her voice. “Look, Thane, justice for Isabella has been nonexistent. Henry’s family has helped hide him away all this time. The only thing Logan and I could try to do was to get him to come after Isabella. It migh
t have been a longshot but…”
“I get it, Henry was obsessed with Isabella. You used it to your advantage. Oh, believe me, I get it. And along that path comes Jonah into the picture, your picture. What did you do about it? Did you take me aside and tell me what you were dealing with? No. You chose to keep me in the dark, chose to keep up the charade while Jonah could have easily gotten in this bastard’s way to get to you.”
She swallowed hard. “But, I took Henry out tonight. I finally did something to stand up for women like Isabella and me. What Henry felt for Isabella is the same kind of sick, warped obsession Garth felt for me, so violent, so controlling. Henry might’ve loved his mother but it didn’t stop him from beating her into a coma when he was sixteen.”
“No argument that this man needed to be off the streets and stopped. But for God’s sake, that isn’t your responsibility.”
“Then whose responsibility is it exactly?” she fired back. “RCMP messed up and so did Interpol. Right now my faith isn’t exactly with the New York cops either at this point in Javier Rialto’s death. So what was I supposed to do, stand by and do nothing, let him get away with murder?”
Thane scrubbed his hands over his face. “Let’s face it, we’re worlds apart on this, Isabella. Marisa. Isabella. What the hell am I supposed to call you now?”
She tried to reach out and take his hand but he pulled it back from her touch, which had her realizing the depth of his anger. “It’s okay to call me Isabella. My parents used to call me that. It wasn’t a lie when I told you my friends used to call me Izzy. But Garth changed all that by calling me Marisa because in his mind it was more regal.”
The memory of that haughty man brought on a bout of wild laughter until she settled down. “It was just another way to enact control early on. For what it’s worth, I always preferred the name Isabella, but of course, what I thought never mattered much to Garth. Back then, I had so little to say in any aspect of my own life… Don’t you see? Going to this extreme—pretending to be Isabella—was the only way to beat Henry at his own game, the only way to draw him out of hiding after he murdered her. The only way to take back the power I’d given up with Garth.”
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