by Jenn Vakey
Revenge with Murder
Book seven of the
Rilynne Evans Mysteries
Jenn Vakey
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter One
“Get back here,” Rilynne heard as she reached for her shirt off the back of the chair and headed toward the open bathroom door. A grin stretched across her face as she turned back to her new husband stretched out in the large king sized bed.
“Go back to sleep,” she said softly. “I’m just going to get in a quick run.”
Ben groaned and raked his hand through his shaggy dirty blonde hair before reaching for the clock. “Honeymoons aren’t for keeping up with your exercise routine. Come back to bed. The sun’s barely even up.”
Rilynne pulled her shirt on and crossed the room to sit on the side of the bed. “I won’t be long,” she said as she slid her running shoes on. “Go back to sleep, and I’ll join you as soon as I get back. You don’t need to be up for a few more hours.”
Another groan escaped his lips as he dropped his head back down onto the pillow. Rilynne grinned as she leaned down and gently kissed his bare shoulder. As she did, a warmth spread through her that took her breath away. She had no more than made it an inch off of the bed before he reached up and pulled her down into his arms. “We’re hiking up to that waterfall today. That’ll be enough of a workout for you.”
The feel of his warm breath against her neck almost changed her mind. It had been over a week, the day before they left for their honeymoon, since she had been out for a run. Though they had been active and enjoying the activities the island held, there was still nothing like the feeling of the wind rushing past her as she ran. It was one of her favorite things to do in the world.
“I won’t be long,” she said, though she didn’t move.
Rilynne could feel his head shaking against the back of her hers. His arm grew heavy where it lay draped around her, and she could tell he was already drifting back off. As she pushed back up off the bed, he half heartedly tried to stop her, but seemed to have resigned to the idea she was actually leaving as he wrapped his arms instead around a pillow and pulled it tight against his body. Before Rilynne had even crossed through the living room and reached the front door, the soft sound of snoring filled the small house. She just smirked and gently slipped out, pulling the door closed behind her.
Their small beach house sat in the middle of a large cluster of towering palms trees. Just beyond them, Rilynne could see the sun peeking above the horizon. Even though she had watched it nearly every morning since they arrived on the island, the look of it sneaking up above the waving ocean still left her breathless.
She took in a deep breath of the cool, salty air before heading down the stairs and onto the path that led around the corner of the house.
Rilynne had ventured out onto it their second day, but had yet to take a run. She had actually tried to put it off, not wanting to spend any of their time there apart, but she could no longer resist its call. After lying in bed for an hour thinking about it, she had finally given in.
Even while on her honeymoon, without a worry in the world, the way the breeze felt as it swept past her face was incredibly relaxing. Since she wasn’t familiar with the path, she didn’t take it at more than a quick jog. Although she’d have liked nothing better than to completely let loose and run as hard and as fast as she could, she would have been lying to herself if she thought she could make it without the chance of injury. She had many strengths, but coordination wasn’t one of them. Instead, she kept her stride steady and let her mind drift freely.
So much had happened since Ben proposed to her seven months before that part of her thought their honeymoon would never come. After their wedding had to be delayed at the last minute, she began to question whether the universe was out to prevent her from being happy. At times, it certainly felt that way.
Rilynne had thought it couldn’t get better when she married her college boyfriend years before. Just a few short months later, however, her world was flipped upside down. After that heart wrenching night when she discovered her home covered in blood and her husband gone, she decided her sole concentration in life would be work. If she didn’t have a personal life, she wasn’t at risk of being hurt by it. That all changed when she moved to Addison Valley.
She had only been in town a few months when she started growing close to a crime scene technician, Ben Davis. Though they both tried to fight the attraction, it continued to grow. Just shy of a year after they met, Ben asked Rilynne to marry him.
Though their relationship moved quickly, it wasn’t always easy. With her dedication to her job, Rilynne found herself getting in trouble more often than she liked. On more than one occasion, it ended up putting both of them in serious danger.
In between getting kidnapped, framed with murder, and desperate manhunts, Rilynne didn’t know if things would ever slow down enough for her to settle down. When she finally found herself walking down the aisle, she couldn’t have been happier. For once in her life, she wasn’t worried about what was coming next. All she could think about was how happy she was to have found Ben. Despite the peril that seemed to surround them, Ben always supported her. While other women might have just seen that as an added perk to a working relationship, it was something Rilynne needed.
When she was young, Rilynne discovered she wasn’t like all of the other children. She had the ability to see things that were happening to others around her. At first, she could see little moments happening in the lives of people she knew. As the years went on, though, her gifts advanced and she learned to focus them. She used her skills, along with her training as a criminal profiler, to quickly work her way up in the ranks, and was promoted to homicide detective just a couple short years after joining the police force. Though her visions helped her to solve countless cases over the years, she never told anyone what she could do. Her mother had decided when she was a child that people would judge her for it, and it was a belief she carried into adulthood. The belief was only cemented when she told her first husband. Though he eventually came around, his initial reactions were about as bad as she could have expected.
Ben was different, though. Rilynne had struggled with the notion of telling him for months before she finally did. She couldn’t hold it back any longer when he proposed to her, but when she finally decided to tell him, she couldn’t have been more surprised. Not only did Ben accept her for it, he had actually already known for months. He had overheard a conversation that revealed the secret he knew she was holding back, and he loved her only more because of it. Although she had wished he would have just told her he knew instead of letting her battle internally with it for so long, she was just happy she had someone she could finally share her most guarded secret with.
With every stride she took, Rilynne could feel the happiness spreading through her. She had never thought it possible to feel as lucky and loved as she did. As hard as some of her struggles had been, without them she might never have found the man she knew she was meant to be with.
Rilynne followed the path for half an hour before turning around. She wanted to continue, but she didn’t know where it would take her. Ben would never let her
live it down if she managed to get herself lost.
When she made it back to the house they had rented, she found her new husband sitting on the large porch swing at the end of the deck. He still looked half asleep, with his shaggy hair unbrushed and his eyes hanging heavy as the morning light shined upon them.
“How was your run, Mrs. Davis?” he asked with a quirky grin. He never missed an opportunity to use her new name. The sound of it on his lips left her with a grin of her own. While she wasn’t eager for their trip to end, she was excited about getting back to make it official.
She climbed up the steps and sat down beside him. “It was fantastic,” she said. “It’s so beautiful out here. I even saw a monkey run across the trail in front of me.”
“You tried to catch it, didn’t you?” he asked. He glanced down at her suspiciously as he kicked the swing into motion.
Rilynne shrugged and nodded. “You know me too well for me to deny it,” she said. “It was too quick, though. He was already up a tree before I even made it to where he crossed. Besides, you wouldn’t have been very happy if I came back with a wild animal.”
He shot her a sideways glance before slowly shaking his head. Before he bought her a Siberian Husky puppy, she had tried to bring home several strays, including a ferret she found in the home of a murder victim. If he would allow it, she would have a yard filled with animals.
“We never would’ve been able to get him onto the plane to go home, anyway,” she stated with an impish grin. She dropped her head down on his shoulder before he could respond. “Are you ready for breakfast?”
“Absolutely.” He pushed up and reached down to help her to her feet. “Why don’t we head over to the diner? I’ve been craving a large stack of pancakes for days. I actually considered getting some when we were there for lunch yesterday.”
Rilynne thought about it for a moment before nodding in agreement. “Let me rinse off really quick,” she said, kicking her shoes off just inside the door. “I managed to get something sticky all over my arm when I pushed through some bushes that were blocking the trail.”
After quickly showering and changing clothes, Rilynne and Ben started walking down the deserted street toward the small diner. There had been a few cars for rent at the dock when they arrived, but Ben said that the island was small enough for them to just walk most places. Rilynne was pleased with his decision. Though it took longer to get from place to place, she valued the alone time they had together. She was also sure they would have missed out on the beauties of the beach island if they had driven. The only downside was a storm blew in their second day, which left them stranded in their room for a full forty-eight hours. Ben had laughed when the rain started to fall, saying it was a sign that they should just spend the entire trip in their room. Though she would have missed being able to explore the island, she wouldn’t have complained if that had been the case.
Ben had truly outdone himself when he picked out their honeymoon location. Though she tried hard for months to get it out of him, he had refused to tell her anything about where they were going other than it had a beach. She had assumed they would end up in some resort somewhere, but that wasn’t even close.
The small island, known to the locals as Spicer Island, had a population about the size of her old police department in Bodker. The only way in or out of the tiny country, which consisted of just the single island, was by boat. About two hundred miles south of Hawaii, the secluded country was so small that Rilynne had never actually heard of it. Though she had asked him twice, Ben still hadn’t told her how he even knew it was there.
They passed only one other person on their walk into town. With no one even close to the house they were staying in, Rilynne liked to pretend they had the island entirely to themselves. With as often as Ben talked about them moving to a deserted island, it wouldn’t have surprised her at all if her husband had actually procured one. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he would do anything he thought would make her happy. He had, after all, built her dream house for her as a wedding gift.
The diner was the only restaurant Rilynne had seen on the island. While it didn’t have much of a selection, the food was surprisingly good.
When they walked in to the small structure, filled with only ten tables and a single woman standing behind the small bar, Rilynne wasn’t surprised at all to see that they were the only customers. From what she had observed, everyone seemed to eat around the same time during the days, and it was empty any other time. Ben didn’t even hesitate before heading toward the table in the back corner. Though it was directly under the vent and Rilynne always got a bit of a chill sitting there, she wouldn’t have been comfortable sitting anywhere else. Even with her special abilities, she’d been sneaked up on enough for her to not want to take any chances.
“We have three and a half hours until our dive,” Ben said as he poured cream into the coffee the waitress sat down in front of him. With as often as they went in in the mornings, she didn’t seem to need to wait for them to order before knowing exactly what they wanted. “Do you want to go out to the waterfall before, or would you rather we waited until after?”
Rilynne thought about it for a moment before responding. Honestly, neither answer was the one she really wanted to give. “Before,” she said simply, though.
“Probably a good idea,” he replied. “I would hate to miss out on the chance to see it because you got eaten by a shark.”
Rilynne threw the sugar packets in her hand across the table and hit him in the face. “You are so not funny,” she stated. “Do you really think saying things like that is going to help the anxiety I already have about going down there?”
Ben chuckled but didn’t respond. He just stirred his coffee before setting the spoon on the table and leaning back in his seat.
“I still don’t think I should do it,” she said a few minutes later as he swallowed a large bite of pancakes the waitress had just delivered. “What if I do something wrong and I can’t breathe. Or what if a shark does come after me? I don’t have a punch quite as sharp as yours and my gun won’t work underwater. Am I allowed to stab it?”
“No, you can’t stab a shark.” Ben sat his fork down as he rolled his eyes and looked at her in complete disbelief. “And I like to think that in the event that anything like that was going to happen, the universe would tell you,” he said. “Have you seen anything that would suggest you will be devoured by a man eating shark?”
“No,” she said with a resigned sigh. The thought of it gave her chills. “You know that doesn’t mean anything, though. I don’t see things before they happen. I’m sure I would end up seeing it just as it was about to take a piece out of my leg.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Rilynne had, in fact, known at a young age that her ability to see things in the lives of people she knew centered on the past or presence. Very rarely was she able to see anything before it happened, and even then it was never more than an hour or so. That all changed over the last year, though. On several occasions, Rilynne had seen event long before they happened. One such vision she received almost a full year before the actual event. Upon thinking about them, though, she realized that each one of them had one thing in common. They were all about Ben.
She was sure that he would be flattered by the fact, but she had decided not to tell him. Many of them were warnings; they showed her what would happen to Ben if she kept down the path she was on. Without any experience with this type of flashes, and with no one to talk to about them, she was left with a worried twinge whenever she thought of them. In one way, she saw it as further proof that they were meant to be. On the other, she worried every time she saw something about him that it could mean something terrible was going to happen.
“I have no doubt that if something truly terrible was going to happen to you that you would get a warning,” he said confidently. “Besides, do you really think I would let you go down if I thought you would be at any risk of danger? True, I would get a life time supply o
f pity if you were to die on our honeymoon-” she again threw a handful of sugar packets at his face, “-but then I’d have to sell the house and go through the trouble of finding someone else. That’s just too much work.”
Rilynne didn’t know what to say, so she just laughed.
“Hurry up and finish eating, or we won’t have time to go on that hike,” Ben said as he reached for the last piece of bacon on his plate. “I don’t want to have to put it off if it can be avoided. We’ve already got a few things booked that I would hate to have to shuffle around.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she mumbled. After taking one last bite, she sat her fork down and pushed her plate away.
“Don’t ‘yeah’ me,” he stated. “A few of these things have already been paid for and can’t be cancelled. And I don’t really… wait,” he said, shifting his gaze from his plate up to her. “You didn’t really bring your gun on our honeymoon, did you?”
Rilynne felt her cheeks grow warm. It seemed to be enough of an answer for Ben, because he just slowly shook his head and looked back to the last of his breakfast. “It’s not like I’m carrying it around with me,” she said defensively. “It hasn’t left my suitcase.”
“Looking past the why at the moment, how did you even get it out here?”
Rilynne shrugged. “It was locked and checked. Since we flew to Hawaii and took a boat across, it wasn’t really that difficult. And as for the why, does it really surprise you?”
“No,” he replied, pushing his chair back and standing up. “Not in the slightest.”
After paying the cashier at the counter, Ben took Rilynne by the hand and led her back out onto the quiet street. They walked silently back to their house, not seeing another person the entire trip. Rilynne fought off the urge to drop down onto the bed when they walked in. She had eaten too much and felt like she needed a nap. Instead, she pulled on her hiking outfit and waited in the chair by the door for Ben.