Veda froze in mid-step. Her chest swelled as a zap of horror shot through her, freezing her blood and making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
“Jax, get it in, bro.”
Bent over the rails, her nails digging into the white stone, a long string of saliva dripping from her sobbing lips, joined by the tears plummeting from her eyes and soaring through the night air, Veda slammed her eyes closed and prayed that it was over.
“Nah,” Jax said. “Not my type.”
“Don’t be a simp, man. I’m telling you this bitch is tight as hell.”
“I like blondes with big tits. I’m good.”
“Don’t be a bitch, bro.”
Tightening her fingers on the rails, Veda snuck a look over her shoulder, just in time to lock onto his hesitant gray-blue eyes.
The eyes.
Her own eyes instantly burned with tears. Her fists clenched tight. Her heart went into overdrive. Everything around her ceased to exist. The sun in the sky. The fountain splashing. Not even the ambulances blaring by, one after the other, their sirens deafeningly loud, were enough to stop the instant, visceral reaction she had to the man before her.
He was just as weird-looking as she remembered. A face that didn’t quite make sense. Not just displeasing to the eye, but off-putting. She imagined he frightened small children on the street, so strange-looking he was.
It hit her like a heart attack.
Jax Murphy. Number three. Standing right in front of her.
In the midst of the horror blasting through her, Veda found her anger. She held on to it, using it as a crutch to help her collect herself. She breathed in deep. She squared her shoulders. She released her fisted hands, knowing they were betraying her emotion. When she felt them trembling, she crossed her arms and hid them under her breasts.
He couldn’t know.
He couldn’t know she knew who he was. He couldn’t know she was the girl he’d violated all those years ago. He couldn’t know because her secret would be out in an instant. He’d realize that the two men who’d been attacked were the same men he’d joined on that balcony on the worst night of her life.
More than likely, he’d realize that he was next.
And Veda had to ensure he didn’t see her coming. So she licked her lips, racking her brain for the smartest way to play this. He couldn’t know that she was the girl from the balcony. But he could know that she knew he worked for the Blackwaters.
“Celeste sent you,” Veda spat. “Didn’t she? Is she so controlling over her son that she’ll have her security team stalk me all over town? Huh? I know who you are, Jax Murphy!”
Jax searched her face, his smile a little fainter than before but still very much present. “Well, aren’t you the sly cat, Veda Vandyke.” His voice was calm and smooth. Just low and slow enough to make a person lean in for more. “I guess you’ve got me all figured out. Guess you caught me.”
Bile raced up her throat because his face wasn’t the only thing that hadn’t changed. His voice was the same too.
“Nah. Not my type.”
The voice that hadn’t wanted to do it. The voice that had eventually given in. The voice that had been too weak to fight.
Veda swallowed thickly, waiting for the sick feeling to fall from her throat and hit the bottom of her stomach like a rock before she spoke again, trying to play it cool. “You’ve been following me and photographing me. You haven’t even been trying to hide it. You wanted me to see you. You wanted to get caught.”
Jax held his arms out, the flaps of his leather jacket opening to reveal a white T-shirt and black slacks. “You got me.”
His smile grew.
Veda nearly emptied her stomach.
“Maybe I wanted to get caught so I could give you an opportunity, Veda.”
He spoke like a self-help guru, a hint of condescension lingering under the surface of every word he said. Every word left his mouth slowly, carefully, as if he were speaking to someone who didn’t understand English.
“An opportunity?” She cringed. The only opportunity she was interested in was taking a scalpel to his scrotum and seeing the blood gush out.
“Aren’t you the least bit interested in what I’ve found?” he asked, tilting his head at her with a squint. “I’ve gotta be honest, it’s… pretty good. Something that would leave Celeste Blackwater creaming in her Marc Jacobs wrap dress the moment she saw it. Something that would end your relationship with her precious baby boy in one fell swoop.”
Veda tightened her crossed arms, swallowing thickly.
Jax held out his camera to her, offering her a look.
Veda’s eyes fell to the camera. She locked onto his hands.
He was still a nail biter. Some of those nails had been bitten down to the quick, with dried blood crusted on a few of the ones he’d gnawed all the way down to the nail bed.
Veda’s teary eyes fell to his thumbnail as he clapped his hand on top of hers, her voice now too hoarse to scream as he struggled to enter her only semi-erect, his hand tightening around hers from behind as he grunted. The laughter and derision from his ‘friends’ rang in, and his frustration was plain in his gravelly breaths as he did everything he could to get inside. Veda held her breath and tried to block it all out, focusing on his thumbnail, bitten so low that it bled.
Barely biting back a scream, Veda snatched the camera from his hand.
Meeting his eyes for just a fleeting moment, she lowered her gaze to the screen of the digital camera.
And there it was.
Her and Linc. Alone in her apartment. Talking. Smiling. Embracing.
She instantly knew the photos that would hurt Gage the most. It wouldn’t be the photo of her letting Linc into her apartment. It wouldn’t be the photo of them talking. It wouldn’t even be the photo of them hugging with his hand cradling the back of her head.
No. The photo of her and Linc smiling. That would hit Gage the hardest. That would hurt him the most.
Veda felt her heart splitting in two at the very thought of Gage ever laying eyes on those photos. When she lifted her eyes back up to Jax, she felt the moisture filling them. That time, it wasn’t the memory of what he’d done to her ten years ago that filled her eyes with tears, but what she knew these photos would do to Gage.
“Now I can hand these photos off to Celeste,” Jax said, smiling gently as he motioned to the camera. “And let Celeste do what Celeste does….” His smile widened.
Veda stared at his disgusting teeth, small and spaced out, with a gap between each making him look like a psychotic, snaggle-toothed shark. Her lips curled down at the corners.
“Or,” he continued, “you can give me what I want, and Celeste never sees them.”
Veda shook her head at him. “What do you want?”
“What an excellent question.”
Veda rolled her eyes. “What the fuck do you want from me?”
Jax turned to look at the stone bench sitting behind him. He leaned on the arm, crossing his legs at the ankle and clasping his hands in his lap. “In the few days I’ve spent getting to know you, Veda, I haven’t just learned about your wildly inappropriate relationship with Lincoln Hill. I’ve also learned about the wonderful friendship you’ve built with Jake Jones, the hospital’s head pharmacist.”
Veda’s heart didn’t just slow to a stop, it stopped, came dislodged from her chest, and plummeted to the grass at her feet.
It was happening.
Faster than she’d ever imagined.
The destruction.
The destruction of anyone foolish enough to come too close to her.
The destruction of the people she cared about.
She felt her teeth baring, glaring at him from the corner of her watery eyes. “He has nothing to do with any of this.”
Jax nodded as if he understood, but his words contradicted him. “I’ll need one hundred milligrams of oxycodone, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday… or Celeste gets these photos.”
Veda nearly laughed. She felt her lips spreading but the hollowness in her chest won over, stopping them halfway. “No.”
Jax shrugged. “Then I guess your relationship with the trust fund baby is as good as over.”
He was right. She and Gage had already gone head-to-head over Linc. Gage had put Linc in a chokehold just because she’d been talking to the man in the hospital hallway. If he knew she’d been alone with Linc in her apartment, Gage’s mind would run away with him. By the time he was finished, he’d have her and Linc fucking in the bed, on the kitchen counter, and in the shower.
Their relationship would never recover.
But as Veda swallowed thickly and thought of what Jake would lose—his job, his pride, maybe even his freedom—it was instantly a no-brainer.
Losing Gage would shred her.
End her.
Throw her into a deep darkness she might never be able to claw her way out of.
Losing Gage would kill her.
But seeing Jake go down, in a fight that wasn’t his, would kill her more.
A few hundred milligrams of sodium thiopental disappearing from the pharmacy every now and then was one thing. Easy to hide. Easy to cover up.
But oxy? One hundred milligrams of it, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?
No way. Every alarm bell in the hospital would sound. Steel gates would drop at every window and door. A SWAT team would surround the building and set up camp until the oxy-snatching culprit was found, apprehended, and taken into custody.
“No,” Veda said.
Jax clicked his pale lips and gave her a side-eye. “Think it through, Vandyke.”
Veda cringed at him. He was so ugly. He wasn’t even worth her anger.
Not yet.
Not until she was cutting his balls out.
She dropped the camera, reveling in the panic filling his eyes when his precious device went tumbling to the grass. He left his leisurely leaning position on the bench and leapt for it, snatching it up from the ground.
Veda chuckled as he scrambled, never more desperate for retribution than she was right then.
He had no idea the world of hurt he had coming.
She began away, pointing at him. “Stay the fuck away from me.”
Steadying the camera in his hands, Jax smiled up at her from the grass.
“Or what?” he asked as Veda turned her back with a roll of her eyes, his voice growing amused. “You’ll cut my balls out?”
Those five words stopped Veda in mid-step, almost as quickly as they stopped her heart. She froze in her tracks but didn’t turn to face him. The morning breeze undid the baby hairs at her hairline, making them tickle her forehead, which was instantly dotted with sweat.
“I know who you are.” His voice crept in from behind her. A smile laced his words. “I know what you did.”
Veda’s breath came up short, leaving her trembling lips trapped in a wheeze. Slowly, she turned on her heel.
When she faced Jax once more, he was showing her both rows of his yellow shark teeth, blue eyes wider and more manic than ever.
His smile grew, voice lowering. “I know you’re The Shadow Rock Chopper.”
Her eyes widened.
“That’s what the police are calling you, by the way,” he said, motioning to her lazily with the camera. “Just in case you were wondering.”
A lump took up residence in her throat. She tried to swallow it back, to no avail.
“I know you’ve been trailing me. But you can’t trail a trailer.” His eyes lit up, voice going to a tremble as he lowered it even more. “I know I’m next on your list.”
Her hands shook out of control. Her eyes narrowed.
“I might be angry about that….” He closed his mouth over his gapped teeth and licked his lips, ever smiling. “But I can’t be angry with you, Veda. Ten years later and you’re still the best piece of ass I ever had. Pussy so tight a man could have a nervous breakdown. No wonder that trust fund baby gave it all up for you.”
Veda’s lips trembled. A fire went ablaze under her skin. She felt blood-red veins stabbing through the whites of her eyes. She felt her lips going dry, so quickly they cracked before she even had a chance to lick them.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She didn’t even believe the words herself.
Jax stood, clutching his camera in one hand while sinking the other in his back pocket. He came up with a blue memory card, showed it to her, and then shoved it into the SD slot of his camera.
Then he held the camera out to Veda once more. “Why don’t you have another look, Veda Vandyke?”
Silence.
Every bone in Veda’s body shook so badly it was a wonder she hadn’t gone to her knees. Her tear-filled eyes moved skyward. They stayed for a while, letting the sun burn her irises.
Then her gaze came down, her arm shot out, and she grabbed the camera, loaded with new pictures from the memory card he’d just put in.
His breathy laughter filled her pounding ears as she flipped through the new photos greeting her from the camera’s display. Each photo was more heart-churning than the last.
Photos of Jake supplying her with sodium thiopental, the drug she used to incapacitate her victims.
Photos of her and Lincoln Hill alone in his truck.
Photos of her and Gage at the masquerade ball.
Photos of her entering the bathroom at the masquerade ball in one costume and emerging in another.
Photos of her fondling Eugene, wearing the costume he’d described to the police just a few days earlier.
Photos of her leading Eugene up the stairs and into the room where she’d eventually castrated him.
Photos of her emerging from that room alone, changing her costume once more, and rejoining Gage on the dance floor.
The camera tumbled from her hand again and a gasp burned her throat, entered her body, and set it on fire.
That time, Jax didn’t leap for his camera. He let it fall, bending the sharp tines of grass under its weight.
His eyes lit up. “On second thought,” he purred, “I’m thinking two hundred milligrams of oxy… every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. I think that’s more than fair.” He paused, another laugh sneaking through the spaces between his teeth. “What do you think, Veda Vandyke?”
But Veda couldn’t respond.
She couldn’t speak.
She couldn’t move.
She couldn’t breathe.
Her life, her plans, her only hope for survival—exacting revenge—was officially over.
Which meant she officially had nothing left to lose.
So she bent down, seized the camera from the grass, and turned to run, cursing under her breath when she barely finished two strides before her arm was under his fierce hold and he was pulling her back.
She yelped, loud enough for the sound to strike through the blue sky above and reach all the way across the parking lot.
11
At the sound of a woman’s scream, Linc stopped dead in his tracks on his way into the hospital. After almost a decade in SVU, it was a sound he’d grown familiar with but never used to. It still made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. When his eyes blazed toward the hospital’s courtyard garden, where the scream had originated, his blood ran cold.
It wasn’t the man’s strange, almost reptilian face that shook Linc. It wasn’t the fear in Veda Vandyke’s usually vivacious eyes. It wasn’t even the fact that her arm was firmly clenched in that man’s hand, even as she tried to yank it away.
No, it was purely personal. The feeling that ate him alive in that moment. It took over every inch of his body. It zoomed through his eyes, which widened at the sight, and spread all over him like a nuclear explosion, catching him so off guard that, for a moment, he was completely frozen.
But only for a moment. In the next instant, that nuclear blast had lit a fire under him and he was racing across the street, holding a hand out to the cars that were forced to make a su
dden stop at the unexpected pedestrian.
He raced for Veda, still begging that reptilian man to release her through clenched teeth. When it became apparent that she was pulling back with all her might, attempting to remove her arm from the man’s hold with so much force she was surely seconds from dislocating it, the flames lapping under Linc’s skin picked up speed.
And he was running. He hadn’t even realized he’d made it to them, not until his hands tightened into fists and one of those fists flew, connecting with the man’s chiseled jaw.
A whoosh of air blew by Veda from the speed of the punch, so quickly it made the curls that had come loose from her hair dance, and she stumbled back to avoid getting caught in the crosshairs.
Her stunned scream was the first thing that filled Linc’s ears, along with the man’s groan as the punch sent him barreling backward into the grass. The camera they’d seemed to be tussling over plopped down to the grass as well.
Soon, however, all noise ceased to exist. Veda’s stunned scream, the man’s cries, and the ambulance sirens that never stopped blaring in the hospital lot. Linc’s blood pumped wildly until all he could hear was a deafening hum in his ears as his veins pulsed under his skin.
Glaring down at the man still crumbled in a heap in the grass, Linc hadn’t even realized he was going in for round two until Veda’s fingers were around his arm. Those slim, tiny fingers, grabbing him, pulling him, begging him, trying to move him even though they both knew he wouldn’t be moved until he chose.
And he wasn’t ready to move.
Not yet.
“What the fuck, man!” the guy bellowed from the grass, his pale cheeks reddening. The crimson color spread all over his body and down his neck, disappearing into the V of his T-shirt. The only thing in the world redder than his cheeks was the streak of blood racing from his split lip and dripping down his chin.
Even as Veda squeezed his arm harder, Linc fingered handcuffs from his back pocket.
“Linc!” she begged.
Finally her soft voice broke through the pounding in his ears and Linc turned to her, meeting her gaze.
Her eyes were always big. Almost too wide for her delicate face. But they were three times bigger right then, making his heart churn.
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