Price of Angels (Dartmoor Book 2)

by Lauren Gilley

  As she left their closet-sized bedroom, she heard him curse and climb out of bed to follow her.

  “You don’t have to get up,” she said, as she rounded the corner into the bathroom, where she would have the best window view of the street below.

  “Neither do you,” he muttered, shuffling loudly after her.

  It was a tiny place, the apartment he’d had as a bachelor years before, and that they’d managed to rent again, by perfect chance. The bathroom was all original fixtures – claw tub, pedestal sink, subway tile – and cold as a tomb in the dead of night. Ava shivered as the tiles bit into her bare feet, and walked to the streetlamp-glazed window, peering out toward the commotion.

  There were revolving blue and red lights: an ambulance, fire rescue truck, and a police cruiser.

  “Damn.”

  Mercy stepped up behind her without regard for personal space, his chest pressing into her shoulders. He didn’t have a robe, like she did, and she didn’t know how he stood the cold, naked like he was. “What?”

  “Someone’s hurt,” she said, judging by the assortment of vehicles. She frowned to herself, at her ghostly reflection in the window glass. “Someone at Bell Bar.”

  It was three-thirty by the time Michael ditched Serena’s car and called it a night, a text fired off to Ghost to assure his president that the job was done, as professional and seamless as always. He didn’t count on a response and didn’t get one; he’d just wanted to clock out, so to speak.

  Three-thirty. Tonight’s closing time at Bell Bar.

  Holly was getting off at three-thirty; probably closing.

  He shouldn’t have cared. On some plane, he didn’t.

  But he couldn’t recall a time in his life when a woman had invested any time in him. And Holly sitting across from him every night, asking him about his reading, inquiring after his health, bringing him complimentary pie – that all smacked of investment. She had those big doe eyes, and there was emotion shining in them. She harbored an affection for him. All the groupie girls at the clubhouse, they’d come to him, because they wanted a Dog, and any one would do, but he saw the fear, the caution in their eyes. He didn’t compliment them, flirt with them, play to their insecurities. He wasn’t one to give the full-on outlaw experience. They were always tugging their clothes back in place right after he finished, making excuses, ducking back out into the hall, looking for one of the other boys, the ones who talked shit and fed them meaningless lines.

  Holly wasn’t nervous with him. Holly always came, always sat, always squeezed her breasts together, a move that contrasted sharply with the soft, kindhearted wonder etched across her pretty little face. She was drawn to him. Wanted to be with him. He didn’t understand it, but at three-thirty in the morning, after he’d spent the night disposing of a body, it seemed extremely stupid of him to question her motives. And he regretted telling her no flat-out. He should have worked his stiff mouth into more elegant words. Should have explained things to her.

  That was all – he was thinking about her now because he felt guilty about leaving her hanging on one syllable. No. And because she wanted to spend time with him, she deserved a complete sentence. He owed her that, because she liked him, and he didn’t understand why.

  He’d go by the bar again, he decided. Walk her to her car, make sure she got away safely, and he’d tell her that he appreciated the offer, but that he didn’t sleep with girls who were that scared.

  When he rounded the corner at the bakery, and headed toward Bell Bar, his foot slid off the accelerator a moment. Flashing emergency lights, so many of them, turning the night into a disco.

  He let the truck coast to a halt. Something had happened. Not a drunk customer, too late for that. This was an employee who was hurt. This was…

  He gunned the engine and parked along the empty curb, hitting the pavement at a fast walk, breath coming in thick, smoke-like plumes in the frigid night.

  As he approached the side-alley that ran alongside the bar, he saw that the paramedics were standing back at the sidewalk, hands at their hips, looking grim. There was no helping whoever was hurt, then.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, tone harsher than he’d intended, and the paramedics snapped around to look at him: young guys, wide eyes, big arms.

  He wasn’t wearing his cut, so neither of them gave him the usual cautious look. One said, “A girl got attacked. One of the waitresses, I think.”

  There was a sudden, unexpected tightening in Michael’s chest. “Which one?”

  The paramedic shrugged. “Dunno. She’s got dark hair.”

  Holly. Shit.

  One of the cops was walking back toward the front of the building from the alley, talking into a walkie-talkie.

  “Hey,” Michael called to him, and he glanced up, looking harried and aggravated. “What happened?”

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, back down the alley. “Girl got–”

  “Yeah, I heard. I wanna know who it is.”

  The cop scowled at him, one of Fielding’s young flunkies.

  “I’m looking for my girlfriend,” Michael lied. “She works here.”

  The cop’s expression changed, became less pissed-off, and more careful. “The bartender inside says her name’s Carly.”

  “Carly?”

  “Yeah.”

  Not Holly.

  The relief had physical ramifications, a loosening of all his sore digging muscles. The release of a deep breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

  “Not Holly?” he asked, just to be sure.

  “I said Carly, didn’t I?” the cop snapped.

  Michael nodded. Not Holly this time, no. But it could have been.

  I want to understand, Holly wrote, because she couldn’t settle down and relax. I didn’t know a man had it in him to refuse. Deny himself? Or else he doesn’t like me. Yes, that has to be it. He doesn’t like me. Then I won’t have another shot with him. No means no. What will I do? He was my best hope…

  The telephone on the end table rang beside her, startling her, sending her leaping from her spot on the couch.

  “Damn,” she murmured, pressing a hand to her stuttering heart. The journal had flown out of her hands and landed with a smack on the boards. She bent to retrieve it, closing it up tight and holding it to her chest, before she answered the old curly-corded landline.

  “Hello?”

  “Holly, dear,” Mrs. Chalmers’ voice filled her ear. “Are you alright? You sound out of breath.”

  “Fine, ma’am.” She took a deep breath and forced herself to smile, knowing the expression would work its way into her voice. “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing,” the kindly old widow assured. “But someone rang the doorbell in front.”

  Holly hadn’t heard it, above the rumble of her TV. She felt something like panic twirl through her. She couldn’t afford to be so lax. Couldn’t miss a single sound, couldn’t let herself be surprised.

  “There’s a young man down here,” Mrs. Chalmers continued, “who’s here to see you.”

  “Oh,” Holly said, and all the breath left her, the panic heightening, closing around her windpipe with a relentless squeeze. So this was it, then. They’d found her, finally. It had taken longer than she’d expected, but it had to be them. She had no friends; she didn’t go on dates. There were only three possibilities as to who might have come ringing doorbells in the dead of night looking for her…

  “He said to tell you,” Mrs. Chalmers said, “that his name is Michael, and that he wants to ‘pick up where you left off.’ ”

  Holly released a deep breath, shoulders slumping, the terror turning loose in a rush that left her light-headed. “It’s Michael?”

  “That’s what he says, dear. Very stern-looking fellow.” Mrs. Chalmers lowered her voice to a whisper. “Unpleasant, really. But I told him I’d ring you and I told him he could wait in the parlor for you to come down.”

  Her relief was so great, she could have done cartwheels
across her loft. Instead, she said, in a too-bright voice, “I’ll be right down to see him, Mrs. Chalmers, thank you so much.” As an afterthought: “I hope the doorbell didn’t wake you.”

  “Oh no.” The old woman made a dismissive sound. “I couldn’t sleep. I was doing my night baking again.”

  Holly thanked her once more, then hung up.

  And went straight to the bathroom mirror.

  She hadn’t showered yet, so her careful makeup was still intact. Her hair she’d tied up, though, and she’d changed into baggy gray sweatpants and a shapeless black long-sleeved shirt. It would have to do. She didn’t want to keep him waiting, especially if he wanted to “pick things up.” She didn’t know a man to care what covered her body. She pulled the elastic from her hair, shook it out so it fell in dark waves down her back, and stepped into her slippers before she disengaged all the locks and let herself out.

  She loved her slippers. About three bucks at Target, they were lined with fluffy fake Sherpa, and looked almost like real leather, if you squinted. They were soft. Comfy. She’d never owned a pair of slippers before, and she hadn’t been able to resist them, an impulse purchase when she was shopping for milk and detergent.

  Light, silent steps down both staircases, and her heart was hammering by the time she swung around the post at the foot on the main floor. The house was mostly quiet and dark around her, save Eric’s record-cutting noise and Mrs. Chalmers’ soft business in her back rooms. The foyer was illuminated by a series of table lamps, set on antique pieces flanking the walls. By their light, she had a view into the parlor, the front-most room of the house, one that had been kept as a public space where residents could meet with guests.

  It was a dainty, feminine room. Long, tufted white sofa against the far wall, bracketed by ornate rosewood tables, lamps with belled, beaded shades. A sequence of old portraits marched along the wall above; Mrs. Chalmers had no idea who any of the subjects were, just dead people, she’d said. In the bay window, two French-style chairs of pale blue velvet framed another rosewood table, another lamp. The floor-length drapes filtered the light from the streetlamps outside.

  This was where Michael was sitting, in one of the chairs in the bay window, one ankle propped on the opposite knee, so his jeans rode up and the spur strap of his heavy black boot was visible. He had his elbows resting on the arms of the chair, hands draped loosely over the ornate curves of wood. His head cocked a fraction at her appearance, eyes narrowing even more as he studied her with unself-conscious intensity. People don’t look at other people like that, she wanted to point out to him. It seems rude. He didn’t seem to care, though, just stared at her a long moment before he finally turned to glance at the chair beside him, and then back at her, a silent request for her to come sit down.

  She complied, sitting sideways so she had a view of his face beneath the ornate lamp shade, legs tucked up into the seat with her. She grabbed onto one of her slippers with her right hand, a small comfort. “You came,” she said.

  He lifted a hand, studied the dirt under his nails – dark dirt that she didn’t remember seeing at Bell Bar earlier that night – and frowned. “I was driving by the bar on my way home.” Somehow, she’d expected his voice to sound different here, in the place where she lived, more relaxed and less controlled. It didn’t. “And there were all these lights and sirens. Cops and EMTs.”

  His eyes flicked over, a quick, unreadable touch that made her feel warm on the inside. They were amber in the lamplight. Long-lashed and truly beautiful.

  “I thought maybe you were closing up tonight, so I stopped to see what was going on.”

  Her stomach flipped at his words. “You stopped to see me?”

  “I stopped because it looked like someone had gotten hurt. And someone had.”

  Just as soon as the spark had flared, it died, a familiar oily dread building up in the pit of her belly. “Who?”

  “One of the waitresses. Girl named Carly.” The touch of his eyes again. “She’s dead.”

  Holly felt the news strike her like a physical blow. Her lungs seized up, and her stomach cramped. She curled in on herself, pressed her forehead into the musty velvet back of the chair. “Oh no,” she groaned. “No. Oh my God, oh my God.” The tears pricked in her eyes; bile pressed at the base of her throat.

  She hadn’t ever had a friend before. In all her twenty-six years of life, she’d always been friendless. But Carly had felt like a friend. Finally. Like someone she could talk and laugh and joke with. Someone kind, who she liked, who seemed to like her back.

  Her first, maybe her last friend – dead.

  “Oh my God, Carly,” she whispered. “Please no.”

  It had been so many years since she’d felt the savage thrust of grief. It was bright and hot, the pain, arcing through the inside of her skull, forcing the breath out of her lungs. Her only friend was dead, and it was like that awful moment in the clearing in the forest, nose full of the rich, wet smell of upturned earth, the flower petals crushed in her hands. She swallowed, again and again, against the revulsion.

  Not true, not true, not true…

  Except that it was, because Michael wasn’t the sort of man to come searching for her on some dishonest whim. There was cruelty in the lines of his face, but not falseness. No liar in the world had ever been as surly as this man.

  Carly was dead.

  But she was equipped to handle the most awful of things, wasn’t she? Yes.

  “What happened?” she asked, sitting upright again, sniffling hard.

  Michael watched her a long moment, eyes moving back and forth across her face, his expression blank, before he sucked at one corner of his mouth, that little thinking face he made. He was trying to decide how much to tell her, she realized. He didn’t know how much she could bear to hear.

  “You can say it,” she said. “I won’t fall apart.”

  He studied her another moment, then nodded. “From what the cops could tell, she was taking the trash out the side alley door, and got jumped from behind while she was facing the dumpster. Her face got slammed up against the side of the thing. She had bruises on her neck, blood in her eyes. The one cop wouldn’t talk to me, but the young one would. He recognized me from around town. He said it looked like she got strangled to death, the marks on her throat. The broken vessels in the eyes. They won’t know if she was sexually assaulted till the ME gets done with her.”

  “And you’re sure it was Carly?”

  “Brunette. Little like you are. Bartender ID’d her.”

  Holly sighed. “Yeah, that’s Carly.”

  “I thought it might be better hearing it from me, than seeing it on the news in the morning,” Michael said.

  She nodded, managed to offer him a scrap of a smile. “It was. Thank you.”

  He continued to watch her, gaze never wandering from her face, the occasional blink the only sign that he was a living man, and not a mannequin.

  Holly slumped sideways against the back of the chair, exhausted by the news.

  “You were friends?” Michael asked. It was the first time, in their almost four months of acquaintance, that he’d ever asked her anything. This simple question shouldn’t have mattered to her, but it did, a small spot of warmth in an otherwise cold night.

  “Yeah.” She smiled, faintly. “I was supposed to close tonight and she was worried about me. She sent me home early, and covered the rest of my shift.”

  “Why was she worried about you?”

  Because I was crying, because you said no, she thought. But she said, “Because I was sad.”

  He frowned, just a little, brows drawing together over his very straight nose. “Sad.”

  “Even more now, because I might as well have killed Carly myself.”

  “That’s stupid,” Michael said, evenly, without missing a beat.

  Holly felt her brows go up. She stared at him, inviting him to explain, the guilt pounding inside her.

  “She offered to take your place, didn’t she? Yo
u didn’t do anything wrong. You had no hand in killing her, and if you’d stayed, it would be you dead, instead of her.”

  She shuddered. “Carly was a sweet person,” she said, though the idea of it would be you dead was making her lightheaded. “She didn’t deserve to die.”

  “But you did?” he asked, his voice relentless, too direct for this conversation.

  Holly shrugged and glanced away from his unforgiving stare. Yes, if it came down to her or Carly, then she was the one who’d deserved to die. She was the one with unspeakable sin attached to her name. She was the one who wouldn’t be missing out on much of anything, if she were killed. She was the one seeking out Michael. Didn’t that automatically make her the worthy candidate for death?

  “That’s what you think,” he said, the force of his gaze drilling into the side of her face. Didn’t he know this was a sensitive topic? Didn’t he have a softer voice somewhere, buried inside him? “You think it should have been you.”

  Holly hated lying. She detested it; it left a dark, stale taste on her tongue every time. At moments, she was forced to do it – at least that’s what she told herself; lie, or face the wrath again. Lie, or risk the pain again, like that awful time both her blackened eyes had swelled shut, when she’d been blind. In that house with them, and totally blind.

  But here, sitting with Michael, her natural aversion to falsehoods was stronger than any fear. He may have been blank-faced and insensitive, but Holly realized she wasn’t afraid of losing her eyesight as she sat with him. She wasn’t braced and ready for pain.

  So she told the truth. “Yes, I think it should have been me.”

  Michael watched her, blinking at least, hands curled over the arms of the chair, still as frozen water. Still as a wilderness predator. Waiting.