Seductive Secrecy (Shadows series)

by Mann, Marni

  Even with her body burned to ashes and scattered among the flowers and the pond of the Public Gardens, Lilly was still casting her shadow over me.

  “She just wanted someone to take care of you, hon. That’s all. It was the one good thing she ever did. She just happened to ask the wrong person.”

  I didn’t feel relief. I wasn’t actually sure what I felt. I was too confused with the bitch who was standing in front of me.

  I glared at her. “So all of my suffering, everything I went through, was because of you?”

  “You were a puppet the whole time, sweetie,” she said sloppily. “Everyone was working your strings.” Her eyes slid to my father, and the horrified look on his face. “Everyone but your daddy.”

  “You’ve never been this cruel, Victoria,” my father said.

  “I’ve never lost everything I ever wanted before…and to your whore of a daughter no less.”

  I saw Cameron become coiled; his jaw clenched, and his arms tensed and flexed. I could tell he was ready to jump into action, to bring this to an end. But I couldn’t let him risk his life for me. I put my hand on his arm to calm him down. “Victoria, I never meant to take anything from you.”

  “Shut up, you fucking whore!” She shook the gun in front of me, and I flinched again. She was completely terrifying now.

  “It’s true. I only wanted to do the right thing, to save the other girls, to bring justice to the ones who lost their lives.” I looked at my father, my eyes pleading with him. And his eyes were apologizing to me.

  “Charlie,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry you were ever involved in this.” His hand brushed mine. “I love you.”

  Just breathe, Charlie. Emma’s voice came to me. Close your eyes and breathe.

  Once my lids were shut, I heard violent movement: feet scuffling on the floor, a clamor of furniture and the three of them shouting. I held my breath. I tightened my muscles, scrunched my face, my arms held my stomach while I braced myself for the pain that was about to blast through me.

  It didn’t come.

  Instead the noises grew louder. My eyes shot open and there was so much action I could barely catch the faces and arms and hands and the gun that were all flapping and slashing through the air. I could no longer differentiate the sounds. Not the yelling. Not the scream when the gun went off.

  There was red.

  It was blood.

  A tide of blood that pooled on the floor, spreading from beneath them. Victoria was on top; my father was underneath her. Cameron was kneeling and rocking beside them. I didn’t know who the blood came from. I didn’t know who had risen from the pile, but someone had gotten up and was walking toward me, their body shielding me. The screams were getting louder. And then I realized it was my voice.

  The screams were coming from me.

  Because there hadn’t been just a single gunshot.

  There had been three.

  EPILOGUE

  THE BUZZING OF THE TATTOO GUN kept me in the moment, each time the needle pierced my skin it reminded me of why I was here, and how we had arrived. The last time I’d heard this noise was when I’d had the date of our accident inked on my finger. Those numbers were just above the heart that Emma and I had gotten done for graduation. Like that little symbol, this piece would also serve as a reminder.

  While I straddled the long bench, a leg dangling over each side, Cameron sat in front of me. His shoulder was red from the hours he’d endured under the tattoo gun and shiny from the ointment that the artist had rubbed over his skin to start the healing process. Cameron’s body might have already been decorated in ink, but the meaning of this piece was completely different than the others. He’d designed a tree, similar to the one on his back. But this one had leaves, rich, lush, multi-hued leaves that covered the long, healthy branches. There were birds flying from the treetop, five of them, all different sizes; some were only an outline, while others were filled in with color. In the center of the trunk was a scar. Cameron had marks all over his body, but they were from his childhood and had been given as punishments for nothing that truly warranted such violence. This one he’d earned by being a hero.

  But all of them were evidence of his survival.

  With his body angled, I was able to compare his new piece with the old one that covered his entire back. “It’s good?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Yeah. Beautiful…like you.”

  Though Ryder had been in Cameron’s life almost constantly, he still felt as if he’d spent all those years alone. Like the black tree that ran up his spine, he had felt barren, empty; he may have had roots, but he was lacking in leaves, in life. His soul had been missing color.

  I had changed that.

  Our experiences together had changed that, actually.

  And our time in Italy had changed it the most.

  I’d closed my eyes when Victoria’s insanity escalated into violence. What I hadn’t seen in my father’s dining room was Cameron charging Victoria and bringing her to the ground. My father was closely behind him. But as Cameron tried to wrestle her for the gun, before he had a chance to tear it from her fingers, it had gone off. His flesh had taken the bullet that was supposed to hit me. It punctured his shoulder. And even with a wound as painful as his, he continued to fight her. During the struggle, my father rushed toward me and shielded my body. With Cameron injured, Victoria was able to get in one final shot. The bullet hit my father in the back, piercing his heart as it exited. Cameron reacted on pure adrenaline, clamping his hands around the gun and trying his best to pull it from Victoria’s hands without it firing again. But it went off one last time while it was pointed toward her chest. She died only a few feet from my father, their blood mingling on the floor between their bodies.

  Following their deaths, Cameron and I spent an extra week in Italy, meeting with the police and giving our statements. We arranged the transportation to bring my father back to the States so he could receive a proper burial. His will had been extremely specific: he was to be interred in the plot beside his father’s, in the cemetery where Emma was buried, as it turned out. I would be able to visit them both and decorate their graves with flowers. Two people I loved, who’d helped me find light in my life, both gone now but sharing a space in my heart and in the ground. I visited much more often than I used to.

  It was the only time I heard her voice anymore.

  I always knew something would happen to disrupt the relationship I had built with my father. Moonlight’s reading had told me that long ago. We’d visited the psychic just before my father had turned in all the evidence he had regarding the mansion. Her telling of Emma’s future and mine was accurate. So I always held in the back of my mind that her reading of his future would come true as well. She told him our paths would lead us to happiness together, only to lead us away from each other again. In spite of her vision and her warning, he’d insisted on carrying out our plan. He practiced science, not psychics, and he didn’t believe her reading. At that time, I believed our loss of happiness had to do with the danger of bringing down the mansion. Much time had passed, and once he’d set himself up safely in Europe, I began to believe her prediction was more symbolic. Hadn’t we been led away from each otherme in Boston and him in Italy? I’d convinced myself that it was true. I never believed our separation would be so permanent, or that it would end so violently at the hands of Victoria.

  And I never would have imagined that I’d find out about Lilly’s attempt to make sure I would be taken care of after she was gone. I had a lot of rethinking to do where she was concerned. It would be much easier now that her voice wasn’t in my head anymore, cursing me for who I wasor, rather, who’d I’d moved beyond being. I hoped she was finally at peace. Maybe knowing she’d done something loving after all, I was able to finally let her go.

  I wasn’t able to do the same for my father. Hearing him say he loved me just before he died was painful in a way I wouldn’t have expected. I became attached to the idea that I finally had a parent who
loved me; in the weeks after he passed away, I was an emotional wreck. I wasn’t able to focus on the moments we had shared, or the words we’d spoken and written. I could only dwell in the pain I felt from his absence. I wondered how hearing someone say they loved me could cause so much darkness. Cameron reminded me that it wasn’t the love that had brought the darkness; it was the ebb of our separation that had led to it, and the flow of his permanent absence that followed after his murder. He asked me to create a piece showing that darkness, hoping it would dispel the pain once and for all.

  I’d stood in front of my easel for almost two straight days, using my brush to fully ignite the emotions that sparked inside. I didn’t work from a sketch; I had no image that was begging to be represented. I just painted whatever came. Cameron sat on the couch behind me the whole time. He knew I needed his presence to get through this, and I did. But what I created on that particular canvas was something neither of us had expected. It wasn’t an image that was directly inspired by my father.

  It was something more.

  There were two boxes, side-by-side, each with a woman’s face staring out from their center. The one on the left wore a mask. Her lids were heavily coated in shadow and liner, her lashes extended, her lips glossed and plumped. She averted her eyes, staring instead to the space beneath her. The one on the right was adorned in much more natural colors, with hair curled simply around her cheeks. Her green eyes glimmered with wisdom as they gazed straight ahead. A night sky formed the background, like a star field on the curtain of a theater stage. I couldn’t wait to show my creation to the Professor.

  Cameron’s face had been lit with amazement when I finally finished the piece, and he asked what it meant to me. I had pointed to the girl on the left. “That’s Cee. She knows her place now.” Then I pointed to the girl on the right. “That’s Charlie. She knows her place now, too…and she’s not afraid to look up anymore.” They were both me, an integrated whole of who I was then and who I had become.

  He had been standing behind me, and he kissed my ear and told me he loved it. Then he had asked me why I included stars. I had shuddered and sank into his embrace. “Because light is defined by the darkness it illuminates.” I knew it wasn’t the only reason. I thought back to one of the letters I had written my father.

  Maybe I should stare at the sky more often. Maybe I should enjoy the night air instead of shielding myself from it. Rather than letting the never-ending blackness overwhelm me, maybe I should appreciate it for what it is: a background for the brilliance of stars. After all, without darkness, there can’t be light.

  I didn’t need to tell Cameron that part. It was just for me, and for my dad.

  Dallas helped Cameron hang the piece in our living room.

  The tattoo gun buzzed as the artist filled in the letters that ran down the inside of my forearm: Where There Is Love There Is No Darkness. “Maybe we should add my quote right underneath the one on your chest?” I teased.

  He shook his head. “That space is reserved, just for my dawn.”

  “Your dawn?” I repeated. “Have you found it?”

  There was so much more darkness in Cameron that I still hadn’t learned. He continued to struggle with the demons of his past. Doors remained open in our apartment, my hands and lips staying off his back. He was slowly allowing his father in, but the weekly phone calls hadn’t quite graduated to visits yet. I had a feeling they would soon. Ryder was monitoring their father’s improvement from afar, making sure the meetings he had with his parole officer actually happened. I believed the brothers would eventually spend time with him in person, but they were moving at a pace that they were comfortable with. I understood that process, when it came to a parent, and how it applied to Ryder. Our friendship was building at a similar speed. It was the right one, though.

  “Not only have I found my dawn,” he said, “but she’s agreed to be mine forever.”

  I stretched out my left wrist and wiggled my fingers while the artist continued to work on my right. The fluorescent light that shone down in the tattoo parlor would have been horrible for painting. But it turned out to be perfect for casting shine. It really made a diamond sparkle beautifully.

  That’s exactly what it was doing to mine.

  I had a star of my own now, a piece of brilliance that had been placed on my finger that would always remind me that the darkness was where it belonged.

  Behind me.

  And in its place was love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, Katherine Sears and Kenneth Shear, thank you for believing in my work and for allowing me to be a member of your family.

  To my team, Heather Ludviksson, Steven Luna, Susan Fye, Andy Roberts, and Greg Simanson, you all have such an incredible talent and have contributed so much to this project. I’m forever grateful for each and every one of you.

  Jesse Freeman, Tracey Frazier, and Tess Thompson, I have so much love for you three, for every ledge you’ve talked me down from, and for giving me the words when I just can’t find them.

  Mom and Dad, thanks for always holding me whenever I needed your strong, loving arms.

  Brian, my everything, especially my best friend, your smile and support inspires me every day. I love you. So much.

  Michele Esterkes, I’m so lucky to have you in my life and for reading whatever I hand to you. You’re such a great friend to me. Special hugs and major thanks to Katie Dacke, Kelly Adkins, Jamie White, Chris Minnick, and Jo Hall.

  To all the bloggers who have given me such a tremendous amount of support, I appreciate everything you all have done for me, each tweet, post, update, review, reveal, thank you: Tiffany Choez from The Novel Tease, Ann Cleire from Please Another Book, Cindy Meyer from The Book Enthusiast, Gillian Pemberton from Tattooed Book Review, Sarah Rostar from Books She Reads, Jodie Bradford from Falling in Fall Book Blog, Donna from The Romance Cover, Rolopolo Book Blog, TotallyBooked, Martini Times, The Book Bar, Novel Words By Jessica, The Reading Café, SchmexyGirl Book Blog, Amber's Reading Room, Busy Mom Book Reviews, Book Crush, Hook Me Up Book Blog, Living Fictitiously, Rose’s Book Blog, Alphas Authors Books Oh My, Books Books Books, My Sticky Pages, Swoonworthy Books, Book Nerd Ash, Jersey Girl Sizzling Book Reviews, Viviana Enchantress of Books, and Blushing Reader.

  And finally, my amazing readers, I listened to every single one of your lovely compliments and I went straight to work on this sequel. You all are the reason Seductive Secrecy was born. Thank you for being so spectacular, so loyal, and so kind.

  ALSO BY

  MARNI MANN

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