by Lucy Score
“We’re no good to you here,” Micah said diplomatically. “We’re going to start driving. If you catch anything, maybe we can get lucky and get a jump on them.”
Travers studied Xavier for a moment longer. “Here,” he said finally. He fished a set of keys out of his pocket, handed them to Micah. “It’s out back. Use the lights.”
They hustled down the emergency exit stairs, just as Ganim had done. When they exited the building, they were in a narrow walkway between buildings. To the right was the street, to the left was the alley.
“He’d have taken her this way,” Xavier said, moving toward the alley. She’d been drugged. She wouldn’t be walking easily. And there’s no way Ganim could have paraded her past the paparazzi out front without being seen.
In the alley, they found investigators taping off the scene. A strappy gold stiletto lay on its side, and he remembered watching her slip it on before they left. She’d glared at him when she caught him staring. Even angry, she still made him hard. Still made him crave her.
“Christ, her anklet! Tell me she’s wearing her tracker.” Please. Xavier yanked his phone out of his pocket, and his hands shook as he opened the app.
“She’s on the move.”
Micah hit the button on the fob, and the lights on a black Yukon lit up.
They sprinted down the cracked asphalt and jumped in. “Call Travers, let him know where we’re going.” Micah turned the key and fishtailed out of the alley. On the street, he hit the blue lights and the gas.
Ten minutes. Ganim had ten minutes on them, but they were going to narrow that gap. They were flying now, red lights be damned. Xavier dialed Travers and gave him the general direction of Waverly’s blip on the screen.
Hollywood Boulevard. They were heading in the opposite direction that they should have been to escape.
“What do we know?” Xavier demanded from Micah.
Micah casually scanned his mirrors as he made an illegal left hand turn and floored it through a red light. “Ganim approached the bar back in the parking lot before his shift. Idiot has on his Facebook profile that he’s the Friday night bartender for the VIP section so it didn’t take much research. Ganim showed him a gun, made some threats. Had the guy drug Angel’s drink. The lab’s going to look into what he gave her, but my guess is some kind of sedative or roofie. The emergency exit alarm has been broken for weeks, and no one noticed that the outside lock had been busted open. It was intact last night when they locked up.”
“How did he know she’d be there? Do we have a leak?”
Micah shrugged. “It’s a possibility. So, talk to me, Saint,” he said, calm as a Sunday morning from the driver seat.
“He’s not trying to get out of the city. He’s got the jump on all of us, but he’s not running. He’s heading somewhere specific.”
“He’s escalating,” Micah agreed. “The flash bangs at the premiere, taking her in public with witnesses.”
“His face has been splashed all over the screen for weeks now. He’s finally somebody,” Xavier thought out loud. Micah slowed for another red light before accelerating through it. “Daisy and Tiffani didn’t think he was someone. They thought he was no one. So he had to prove it to them.”
Micah shifted in his seat, and Xavier knew he’d come to the same conclusion. “You can’t just take a girl off into the woods and kill her when you’re a big deal. You need to make a statement.”
“Fuck. I know where they’re going,” Xavier said.
--------
Waverly woke, dizzy and sick, in the dark.
Her entire body tensed before she was even fully conscious of the danger. She was in a car, facedown on the backseat. Her hands were secured behind her back, but her feet were free. Ganim.
She remembered the club and the wave of dizziness that had swept over her. She wanted to call out to Xavier, but something happened. Some commotion, and then it was Ganim at her side. She couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything but fall into unconsciousness. Now she was tethered and helpless.
And she was going to die.
A rush of visions hit her. All she could think about was all the things she’d never do. There’d be no college. No house of her own. No Xavier. She’d have no chance to tell him that she was sorry, that this was all her fault.
At least he’d get over her death. They all would. After all, wasn’t this the price some paid for fame?
Ganim was whistling now. A cheerful, tuneless riff. Looking forward to killing her, she supposed. God damn it. She felt a hot tear streak down, sliding over her lips so she could taste the salt.
She had lived her life so carefully, and now she was going to end up as some grisly Hollywood story? No. For once in her pathetic, charmed life, she was going to put up a fight.
The car was moving but not at highway speeds. There were streetlights here and headlights from other cars. Maybe she hadn’t been unconscious too long. If they were still downtown, there was a good chance Xavier would find her.
She just needed to hang on until then.
She worked through her options in her head. If she could open the backdoor with her foot, she could slide out. It wouldn’t be a pretty exit or a fast one, and odds were he could catch her before she made it out. Her other option was to wait until he tried to get her out of the car. If he thought she was still unconscious, she might have a chance at surprising him and getting away. But if he didn’t stop soon, if he took her out of the city, her chances for survival were zero.
“I bet you’re wondering how I found you,” Ganim said, and Waverly froze. Her breath stilled in her chest. His voice was thin, reedy, and oh so confident. “Come on. I know you’re awake. I can hear your breathing.”
She weighed her options. If she was going to die, she at least wanted some answers.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, her voice a rasp of fear and sickness.
“Wrong question,” he admonished. “Ask me how I found you.”
Waverly took a shaky breath. “How did you find me?”
“Do you remember when we met?” he asked.
She closed her eyes and took another breath. “At the premiere.”
“Good girl. What do you think I was trying to do there?”
Waverly squeezed her eyes shut tight against a new roll of nausea. “Get my attention?” she guessed.
“Well, that was secondary. Tell me, what did I do?”
“Besides the bombs? You got close to me.”
“Exactly right. A-plus. I could have killed all those people, you know. I could have killed you. But I didn’t.”
“Th-thank you.” Blackness lurked on the edge of her vision, and her heart thundered in an irregular rhythm.
“Don’t be stupid. I didn’t do it for you. I wanted witnesses. I wanted them to see what I was capable of and spread the word,” he crowed.
And it’s exactly what they had done. Les Ganim’s name was currently synonymous with terror.
“Why did you want to get close to me?” Waverly asked. She debated sitting up but decided that appearing too weak to sit would play more in her favor. And she wasn’t one-hundred percent sure that she was capable of sitting up.
“Well, you see, my dear. I have a bit of a flair for technology.”
“You were a... a systems analyst. At home.”
He scoffed. “I was a puppet to them. A speck of nothing. But in my own time, I developed some special skills. There wasn’t much else to do while Mother was sick, you see. If I wasn’t working, I was taking care of her. But I did carve out time to learn a bit about hacking and build an interesting little program.”
Waverly’s head was throbbing, and the urge to vomit was rapidly becoming a priority.
“What kind of program?” she whispered.
“All I had to do was get within ten feet of you, and my program could detect your phone.”
“Detect?” Waverly felt the sick roll. “Oh my God. It was you. You
texted me today.”
Ganim laughed, a high-pitched snicker. “I did more than text you,” he scoffed. “I tracked you. I knew the second you came home,” he said proudly. “I knew where you went after the premiere. I knew how long you were there. As long as you were within a hundred miles of me, I knew where you were.”
She hadn’t told Xavier about the text, a mistake for which she would now pay dearly. Waverly groaned, making a noise that she hoped passed for admiration.
“Everyone always underestimates me,” he said airily. “And they’ll all pay in the end. Just like you.”
“Why me?” she asked again.
“You know why. I was alone after I had disposed of Tiffani. Such a disappointment, that girl. She’d pretended to be special when she danced. Pretended that she saw that I was special, too,” he tut-tutted. “I had a sick mother to care for and no one to care for me. And one night, I went to the movies, and there you were on the screen smiling at me with those green eyes. You saw me. You remember.”
“We connected?” she guessed.
“Exactly!” Ganim slapped the wheel and Waverly flinched. “I came out here to bring you home. But what did you do?”
She prayed it was a rhetorical question.
“You disrespected me. Over and over again. I gave you chances to prove yourself to me, and you let me down every single time. First you couldn’t bother to respond to me, then you openly taunt me, and then you let an imposter deal with me,” he ticked off her faults one by one. “I knew it wasn’t you. Because I know you, everything about you. But I played along until you came home. I was just toying with them. I gave you so many chances to prove yourself, to be worthy. And you failed.”
He slowed the car and used the turn signal to pull over. “Are you ready for our destiny, Waverly?”
The excitement in his voice had her choking back a cry. Panic was closing in, and she was losing the fight.
“It’s time.” He put the car in park. “I’d tell you it will all be over in a minute, but that’s only your part of the story. Mine will go on from here.” He got out of the car and shut the door.
Waverly fought back against the short gasps of breath. She needed to keep it together. A panic attack would end it all here and now, and she wasn’t ready to go yet. “Xavier, please hurry,” she whispered to the night.
Ganim opened the door by her feet. She felt his hands on her bare legs, and her stomach lurched. “No!” she shrieked. She tried kicking him, but the drugs swimming through her system left her weak.
He hauled her out and leaned her against the car. Waverly’s knees buckled, and he let her crumple in the gutter.
“Do you know where we are? Look around.”
They were on Hollywood Boulevard. The Walk of Fame. And her star was here.
“How poetic.” he asked. “You’ll die on your own star, and I’ll become the famous one. Let’s just hope we have an audience. Scream if you want. It’ll only make it better.”
Her hands were still tied, and her legs were shaky, but there was one thing she had reasonable control over. When Ganim hauled her up, Waverly staggered forward and connected with him forehead to nose.
She’d learned it from a stuntman years ago on set. “No one ever suspects a head butt,” he’d explained. Well, if she lived through this, she was buying the man a steak dinner… and a mansion.
The night exploded in stars when she made contact, and she heard the satisfying crunch of Ganim’s nose. He shrieked and backhanded her to the sidewalk. The blow had her tasting her own blood.
“Hey!” she heard it. Another voice in the dark, and there was the sound of running feet. “Hey, man! Stop!”
Ganim grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to her knees. She flinched as he raised his fist again. This blow caught her in the jaw and would have toppled her if he hadn’t held her by the hair.
“Come closer,” Ganim said, with a theatrical wave of his arm to the bystanders. He was a ringmaster, basking in the attention. “You’re about to witness history. Do you know who this is?”
He twisted Waverly’s head so she could look at them. “Tell them who they’re about to see murdered.”
When she refused, he slapped her again. Then she saw it. Streetlights reflecting on sharp metal. He waved the knife in front of her.
“Tell them who you are,” he growled.
“Waverly Sinner,” she whispered. Blood leaked onto her lips, but her eyes stayed dry. There were four of them, two men and two women, all young, all rapidly sobering up. One of the girls started to cry. “It’s okay,” Waverly told her. “It’s okay.”
“Don’t hurt her,” the tallest one, a guy wearing a shiny gray shirt unbuttoned almost to his waist, held up his hands.
“Oh, I don’t want to hurt her,” Ganim said. “I want to kill her.” He held the knife up so they could all see it in its deadly glory.
Both girls were crying now. When the guy in the gray shirt and his friend both took a step forward, Ganim brought the knife down in a fast, shallow slice on Waverly’s neck. She felt the blood well and spill, hot against her stinging skin. “Just run,” she tried to yell, but her voice was so weak. “Run.”
“Uh-uh-uh,” he tutted. “Not another step, but I’ll tell you what you can do.”
--------
“Kate?” Xavier answered his phone before the first ring finished.
“He has her. He has her, and he’s making someone live stream it,” Kate sobbed in his ear. “They’re at her star. He’s going to execute her! She’s already bleeding, X. You have to do something.”
“We’re almost there,” Micah said, putting the pedal all the way down.
One block to go, Xavier calculated.
“Kate, call Travers. We’re here now.”
He could see them from here. Waverly was kneeling on a star, her star, her head twisted at a funny angle.
“Go!” His voice broke on the command, and he unclasped his seatbelt. He and Micah had known each other long enough that they didn’t need any other words to form the plan. This was life or death, and there was only one chance at making sure Waverly came out of this alive.
Ganim glanced in their direction as the roar of the engine caught his attention, but they were too fast. Xavier was already flinging his door open as Micah roared the Yukon up onto the sidewalk within inches of the man. When the knife flashed up, catching the light, Xavier fired three times into center mass and launched himself from the vehicle.
Ganim crumpled beneath him like a deck of cards. There was no resistance in his lifeless body. Xavier didn’t bother checking for a pulse. He sprang to Waverly’s side. Those beautiful eyes were closed, and there was so much blood. There were wounds on her face and her neck. His last strike had managed to connect, even as he died. The knife stuck in her chest, the handle angling out.
She was so pale. His Angel on concrete.
Xavier leaned over, framing her face with his hands. His lips hovered over her ear. “I’m here, Angel. I’m here. You’re safe now. Don’t leave me.”
Micah was with him, kneeling at his side. But Xavier couldn’t hear the words he was speaking. There were footsteps up close and sirens far away, but nothing registered with him. Not even the tears on his own cheeks. Her pulse was thready under his fingers.
“You can’t leave me, Angel. Stay. Please stay, baby.”
For the briefest moment, those gray-green eyes fluttered open. “I knew you’d come, X.”
“Always, Angel. No matter where you are or what you need, I’ll be there.”
A ghost of a smile teased her pale lips. “I guess I can go to Stanford now.”
“You can go anywhere you want, Angel.” He pressed gentle kisses to her forehead and cheeks. “But I’m going with you.”
Her eyes fluttered closed, but the smile remained.
“She’s losing blood, Saint,” Micah said grimly.
One of the bystanders jumped in with shaking hands. �
�I’m in nursing school,” he said and set about assessing the stab wound. He and one of the girls applied pressure with makeshift bandages while Micah jumped on his cell phone.
The sirens grew louder, and Xavier could see red and blue lights reflecting in the store windows, but his gaze never left her face.
“I love you, my Angel,” he murmured against her ear. “Since the moment you tossed me in that pool, I’ve been in love with you, and I’m not going to stop. So you need to stay with me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Micah had to pull Xavier away from her when the EMTs arrived. His friend held him back in a bear hug while they went to work on her. A crowd, some hysterical and some ghoulishly excited, had begun to gather, and uniforms were putting up tape and pushing everyone back. Ganim’s body lay crumpled where it had fallen, ignored as the energy of the scene focused on Waverly.
Xavier’s gasp of pain ripped through him when he saw them lift her listless body onto the gurney. Micah held on to him for dear life, supporting his weight.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
When they moved to load her into the ambulance, Micah shoved him after them. “Go.”
Xavier was clamoring aboard before anyone could suggest otherwise. He didn’t bother looking up as the doors closed, just held her hand and watched her face. Nothing existed to him beyond that beautiful face, frozen in time.
He couldn’t have told anyone how long the ambulance ride was or how long he waited outside the trauma room. The only thing that he was able to recall was the nurse who pressed a cup of coffee into his trembling hands. He caught the words “lucky” and “recover,” and it was enough to crack the dam inside him that had held back the fear, the remorse, the pain.
He followed along behind Waverly’s gurney as they wheeled her into a private room with a host of IVs and monitors. The same nurse coaxed him into a chair next to her bed and suggested he talk to her while she slept.
He spent the next two hours doing just that.