Bait: A dark erotic thriller (Hunter & Prey Book 2)

by Barker, Kira

  Of course I had no way of knowing exactly what Agent Lamar—Adam’s real last name—had been up to. I had only learned about his cover the day before. I had never had a reason not to trust the lies he’d told me. Had I suspected something? Of course not. Adam had been my friend. My only friend, it had seemed at times. Yes, I had noticed that he had started behaving differently when Darren and I had started dating, but I’d choked that up to a strong case of friendly protectiveness. No, I had absolutely no idea why he’d killed Brigitte.

  Agent Smith was also present in the room, watching with a stony expression from the corner by the door as I layered lie upon lie. She never interrupted me, but I could tell that she was burning to. Why she didn’t, I had no clue. Maybe Alison and Ray kept her from it. Maybe she wanted my written statement so she could suffocate me with it later.

  It was only when we’d been over every single point twice and I was starting to get antsy about possibly slipping up after all when she cleared her throat and nodded to Donahue, prompting him to take over talking from Wessex, who’d done most of it so far.

  “Ms. Thompson, are you aware that Daliah Jones was the sister of Juliette Imahara?”

  That name was not one I’d ever wanted to hear again, least of all in this context. In fact, the question left me so stunned that I couldn’t do anything but stare at the detective. Juliette, the one who’d come before me. The woman Darren had been grieving that day I’d happened upon him in the shower, after he’d asked me to be his wife. The last woman who had disappointed him so deeply that he couldn’t let her get away with it.

  “Who?” I finally croaked out, very unconvincing, I had to admit. Ray stiffened the tiniest bit to my left, giving me a silent hint to better not play dumb. “I mean, I know that name. She was in Agent Smith’s case file. How could they even have been related?” I vaguely remembered that, while rather on the light side, Juliette’s features had definitely been Asian.

  Donahue was only too happy to fill in the blanks for me. “Related on their father’s side only. Her mother came from Hong Kong initially, and gave her up for adoption. Daliah found out that she had a sister by accident, but managed to track her down two years ago. The two women became friends although they couldn’t have had much in common.” One being a whore, the other a student, still. Because, obviously, all of us were heroin addicts and high school dropouts. “I take it that your silence means you weren’t aware of that?”

  I shook my head. “No.” I wondered if Darren had known. It seemed like too much of a coincidence. Then again, Agent Smith had tried to work me as an asset. Who said I’d been the only one?

  “Are you done yet?” Ray asked, sounding bored rather than annoyed. “My client has been through enough today as it is. If you keep her from visiting the man who saved her life, anyone could just call that unnecessary cruelty.”

  Donahue nodded after a pointed pause, but before any of them could get up, I turned to Agent Smith herself.

  “Can I ask you a question, Agent?”

  She hesitated, but then inclined her head. “Sure.”

  “What exactly did Adam do during those times when he was supposedly on missions with you? I’ve been wondering this the entire night yesterday. Working undercover non-stop must have put an immense strain on him, particularly with his family waiting at home.”

  A muscle jumped in her cheek, and I thought it was right then that she realized that I wasn’t just making idle smalltalk. She still answered, if unwillingly so.

  “That is true. Those infrequent intervals were his time off from the job.”

  “So he wasn’t under constant supervision then?” I asked, still trying to sound innocent.

  “Of course not.” She sounded almost affronted.

  “So, what were the twenty-three marks on his wrist for?”

  Before I’d asked that, the room had been filled with the casual sounds of people getting ready to leave. After, you could have heard a needle drop. I forced myself to keep holding Agent Smith’s gaze evenly, exactly until Donahue cleared his throat.

  “What marks?” he asked, turning to his colleague. “Do you have the crime scene photos here?” It didn’t take them long to find one where the evenly spaced lines were visible on Adam’s wrist, visible even through a couple of blood spatters—Darren’s, most likely.

  When Donahue raised his brows at me, I shrugged. “He told me he inked them himself as a reminder for the missions he was on. The last one was still healing that day when Darren and I met for the first time. I remember, because I just came back from a job when Adam returned, and we joked about sometimes having to do things that needed to be done even when we were technically off the clock.” I hoped that I wasn’t laying it on too heavily with that, but since Donahue had just brought her up…

  “Wasn’t that just after Juliette disappeared?” I was well aware of the fact that I was on thin ice there. I’d never actually found out how—or when—she had died, only that she had lasted months. Whether that entire time had been before Darren had been on the prowl again, or still ongoing during the first weeks of our courtship, I didn’t know. He had called her from Paris, but my guess was that she’d been pumped full of embalming fluid at that time already. Then again, that morning where I’d happened upon him grieving for her in the shower hadn’t been much later. There was a lot that I didn’t know—but that would also have been the truth if Adam had been the one to kidnap and kill all the women that had found their unlucky end at Darren’s hands.

  I knew my seed had dropped on fertile soil when Donahue started leafing through the file in front of him, then excused himself and left the room without further explanation. Wessex kept shuffling papers around, but eventually thanked me for my cooperation and let me go.

  Agent Smith followed our little entourage outside, and I wasn’t surprised when she stepped up to Alison before we could make a beeline for the waiting black limousine.

  “Was that really necessary?” She asked the lawyer, correctly assuming that this hadn’t been my idea.

  Alison held her gaze evenly, not giving anything away. “Agent, I have no idea what you’re talking about. But if I had, I would advise you to do the same. After all, you just solved a case that everyone else had given up on. You found the possible murderer of twelve, no, thirteen women. It makes sense that if he killed all the others, he did away with sweet Daliah also to paint Darren the main suspect. Of course, if it wasn’t him, that means that your mission was an utter failure, and you had a murderous traitor in your lines, too. I think that’s what they call a complete career killer. You seem like a smart and capable woman, Agent Smith. I hope for your sake that it was the former, because I’d hate to see you writing parking tickets for the rest of your life.” She let that sink in before she turned to Ray. “Why don’t you and Penelope go ahead? I think I would like another word with Agent Smith here.”

  I’d never seen Eva Smith so disgusted with anything in her entire life—but she remained standing there, clearly ready to have her palms greased. I couldn’t fault her that. Whether that endless frustration had been the cause for why Adam had snapped, I’d never know, but it must have been weighing heavily on the entire team for a long, long time. And in that, Adam had been right—that trail had gone cold, and would never flare up again. I knew that. Alison knew that. Agent Smith knew that. And while I still thought of her as the most law-abiding person I had ever met, I knew that she wasn’t above taking shortcuts. So why not cut her losses and move on?

  Thirty minutes later, I walked into a sparely lit hospital room, finding Darren blinking drowsily up at me. He was still pale, even after having received two blood transfusions, but already looking better than when the EMTs had wheeled him away. The hint of a smile appeared on his face when he saw me, his eyes lighting up.

  I sagged onto the chair already positioned next to his bed and took his hand in mine, pressing my lips against his knuckles. He was too weak to squeeze my hand, but I knew that would change soon enough again.
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  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up,” I whispered. “I had to give my statement at the precinct.”

  “And what a statement it was,” Ray said from behind me. “You should have been there. Marvelous performance. If the whore-managing business doesn’t work out, she can always try her hand at acting.”

  Darren stared up at Ray for a full ten seconds before he answered, his voice cracking, but that didn’t take away from the menace in his words.

  “If you ever refer to my wife as a whore again in any way, I will end you. And it won’t be quick or painless.”

  Anyone else would likely have been taken aback by that. Ray didn’t quite shrug it off—he was too smart to be that stupid—but left it at a curt nod before he excused himself.

  Then it was just Darren and me. As much as I’d yearned for this moment to come, now that it was here, I didn’t quite know what to say.

  “The doctor said you’d likely make a full recovery,” I started, but Darren shut me up with a shushing sound.

  “That’s not important,” he said. “The only thing I care about is that you’re safe. And now you are safe.”

  I nodded, pressing my lips against his knuckles again before I looked deep into his eyes.

  “I love you. I lied for you. I killed for you. And I will do it again, if I have to. The only thing that matters is that I love you, Darren.”

  His answering smile had that certain tint to it that had made me run cold so many times—but now that apprehension was gone.

  “I love you, too,” he replied. “And I will do anything for you. You know that. Do you trust me?”

  I nodded. “I do. Always. Unconditionally.” As I said those words, I realized that I meant them.

  His eyes closed at that, but his light grip on my hand remained steady. I listened to his breathing even out as he drifted off.

  One month later…

  Brigitte’s funeral was a quiet, private affair.

  Her daughter had been aware of how her mother had earned her keep, but she had never become involved in any of it. I of course knew that, considering that it had only been after Brigitte decided to offer me the position of becoming her successor that she’d divulged that she had a daughter at all. That she blamed us, Brigitte’s girls, for what she thought of as the shortcomings in her mother’s life didn’t help. She still allowed me and one other to attend the funeral. I asked Nya to accompany me, seeing as she had been almost as close to Brigitte as I had been. No one questioned the presence of two beautiful, well-dressed women who kept to the background for the most part.

  My heart broke all over again as I said my last, silent goodbye to the woman who had, ultimately, paid the price for my ignorance.

  No one had had any records of Brigitte’s assets, but I helped her daughter sift through everything that I knew Brigitte kept in her safety deposit boxes. There, we found a will and detailed accounts, listing everything in minute detail. My underlying fears that the daughter would make a fuss over what were revenue streams from what her mother had invested for the girls were unfounded. She took one look at those books and mutely pushed them across the table for me to do with as I saw fit. Approve of us she might not, but she was just as much of a class act as the woman who had raised her.

  Before we parted ways, I made her an offer for the penthouse her mother had conducted her business from for almost three decades. It was an exorbitantly high offer, and she hesitated for a full minute, but then accepted. I called an interior decorator that very same day and hired her to do a complete refurbish. All personal effects had already been removed. The rest were painful memories.

  When I walked into what used to be Brigitte’s slightly gaudy but ever so glamorous boudoir now, it barely resembled what it had been before. Gone were the rich colors and plush cushions. Everything was clean, held in a white-and-charcoal color scheme. It was a representative space only, so why bother with making it a home? As I inhaled, I could still smell the paint with a lingering scent of new leather. I couldn’t quite suppress a shudder when my eyes skimmed over where I had found her, bleeding, using her last breath to try to save me.

  As it turned out, people might tolerate another resident’s immoral business, but homicide was a different matter altogether. It was easy to buy up the apartments on the two floors below the penthouse, letting me introduce other changes. One of the four units I kept for myself. The others, I set up as spaces where the girls could conduct their business in the case a client insisted on screwing them in their own home. They could also be used as temporary quarters should any of them require a place to stay. The former I did because of my own not-quite-pleasant experience. The latter was in honor of my old madam’s memory.

  With Brigitte so suddenly gone, I didn’t hesitate to ask Nya to help me with running the daily business, but she declined, citing that while she was happy to continue working with me for a few more years, she had no interest in glancing behind the curtains. She recommended Pam for the job, though. I hesitated to approach her, but after a long talk and quite the amount of liquor decimated, she agreed. It turned out the reason why she had quit—the day before Brigitte’s murder, it had turned out—had indeed been that she had met someone. Only that it wasn’t a man, and she didn’t pressure Pam; it was her decision alone. She needed some persuasion, but when I upped my offer for her salary to above what she’d been making as an escort, she agreed. I was sure that it wasn’t the work in and of itself but the woman asking that was the issue—and apparently, having to suffer my company had a somewhat moderate price tag attached to it compared to other expenses.

  Agent Smith turned out to be another pleasant surprise. Not only did she keep her trap shut about what she knew had actually happened, but she was also happy to let herself be lauded into a position in D.C. There may have been a permanent smudge on her record for not realizing that she had been working with the man who the media immediately stylized as a modern-day Jack the Ripper, but that seemed to open doors for her that had previously not even existed. I was sure that it was Alison Moss who held them for her.

  There was no question about Brigitte’s murder. Daliah’s was a different affair, but evidence—fabricated, as I very well knew—turned up that helped with a posthumous conviction. As for all the other names in Agent Smith’s file—they would, forever, remain cold cases. There were enough others of the sorts in the Chicago metro area, and thousands all over the country, sending the media on a merry speculation chase that I knew would eventually die down. None of the speculations came anywhere near the truth, of course.

  With Adam the scapegoat, the public eye turned its sensation-loving gaze away from Darren, as did the investigators—with a certain lag that made me guess that Detectives Donahue and Wessex were both smarter men than was good for them, yet political pressure forced their hands. I was well aware of the unmarked sedan that I sometimes spotted around town, particularly in the vicinity of my usual haunts. I could relate to Donahue’s frustration, but I’d had enough of obsessive stalkers for several lifetimes. My secrets I would take to the grave. No man’s conscience was worth changing that.

  One thing that hadn’t changed was Ray Moss. He continued to smirk at me whenever anyone was around, and even when it was just us, he kept layering on the sleaze freely. Darren’s warning might have gotten him to censor himself in how he was referring to me, but that was the only concession he seemed willing to make. With the murder investigations about to be tied up, I had no need to seek him out professionally, but of course we kept running into each other.

  The same was true for Alison. She was still the two-faced queen of the courtroom and its seedy underbelly. She regularly engaged my services, but except for social events, we rarely crossed paths personally. Her approval of me and my actions seemed to be consistent, though, because Darren never mentioned anything about it, and when we met, she was always cordial.

  That left Darren.

  It took him two weeks to make it out of the hospital, but only th
ree days until he ordered his assistant and a small army of paralegals to his bedside. That put a natural timetable on the hours we could spend together each day, but that was probably for the best. I still visited each day in the evening when everyone else was gone, and if I didn’t stay the night on the provided sofa that had appeared in his room on the second day, I dropped by in the mornings as well. We had a world of conversations to have—old ones all over, new ones for the first time—but mostly spent our time together in silence. With him, I didn’t need to pretend. With him, I could let grief chisel lines across my forehead, and fear widen my eyes. I still had nightmares, but they were getting better with each passing week. They were lighter and much easier to shake off when I woke up in the hospital and realized that—even bedridden as he was—I had my silent protector right here with me.

  And the first night Darren was home and I fell asleep in his arms, they were gone.

  That wasn’t to say that things between us had miraculously turned to complete and utter bliss.

  I was well aware of the fact that, one night, he would return to our bed agitated, the cloying scent of bleach still adhering to his hair and skin. Already, I could tell that his particular itch had returned, begging to be scratched. Each day I scanned the papers, wondering if this murder or that unexplained accident was his doing. I loved him. I accepted him for who and what he was. I knew that I was safe from him, and, even more importantly, he would lay down his life for me. But that didn’t mean that my mind and conscience were at rest. That would only happen the day I placed a bouquet of white lilies and roses on his grave—yet I could very well live with that.

  Stepping into Brigitte’s shoes had been perceptively easy. Already she had taught me what I needed to know in our brief transitional period. Now it was just a matter of putting my personal touch on her tried and tested methods. A few heads continued to turn whenever I appeared on Darren’s arm in public, but something seemed to have changed between before and now. No longer did I see those hints of condescension, everyone expecting me to flounder, fall, or be discarded. Maybe some of Darren’s attitude was finally rubbing off on me. Maybe they saw something in my eyes that made them pause.