Stolen: A Novel of Romantic Suspense

by Shiloh Walker

  “It will matter more if you tell me what happened to Darcy.” She shot a nervous look at the camera as Leslie toyed with Abernathy. Still blank—shit. Then a cop car appeared. Followed by another, then an unmarked one.

  Elliot shifted his body, minutely. Shay didn’t dare look at him. Leslie barely seemed to realize he was there. It was as though he didn’t exist for her, as long as he didn’t get in the way.

  Like Darcy … like Abernathy. They had gotten in the way.

  Abernathy made another one of those horrible whines low in his throat, and Shay stared in horror as Leslie pressed the tip of the blade into the hideous hole in his groin. Suddenly Shay realized why there was a gaping hole there, why there was so much blood. Oh, shit …

  “I just need to know what happened to her, Leslie. She had sisters, too. And they must be worried. Tell me, and then we can talk about him all you want,” she said, her voice reed-thin.

  “Fine.” Leslie’s voice was truculent as she jerked the blade out of Abernathy’s body.

  She stood and focused her eyes on Shay’s face. Shay had the sensation of being a fly pinned to a board. It wasn’t pleasant. “You, being the wicked smart writer that you are, have probably researched all the ways to dispose of bodies. I got the idea from you … you really are brilliant, you know. I’m so proud of you, sweetheart.” Leslie laughed and the sound was high, almost girlish.

  It sent chills down Shay’s spine. “Which idea was that?”

  “Alkaline hydrolysis.”

  Shay’s belly pitched and hurled. I won’t be sick—I won’t.

  “She was already dead when I did it, don’t worry. It’s that so-called greener alternative to cremation. And it was so simple. Some lye. Lots of heat. Water. Pressure. And in a few hours, she was nothing.”

  I’m going to be sick, I’m going to be sick, I’m going to be sick—

  Elliot’s hand gripped the back of her neck and squeezed. Gently, but firmly. Shay sucked in a gulp of air. The metallic stink of blood didn’t do much to settle her belly, but as she stared into the mad eyes of her sister, she realized the very last thing she could do was get sick. The very last thing she could.

  “That isn’t exactly an easy process,” she heard herself saying. Another glance at the computer—shit, the cop cars. If Leslie looked over there now and saw them, what was she going to do? “You need lots of heat. High pressure …”

  Leslie nodded. “Yes, yes … I know all about that. Don’t you remember me emailing you about what a fantastic idea that was? Do you know what I went to school for? Veterinary medicine. They never did let me in, but that was what I wanted to do. I worked at a vet’s office when I met Darcy. All I did was schedule appointments and shit, but I knew how to work the equipment. All self-taught. And he had the equipment I needed. I did a few test runs on strays, late at night—I’d go in to file, help them get caught up. I’m helpful that way.”

  “How considerate …”

  As though Shay hadn’t said a word, Leslie continued. “Plus, I wanted to make sure I knew how to clean everything up—better to have to explain having a dead animal than a dead girlfriend. And she didn’t suffer any. She was diabetic, you know. Had crazy problems with her blood sugar and she didn’t control it too well. We were out drinking one night … she was totally wasted. I mean, trashed. When we got back to her place, she passed out. I checked her blood sugar … it was low. She never woke up.” Leslie smiled and her eyes gleamed with pure madness. “I gave her some insulin to make sure she wouldn’t. She died a little while later. You see, I didn’t really kill her. I just let her die. She should have taken better care of her disease and she would have been fine.”

  “Yes,” Shay mumbled. The monitor was blank again. She couldn’t see the cop cars. Where were they? “Why did you have to kill her?”

  “Why?” Leslie stared at her. The look in her eyes was the sort of look an exasperated parent would give a particularly frustrating child. “Sweetheart … she was in the way. And she was using you. I’d been watching you ever since college and I could see it then, but I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. You never talked to anybody but her. I needed to get closer to you and she was in the way. I realized that she was my chance to help you. To take care of you again.”

  Take care of me—

  Shay slowly started to see red. It had been creeping in over the past few minutes, but now, as she stared at her sister, it was as if a veil of it had fallen between them—an insubstantial mist that overlay everything she looked at.

  And still, like an inane, insane chatterbox, Leslie carried on. “She was doing all of these silly little chores and she felt so important for doing them, but none of it really mattered. She also had ways to talk to you and I knew you weren’t ready to talk to me yet. So I just stepped in. She’d already moved away from her mother’s—it took me nearly a year to talk her into doing that, stupid girl. She was scared to death to tell her mom about the two of us and she never did. Which is good, because no one ever came looking for me.”

  “Tell her mom about the two of you …”

  Leslie grinned. “Yes. I figured out the best way to get to her. Darcy never did come out of the closet, but that was fine. I went into the closet with her … I could swing that way if it let me take care of you, Michelline.”

  It was another brutal punch, because Shay remembered emails from Darcy. She’d met somebody. Somebody really special. Somebody who made her feel really special. Hatred, pure, bright, and shining, rushed through her but she throttled it down, refused to let it show.

  Leslie turned her attention back to Abernathy. “Now, can we talk about him?” she demanded, her voice falling into that needling whine that Shay found all too familiar.

  This was the woman she’d been dealing with for two years. The woman she hadn’t particularly cared for, who’d pretended to be her friend. Darcy had died, been murdered by a woman she’d thought cared about her.

  Darcy …

  “Yes,” Shay said quietly. “Let’s talk about my dragons.”

  “Dragons?” Leslie shook her head. “There’s just the one, sweetheart.”

  “No.” Out in the hallway, she heard something … it was faint, but she thought it might have been a footstep.

  Leslie’s head cocked and she shifted her attention to the door for the briefest second.

  “I went into that closet all the time to hide from two dragons.” Shay dropped her gaze to the pitiful bastard bleeding on the floor. “Him.” Then she looked at her sister. “And you.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THOSE FOOTSTEPS HAD BEEN QUIET, ALMOST SILENT, but still, Elliot had heard them. Shay had heard them.

  And so had her sister.

  Leslie Hall moved over to the computer and reached behind it, and he tensed—everything was about to get ugly. Fast.

  The gun in her hand looked small, unassuming.

  It wasn’t.

  He knew for a fact that a baby Glock could do a hell of a lot of damage. “Who is out in the hall, Michelline?” Leslie asked, her voice disturbingly void of emotion. And her eyes … they were as lifeless as a shark’s eyes.

  Locked on Shay’s face.

  That crazed bitch killed anything and everything that got in the way of her goal—taking care of her sister. Would she even try to kill Shay if she got in the way?

  Shay smiled.

  “I made a stop on my way here,” she murmured. “A few of them, actually. I visited my brother’s grave, my mother’s … and I spoke with the cop who arrested the guy you’re torturing.”

  Leslie’s face spasmed. “The cop …” She blinked, shook her head. “The guy? Don’t you know who he is?” She pointed the gun at his head. “That’s the fucker who cut you up! Don’t you want him to pay?”

  Shay looked at the wheelchair, then looked at the skinny, scrawny man. He couldn’t even move, Elliot realized. Oh, he was trying. But there wasn’t much he could do. Even as she’d cut him, the man hadn’t been able to
move his lower body, and it wasn’t because she’d tied him down all that well.

  “I don’t think he needs to matter to me anymore,” Shay said quietly. Her lip curled and derision all but dripped from her words. “He’s helpless. He’s old. He’s weak. There’s nothing to fear from him. He’s no dragon, Leslie. I’m not afraid of him. I don’t need you to protect me … not from him. Not from anything.”

  Leslie’s hand wavered. “You need me. You’ve always needed me.”

  “Up until today, I didn’t even know you existed.”

  “I’ve been taking care of you for two years!” Leslie shouted, her voice harsh and strident.

  To Elliot, her voice sounded like it was coming through a long, endless tunnel.

  It was one of those moments … he knew it even before it started to really unfold. One of those moments where everything could change in the blink of an eye.

  Every time his life had ever gone to hell, it had happened in the blink of an eye.

  I regret to inform you of the passing of your parents …

  She’s accusing you of rape, Sergeant Winter.

  Yeah. Two brutal, ugly events … but they both paled in comparison to seeing Leslie lift the gun and point it at Shay’s head. “You fucking need me,” she snarled.

  Not this time, Elliot thought. Life, fate—nothing else was going to steal from him again. Not this time. Moving in front of Shay, he caught Leslie’s eye. “She needs you. You don’t want to hurt her, right? That’s not how you fix things, not how you show her how much she matters.”

  Her eyes darkened. “You shut up. Cocksucker! You shouldn’t be here. You fucked everything up.”

  “I know. Look, maybe I should go,” he offered. The cops were out there and he knew they were listening. All he needed to do was make sure she kept that gun pointed away from Shay. “I can go, and you two can talk.”

  “Yeah. You go, and tell the cops out there what’s going on in here … so they can get in my way,” Leslie muttered. “I don’t think so.”

  She shifted the gun.

  As he saw her finger tighten on the trigger, he lunged for Shay.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  SEEING THAT GUN POINTED IN HER DIRECTION WAS nothing compared to realizing Elliot had just been hit—nothing compared to realizing he’d taken a bullet for her.

  Trapped under his bigger body, feeling the hot, wet wash of his blood, Shay shoved upward with all of her strength.

  She heard the door slam open.

  Heard screaming.

  Heard, distantly, the fire of another gun.

  But none of it mattered.

  Elliot was bleeding. Leslie had shot at her and he’d jumped in front of her.

  She managed to wiggle out from under him, despite the fact that he was trying to grab her and hold her close. Shoving him onto his back, she crouched over him, staring down at his face. He was pale, lines of strain fanning out from his mouth and eyes. “Get … down,” he muttered.

  Shay glanced around. They were surrounded by cops.

  And there was a body on the floor.

  Dark hair fanned out around Leslie’s head and there was a neat hole in the middle of her forehead, blood pooling out from the back of her head in an ever-widening circle. “No need to,” she said. “You jackass, what were you thinking?”

  The bullet had caught him in the right side of his chest. The heart was on the left. That was good, right? Except he was so fucking pale and his breathing was really, really weird. A strange sucking sound came from the area of the wound, too. Cover it, she thought. He’s bleeding, cover it—that’s the smart thing, right? She wiggled out of the long-sleeved shirt she wore over a tank and pushed it against his chest.

  He closed his eyes. “I dunno. You …” He grunted as she applied pressure. “You were baiting a psychopath. I had to do something to keep up. Shit, that hurts, Shay.”

  “Let me see him,” a gruff male voice said from over her head.

  “Go away,” Shay snapped.

  Then, as somebody knelt down in front of her, she looked up and found herself looking into a pair of familiar, faded blue eyes. “Shay, you trusted me once. Trust me now.”

  She eased her hands back as Hilliard bent over Elliot’s body. Nerves bit into her. It was one thing to trust the cop to do his job—another to trust him with Elliot’s life.

  “Of course, it might have been nice if you’d trusted me and just waited before you tore off into here to face a woman you knew was unbalanced.”

  Unbalanced … Shay shot a look in her sister’s direction. Did unbalanced even begin to touch it? Numb, she watched as Hilliard lifted the shirt she’d used to cover the wound on Elliot’s side.

  “I think it hit a lung—ambulance is on the way,” the older man said quietly. “Just be still, okay?”

  “I ain’t up to moving much,” he gasped out. But he did reach for Shay’s hand, holding on tight. His eyes were glassy as he looked up at her. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Not for anything.”

  The waiting room was done in soothing colors of pale pinks, blues, and cream. Shay decided that if she had to stare at those walls for much longer, she was going to go stark, raving mad. Then an image of her sister’s insane eyes flashed through her mind. No. She wouldn’t go mad. She’d just rip her own hair out by the roots.

  “You’re looking a little rough there.”

  At the sound of Hilliard’s quiet, patient voice, Shay just sighed. She didn’t even bother to lift her head. He’d been in and out of the waiting room much of the night, which probably wasn’t too easy, since he had a crime scene to work. Jethro Abernathy had already undergone surgery, although Shay hadn’t asked for details.

  She didn’t care. She just didn’t care, one way or the other, about Jethro Abernathy.

  No, the only man she cared about was still in ICU. The bullet he’d taken for her had caught him in the lung, just as Hilliard had suspected. On the way to the hospital, he’d taken a drastic turn for the worse. They’d managed to get him stabilized in the ER. He’d needed surgery and he had a chest tube in place. Now he was in intensive care but he was stable.

  Of course, Hilliard was the one who’d told her all of that—the doctors wouldn’t tell her shit. Couldn’t tell her shit.

  Bastards. Damn confidentiality laws. She wished she’d lied and said she was his wife. Then they would have talked to her.

  Worse, they wouldn’t let her in to see him. She wasn’t family. Hilliard had managed to talk a nurse into letting her in, but that nurse had since gone and nobody else would allow it.

  “Can you see if they’ll let me in to see him?” she asked tiredly.

  “They won’t let you in?”

  At that voice, Shay looked up. “Lorna.” She shot up from her seat, but halfway across the floor, she froze.

  Lorna didn’t, though. Before Shay could so much as blink, the other woman had her caught up in a hug, one that nearly bruised her. “Damn it, Shay, what kind of mess did the two of you get into?” Lorna pulled back and stared at Shay’s face. “Aw, honey, you look like shit. Why in the hell won’t they let you in?”

  “I’m not …” The sob caught her by surprise. Tears, deep and wrenching, choked her, and Lorna pulled her close.

  “Shhhh …” Lorna hugged her, patted her back. “Now you need to hurry up and get that out, because Elliot will have my hide if he thinks I let you cry over him. Hurry up, because I need to see my brother and you’re going with me.”

  “I can’t,” Shay whispered. “I’m not family.”

  “Like hell.”

  He remembered hurting. He remembered that a lot.

  He remembered not being able to breathe.

  And he remembered Shay.

  He’d told her not to go anywhere and she said she wouldn’t.

  He couldn’t tell where she was, but he knew she had to be there.

  That was the one thing he held on to.

  He was too fucking weak, and too
fucking tired, but he held on to that. Shay had said she wouldn’t go anywhere.

  All around him, he’d hear voices and he kept waiting to hear hers.

  He thought he’d just heard Lorna’s.

  She’s gonna be so pissed …

  “You’re such an asshole,” she said, her voice shaking and soft. “Do you hear me?” Then she squeezed his hand.

  He squeezed back. Wished he could figure out how to talk. He wanted to ask for Shay. She had to be there.

  “Say something to him.”

  Who …

  “Hi, Elliot.”

  Shay—

  Lorna’s hand pulled away, but then there was another … Shay’s. He gripped it almost desperately. Don’t go anywhere, he thought. But for the life of him, he couldn’t find the strength to speak, couldn’t find the strength to open his eyes.

  The darkness that had gripped him endlessly rose and he sank into it, helpless.

  Shay …

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  “WE SPOKE TO SELENA CAMPBELL.”

  Shay stared at Captain Hilliard over a cup of lousy hospital coffee and braced herself. She knew whatever he had to say wasn’t going to be easy to hear.

  “And …?”

  He sighed and dumped what looked to be two quarts of sugar into his coffee, stirring it absently. “She was pregnant when they took Leslie as a foster child. They didn’t know. The lady was about five months along when they decided to tell the kid. When she was seven months along, she went into early labor. The baby didn’t survive. Something screwed up showed in her blood work—she was crying as she told me, and I couldn’t understand at first. But they found something in Leslie’s room a few days later. Leslie told them that they already had a child and they didn’t need another one. She killed that woman’s baby—dumped shit in her tea and fed it to the lady. Killed the woman’s baby while she was still carrying it.”