Authors: Kelly Meding
“You’re scaring the hell out of me,” Gage said. His voice was quiet, but audible. “I need you back, baby.”
Teresa’s face scrunched, and he jerked. I stepped a bit closer to the door, heart pounding with excitement. She was waking up.
“Teresa? Can you hear me?” he asked.
She moved her lips, and he bent down lower. Listened. Smiled.
“We’re all fine,” Gage said. “Everyone’s too busy worrying about you to get into much trouble.”
It was a lovely sort of lie. She didn’t need to know how complicated everything had gotten. She’d want to try and help, and the only thing Teresa needed to do was get well.
“Even Simon came out to make sure you were okay,” he said. “Once you’re out of ICU, everyone can come visit.”
Teresa studied him. She said something I didn’t hear, but her face betrayed her disbelief. She knew he was hiding things. Her lips moved, and I swore she asked, “What’s really going on?”
“It’s nothing we can’t take care of, and this time you don’t get to override me. All you get to do, love, is heal. Understand?”
She seemed poised to argue, and when she opened her mouth, words became a yawn.
“It’s late,” Gage continued. “And you need to rest. I just wanted to see you and to say good night.”
She mouthed,
Good night.
He bent low and pressed a kiss to her forehead, and I knew I was intruding on a private moment. I just couldn’t look away. He kissed her forehead and both cheeks, then brushed his lips over her mouth.
“I love you,” he said.
“Love you, too,” she replied.
Gage kissed her again, and I walked away from the cubicle, giving them the privacy they deserved.
Simon had information
for us the moment we stepped into the visitors’ lounge.
“I called Alan Bates’s old boss at Channel Four,” Simon said as we headed toward the elevator. “He was fired right after the incident at the construction site. It seems at least a dozen other producers made angry phone calls to the station, so they canned him.”
“How’d he react to that?” Gage asked.
“He was furious. He made threats and stormed out of the office, and no one at Channel Four has had contact since. The boss said he was a mediocre reporter, at best, so he was probably blackballed from the industry.”
“For asking a question out of turn?” I asked.
“It was a pretty important interview,” Gage said.
“True.”
Simon hit the elevator button. “His firing certainly gives him motive for shooting at Dahlia.”
I opened my mouth to respond to that, and it turned into a yawn. A forceful, eye-watering yawn. “Sorry, I haven’t slept much,” I said.
Gage’s phone rang just as the elevator arrived. Three other people were already on it, so we spent the entire ride down to the lobby listening to him make the occasional comment on a mostly one-sided conversation. As soon as the doors opened and we got off the elevator, he hung up.
“Well, this just keeps getting better and better,” Gage said.
“No good conversation ever started like that,” I replied.
“Renee ran a current address on Alan Bates.”
“Dead?”
“Worse. He’s in jail.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“For what?”
“Aggravated assault.” Gage wrinkled his nose. “He beat up his girlfriend and the guy she was cheating on him with. Put the other guy in the hospital and gave her a bloody nose and a cracked rib.”
“How long has he been in?”
“A week. He couldn’t post bond so he’s in custody until it goes to trial.”
“Sounds like the man has a temper,” Simon said.
“He does,” Gage agreed. “He even took a swipe at his arresting officer.”
I tilted my head to the left. “Something in your tone tells me we know the arresting officer.”
“We do, and we even know the girlfriend.”
“Do tell, the suspense is killing me,” I deadpanned. I wasn’t going to like what he had to say, but it was another puzzle piece in this slowly widening mosaic of images and events.
“Detective Peter Pascal arrested Bates, and the girlfriend is Pascal’s partner, Liza Forney.”
I stared. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
The day in the alley, when we first found John Doe’s—no, Joel Stevenson’s—body, Forney had been there. Annoyed and quiet and wearing too much foundation beneath her eyes, she had moved slowly. Cautiously. Hindsight was twenty-twenty on the memory, no doubt. It also made me wonder about the scar running the length of her left cheek. Had Bates been responsible for it, too? Was Liza Forney just attracted to the wrong kind of guy?
“So,” Simon said, “can we chalk Bates up to a big fat coincidence and move along to our next dead end?”
“I don’t like coincidences,” Gage said. “But I also don’t particularly like the idea of invading Detective Forney’s personal life, especially when we’ll have to explain why we’re investigating Alan Bates in the first place.” He sucked in his lower lip. “It’s still on the table, but I want to hit any other possible leads harder.”
“We’ll go over the footage and collate a list of names of the people at the construction site that day. We’ll go over them one by one, and hope someone can lead us to the next stepping-stone.”
“In the morning?” I asked, hopeful. No, more like desperate.
“Yeah.” Gage slipped his arm around my shoulders. “In the morning sounds good.”
Morning sounded great, in fact. And so very far away.
M
orning was further away than I expected. Sleep avoided me, offering no relief from the storm of emotions at war inside me. I dragged my tired, battered body out of bed and curled up in my comfy chair with a blanket.
Someone out there wanted me dead. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know how he or she had convinced King and his brothers to help. They knew, but they refused to tell me. Noah refused, a fact that hurt more than anything else. It was a betrayal of my feelings and of the trust he claimed to have in me. I didn’t return his trust. How could I?
A shaft of silver moonlight trekked slowly across the unfinished wall in front of me, inching its way toward the door. Branches from the tree outside created spiderweb patterns that tricked the eye. They bent, shifted, thinned, and thickened as they traveled.
Footsteps shuffled in the hallway outside. It was probably someone heading for the bathroom, the one downfall of choosing the room directly across from it. A shadow fell
across the bottom of the door. The footsteps stopped, followed by a gentle knocking.
I sat up straighter. Who would be coming in this late? I ignored the knock and waited for the intruder to leave. I wanted sleep, not a conversation. But the shadow remained, and the hand knocked again. I growled, mentally telling them to go the hell away.
The doorknob turned—too late I remembered I hadn’t locked it. It squealed, and the door pushed open. I froze, watching the shape enter the dim room, his face in shadows. He closed the door, and a bit of moonlight identified the visitor: Gage.
The hell?
He looked first at the bed, and then around the room until he spotted me on the chair. His head tilted to the side, observing. He didn’t move. He didn’t seem upset or panicked, so I didn’t suspect anything had happened to Teresa. I was both curious and annoyed at the intrusion.
“Something that couldn’t wait?” I asked, voice low even though we were on the other side of the house from the rest of the occupied rooms.
He stepped forward. “I had to talk to you,” he said.
The voice chilled me. Butterflies tore through my belly. He continued to walk through the shaft of moonlight. Silver-flecked eyes melted into emerald. His entire body shimmered and went out of focus. The jaw narrowed. Hair spiked out and brightened into a deep auburn. His muscles became more streamlined, sinewy versus toned, even beneath
the tight white T-shirt and jeans. Panic set in and my heart caught in my throat.
Noah-Ace crouched in front of my chair, and I couldn’t move. Shock and fear held me in place like iron cuffs, refusing to let me react. Run. Shout an alarm. He didn’t speak, just knelt there like a penitent churchgoer. Did he want me to forgive him? Six Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition? As if.
He sported a cut on the left side of his cheek, puffed up by a purplish bruise. I did that to him. Good. One small wound for all the things he’d done to hurt me.
Oh God, what had he done to Gage?
He must have seen and understood the panic on my face, because he said, “It was just a glamour. I shook his hand yesterday, so I could use his image to get inside.”
I exhaled hard, relieved. Until anger crept in and took over. “How’d you get through the gate?”
“I slipped in when you arrived home earlier, right before it closed. Nearly caught my foot in it, too.”
“Too bad.”
“I can’t believe you punched me.” He smiled.
I didn’t return the smile. “There’s a lot of things about the last two days I can’t believe, and punching you doesn’t rank anywhere on the list of things I’m sorry about, Noah. Or Ace, or whoever you are.”
He flinched. Good.
“I just came to talk, Dahlia.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“Yes, we do.”
I wanted to bolt out of the chair and climb into bed, pull
the sheet over my head, and pretend it was all a nightmare. He wasn’t really here. I was imagining him in my sleep-deprived, drug-addled mind. Hallucinations. Everyone had them at some point in their life, right?
He touched the blanket, very close to my knee. I jerked, and he withdrew his hand, hurt very clear in his eyes. Hurt was good.
“Fine, we do have one thing to talk about,” I said. “But you and your brothers refuse to discuss it.”
“We have our reasons.”
“Of course you do. So why don’t you take your reasons and shove them, you unforgivable ass.”
His jaw tensed. “Did you get the footage I sent?”
“Yes. And thank you so much for almost giving Gage a coronary with the whole Teresa’s-back-in-surgery thing. Real nice touch, that.”
“I’m sorry, but I needed to be sure you’d go.”
“Congrats. It worked, but I don’t really know what you wanted me to see. There are a hundred different people in that footage, Noah, so if one of them is who hired you, I’m going to need a little help narrowing it down.”
“I’ve given what help I can right now. There’s more at stake here.”
“More than just my life?”
“Yes.”
I narrowed my eyes, caught off-guard by the venom in his voice. Undiluted wrath, and it was not directed at me. “What else? What else is at stake that’s more important?”
“I can’t.” While his tone was adamant, his expression held
less conviction—were Noah and Ace battling this one out? Or did he (they?) really want to tell me and couldn’t? It didn’t matter. It was information I needed, and he continued to withhold it, the jerk.
“Right.” I lurched forward. He scuttled back, avoiding potential hits to the head. As I stood, I pulled the blanket tighter around my body, very aware of the flimsy tank top and short-shorts I had worn to bed.
He scrambled to his feet and then inserted himself between me and the door. “I don’t know how to make you believe me,” he said.
“Oh, I believe you. I believe there is something else going on that’s more important than my life and telling me who wants me dead and why. For you, but not for me.” And I was sick of it. I sucked in a deep breath and prepped a good scream. It lodged in my throat, along with my ability to breathe. Or move, for that matter. Crap.
Ace was telekinetic. He could kill me with a thought.
“Don’t. Scream.” He released my lungs, and I exhaled hard. He allowed me nothing else. I couldn’t even blink. His ability had no power over my mind, though. I leached the heat from the room, lowering the temperature by fifteen degrees in seconds. Twenty degrees. Twenty-five. Goose bumps rose visibly on his arms.
He reached into his back pocket and produced a slim cell phone. He tossed it onto the bed. “Keep that close tomorrow. I have to do something, and if I can . . . if it works, I’ll call you and tell you everything. Everything, I swear.” He released control of my head; the rest of my body remained frozen.
“What if I need to contact you?” I asked.
“Speed-dial one.”
“Is what you’re doing dangerous?”
“Keeping you frozen?”
“That, too.”
“I need to do it, Dahlia, and if it works it takes care of both of our problems. It gives us a chance.”
I snorted. “A chance for what?”
He lifted his hand as if to touch me. Stopped. He let his hand fall. “For a lot of things.”
He walked to the door, and by the time he reached it, he was a glamour of Gage again. He turned back. I glared. A sudden pressure against my neck first stunned, then alarmed me. I couldn’t get away or shout for help. Blood rushed against a blocked artery and found no escape. My vision blurred. A telekinetic sleeper hold.
This was getting ridiculous. . . .
F
ists pounded on the door. I pulled my fleece blanket tighter around my head. No interruptions, just another ten minutes. Ignore the peasants storming the castle gate. Back to that nice dream about a white-sanded beach somewhere warm, and far, far away. I rolled over, surprised to discover I could roll at all. Hadn’t I fallen asleep in my chair?
No, I hadn’t fallen asleep.
The door creaked open. “Dahlia, is there . . . ?” Simon’s voice and a rough hand on my shoulder, shaking. “Wake up!”
Head throbbing, I untangled the blanket and blinked against the glare of the overhead light.
Simon loomed above. “I could sense his aura in the hallway. Where is he?”
“Who?” Last night trickled back in vague bits and fuzzy pieces. The hospital . . . no, that was two nights ago. Wait, yes, we did visit the hospital last night. Me and Simon and Gage. An emergency that really wasn’t.
“Who?” Simon parroted with some serious sarcasm.
“He was here,” Gage said. Where had he come from? His
nose wrinkled, and he didn’t venture out of the doorway. “I can smell him.”