Authors: Pamela Callow
“Yeah. I love it.” She forced enthusiasm into her voice. “It’s really striking.” It
was
really striking.
It just wasn’t Finn.
Or at least the Finn she thought she knew. When had he changed? Why hadn’t she noticed? Even though the redecorating of her main floor had been completed in the fall, she still saw him almost every Sunday, when he, the Richardson sisters and Kate would meet for Sunday-night dinner.
His voice slightly defensive, Finn added: “When Yoshi—”
Yoshi? Who was Yoshi?
She really didn’t know any of his friends, she realized “—told me that Kenzie Sloane was going to be a guest artist at his shop, I decided to get this piece done. She’s considered one of the best artists of the Japanese style on this continent.”
Oh, God. You can’t be serious.
“Kenzie?”
“Kenzie Sloane. She’s from here but lives in New York now.” Finn pulled his arm back through his sleeve and winced. “Still a bit tender.”
Most people are after an encounter with Kenzie.
She exhaled. So, Frances had been correct when she said her daughter was a successful tattoo artist.
“Are you planning to get more?” Kate asked.
Finn shook his head. “I don’t think so. Although she thought I should get a matching one on the other side.”
I’ll bet she did.
Kenzie was putting her mark on him.
And he’d never be the same.
Don’t say anything you’ll regret, Kate.
“You need to keep an eye on the infection. So it doesn’t get worse.”
“I’ll get Kenzie to check it,” he said. “I’m walking her dog for her. Alaska likes pugs.” He kept his tone light, but a faint blush tinged his cheeks.
Oh, God. Not you, too, Finn.
Kenzie Sloane had stolen Imogen from her in the worst possible way: through addiction. And now she was about to poach one of the good guys.
“You’d better get home and put some antibiotic cream on your tattoo,” Kate said. “I’ll wait until Enid’s friend arrives.”
He nodded. “You sure you don’t need anything else?”
“No. But I bet Enid would love it if you called her.”
“I’ll take a detour down to the E.R. before I walk the dogs. Just to say hi.”
Bless you, Finn.
He left, hands shoved in his pockets. The stain was barely visible on his shoulder.
She hoped that Foo Dog would guard his back.
20
Y
ou can prepare yourself for days, months,
years
, but still not be prepared. It was like deciding to get a tattoo, savoring the design, imagining the art on your flesh—
in
your flesh—and then wincing from the first sting of pain when the needle penetrates the skin.
McNally had just taken a bite of pizza when the door to Yakusoku Tattoo opened. He slid down in his seat and peered out from under his ball cap.
Kenzie Sloane hurried out, her kit bag on her shoulder, holding the leash of a little black dog.
McNally spat his mouthful of pizza onto his plate. He wiped the back of his mouth with his sleeve. And stared.
It had been seventeen years.
Seventeen years of wanting. Waiting.
Hating.
Her hair was longer than the photo he’d seen of her in
ExtINKshun!
magazine
.
It curled in the damp, tentacles of dark red whipping around her face. Medusa in hi-def. The tentacles reached toward him, sensing his presence, and then whipped away from her face. The light caressed her neck, and the purity of her porcelain skin through the design of her tattoo made his throat ache.
Oh, God.
He thought he could handle seeing her. That the longing he felt could be tamped down.
But it spilled through him, boiling and raging, the magma of betrayal and unrequited love.
When they had been together, everyone had always talked about Kenzie’s eyes—the remarkable sky-blue shade, the tilted shape, the way she could slay you with a glance from under her delicate lids.
But for him, it had always been her neck that had driven him crazy. He’d stroked that neck, kissed that neck, bitten that neck. But it wasn’t enough. It had never been enough.
His gut clenched. Her neck was covered in tatts. She had made sure that he would never be able to tattoo her neck now.
But what about the raven?
Was it still there on the back of her neck?
She yanked the collar of her jacket higher as if sensing his searching gaze and glanced over her shoulder. He averted his eyes, suddenly nervous. She disappeared down the driveway to the back of the building. He took a deep breath.
Take it easy, McNally. She won’t like it if you are all freaked out on her.
He jumped out of his car and smoothed his hair, an automatic gesture from the years before he had shaved his head. Nervous sweat pricked his T-shirt.
What would she say?
Would she be happy to see him?
Would she kiss him hello?
He still remembered how her lips felt, how they clung to him, how they teased him, taunted him, made him scream in the agony of pain-drenched pleasure that was a Kenzie specialty.
Redheads don’t feel pain,
she had told him.
He hurried down the driveway to the rear parking lot, searching for the whirlpool of red hair. At first, he didn’t see her. She was bent over the passenger side of her car, strapping her dog into the seat.
He could pinpoint the moment she saw him.
Really
saw him.
The shock of recognition.
The disbelief.
He smiled at her. Fear was good.
He could do a lot with fear.
She rushed around the hood of her car, trying to reach the driver’s side.
Her hand was on the door when he blocked her escape.
“Kenzie.”
Up close, she was older than the Kenzie in his dreams. Her face was more defined, her makeup more skilled.
“Stay away,” she said, her voice tense.
He flinched. “I need to talk to you.”
“You are the last person I want to talk to.”
“Kenzie. Please.” He hated the pleading note that had crept into his voice. He cleared his throat. “I just want to talk.”
His hand trembled with the effort of keeping it by his side. He longed—
ached
—to touch her hair.
It gleamed in the sunlight. Shades of red, each highlight more glittering and complex than the last.
“Haven’t you seen the news?” she hissed. “We should not be seen together.”
“We can meet at my place—”
She was already shaking her head. “I don’t want to talk to you. Ever.”
She opened the car door. Before he could grab her arm, she dove into the driver’s seat, slamming the door shut.
She just missed his fingers.
“Hey!” he shouted, pounding on the window.
She turned on the engine, slammed the gear into Drive and hit the gas.
Her eyes flashed at him.
Those merciless eyes.
He jumped backward. His heart pounded as he watched her car disappear down the driveway.
She had left him.
Again.
How the fuck had he let that happen?
He’d been too nice to her, that’s what had happened. His head had been so messed up imagining her lips that he had been totally unprepared for the real Kenzie.
The heartless Kenzie.
The bitch Kenzie.
Who the fuck did she think she was?
Seventeen years ago, she had run away, leaving him with a dead body to dispose of.
She thought because she had managed to escape that night that she could do it again.
He stalked back to his truck.
She had no idea who she was messing with.
He had been young, naive, when he met Kenzie. She had wrapped him around her little finger. She was willing to try things, do things—things that no other girl would ever do.
And in return, she had goaded him to prove his love.
He had proven his love beyond what any ordinary man would do. He had demonstrated the lengths he would go for her. He had given up his whole future to please her.
And what had she done?
She had left him holding the bag and disappeared without a word.
It had turned out perfectly for her: she had gotten away with murder and followed her dreams.
He needed to make her realize that she could try to cover her true nature in symbolic Japanese art, but the tattoos couldn’t conceal her soul.
Kenzie was as cold-blooded as he was.
In fact, more so.
Then he grinned. She didn’t realize it, but when she chose to ink a koi on her chest—her symbol of “transformation”—her subconscious had kicked in.
Fish were cold-blooded, right?
21
T
he key card shook in Kenzie’s hand as she slid it into the lock on the door to room 549. She had kept her nerves under tight control after her run-in with McNally and the two hours previous to that while she inked her last client. Her fingers would no longer hold steady. It was a good thing her clients couldn’t see her now. They would never let her go near them with a needle.
After three attempts, the green light on the lock blinked and she pushed the door open.
Foo rushed in, knowing that this signaled his mealtime. Kenzie dropped her kit bag to the floor, locked the door behind her, and hurried into the tiny white kitchenette of her generic hotel suite. Within a minute, Foo had been served his dinner and it had been consumed. He now licked his bowl, either hoping for magical food to appear, or savoring the micro dust left by his kibble.
A message blinked on the desk phone. She ignored it.
Her brain still processed her encounter with McNally in the parking lot.
One minute she’d been strapping Foo into his seat, the next minute she was confronted with the person who had forced her to flee Halifax a lifetime ago.
It
was
a lifetime ago and it had shown on John McNally. She knew he had been in prison, but even if the thicker build and jailbird tatts hadn’t given that away, it was evident in the harsh lines etched in his face. Gone was the smooth-cheeked passionate wanna-be rocker of her youth, whose handsome features were made edgy not by years spent in an eight-by-eight cell, but by his punk haircut. In its stead was a physically threatening man, with a buzz cut, goatee and a look of desperation in his eyes.
That look, more than anything else, convinced her that the body in the peat bog was indeed Heather Rigby’s.
It could be no one else.
She had fled before Heather’s body had been disposed of. She had guessed that Lovett and McNally tipped her over the edge of the cliff. Not buried her in a peat bog. What the hell were they thinking?
But they hadn’t been thinking that night.
She closed her eyes. She wished she had never come to Halifax, she wished she had never left her apartment in Manhattan.
She wished, as she had wished a thousand times before—until she knew it was a barren trench into which she had dug herself—that she had never met McNally.
Her fingers scrabbled for the remote. She turned on the TV, standing in front of the small flat screen, flipping channels until the supper-time news came on. She waited, impatient to learn more about the discovery of Heather’s corpse. Halfway through the local news segment, the anchor provided an update on the “bog body.”
She sank down onto the sofa.
Everything came rushing back to her: the rubber Halloween mask, the naked girl, the rope…
The rope.
The tantalizing, pleasure-inducing, terrifying rope.
But it hadn’t started with a rope.
It had started with a gun.
Months before they picked up Heather Rigby at the Mardi Gras.
The first time they played was at two o’clock in the morning, after a gig. McNally had pulled his grandfather’s service revolver out from under his bed.
“Holy shit, you’ve got a gun?” Lovett chortled.
Kenzie had stared at it. It looked like an adult version of her brother’s toy guns that he had flourished with great machismo when they played cowboys and Indians as little kids.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. She had never seen a real one before.
McNally held the revolver up to the light. “It was my grandfather’s. It’s an Enfield No.2 Mk I.”
“Lucky you,” Lovett said, his gaze avid. “I’d die to have one of those.”
McNally pointed the gun at Lovett’s head. “You can have a bullet, instead.” He grinned.
“Hey!” Lovett flinched.
“Hey, what?” McNally mocked. “It’s not loaded.” His finger caressed the trigger.
“You idiot! If it was loaded, you could have shot someone! The hammer has no spur.”
Kenzie had no idea what Lovett was talking about, but he seemed pissed.
“So what?” McNally’s voice was casual, but his gaze sharpened.
“The spur on the hammer was removed from the Enfield during World War Two because it kept getting caught on things inside the tanks.”
McNally had lost his smirk. “So?”
“It makes it a double-action revolver.”
At Kenzie’s blank stare, Lovett added, “You don’t have to keep cocking the hammer. Once it’s cocked, you just have to pull the trigger to empty the cylinder.”
Clearly wanting to demonstrate that he was the real expert in the room, McNally released the lock on the cylinder and pushed down on the front of the barrel. The action pushed the cylinder upward, exposing six empty bullet chambers. “See? There’s a hinge at the bottom. Makes it easy to load.” He grabbed a box of bullets. The box looked like a cigarette package, but made of heavy brown paper. There was some kind of serial number, with the words: 12 Cartridges Revolver—380-inch, with the date stamped on it 24 JUL 1942. “These are military issue.”
Envy twisted Lovett’s mouth. “You are so lucky. Those are hard to come by.”
McNally loaded bullets in five of the chambers. “You need to leave one empty, otherwise it could discharge accidentally if you drop it.” He snapped the barrel up, locked the cylinder, cocked the hammer, and pointed the barrel at a flower vase sitting on his bureau, all in one smooth motion.
Kenzie didn’t even see him pull the trigger. She heard the gun fire, saw the vase explode into smithereens, smelled the gun smoke. “Sorry, Grandma.” McNally grinned.
Lovett snickered.
McNally fired again. The bullet grazed the lamp. He blew gun smoke from the barrel and smiled. “Bingo.”
“You can blow your brains out doing that, McNally,” Lovett said. “There’s still a bullet left.”
“Oh, yeah?” McNally flipped off the lock on the cylinder. But instead of breaking open the revolver, he spun the cylinder and locked it. He held the gun to his head. “Bang, bang, I’m dead.”
“John, don’t—!” Kenzie screamed.
Lovett stared at him, fear mingling with excitement in his eyes.
McNally pulled the trigger.
He fell backward, moaning.
“John!”
Then Kenzie realized she had not heard gunfire.
She shook him. “You faker.”
He grinned. “Your turn.” He thrust the gun at her.
“Me?” Her heart lurched at the look in McNally’s eyes. “No way.”
He grabbed her hand, uncurled her palm and placed the gun in it.
Kenzie stared at the revolver. A sculpture of extinction. Or rebirth. Depending on your beliefs.
Her fingers curled around the grip. It felt so natural, that she relaxed. She hefted the weight of the cold metal in her palm. It felt good.
She held in her hand the power to end a life.
Her blood surged.
McNally grabbed her wrist and forced the gun up to her temple.
“Stop it, John.” She tried to shake him off but he wouldn’t let go.
He pressed the gun to her temple.
“Shoot it.”
“No!”
“You scared, Kenz?” he asked, his voice soft, teasing. “You want to be a tattoo artist and you’re scared of one little bullet? You need balls to be a tattooist, Kenzie. Balls.”
Lovett gave a slow smile.
The air was thick from her sweat, the booze exuding from McNally’s pores, the animal excitement that both McNally and Lovett gave off. Kenzie could hardly breathe.
“Do it, Kenz,” McNally breathed in her ear. She shivered. His breath was moist, warm, erotic. “Do it for me, baby.”
Her nerves screamed with an exhilarating rush of fear and adrenaline.
Do it.
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
Do it.
She pulled the trigger.
The sex they had that night was the best sex they’d ever had.
Kenzie had packed her memories of that night with Heather Rigby—and the months leading up to it—into a tidy little box, along with her passion for the fiddle and any goodness that she’d once possessed, and buried the box in a tiny corner of her memory.
And she’d done everything she could to preserve the entombment of those memories—she left her home, deserted her friends, abandoned her family and struck out on her own. She had slept her way into a tattoo apprenticeship and used every skill at her disposal to create the KOI brand.
She wasn’t going to let those memories be exhumed now. She wasn’t going to let all those years of damned hard work go down the drain.
She wasn’t going to let herself get caught now.
Why had McNally come to see her today? What was so important that he was willing to risk being seen in public with her—one day after Heather Rigby’s body was discovered?
He was no fool.
Her cell phone rang. It better not be her mother. No, the call screen flashed the number for Yakusoku Tattoo.
“Kenzie?”
“Hey.” She exhaled. “What’s up, Yoshi?”
“Listen, we are getting many, many phone calls from customers wanting to book with you. Would you consider staying a few days extra?”
She almost laughed. “Sorry, can’t do that. I’ve got some stuff to attend to back in New York.”
“Of course, I understand, Kenzie.” There was silence. She sensed his hesitation. “I’m wondering if you could do one extra client tomorrow. She’s a special client. It would be a great favor.” Knowing Yoshi and the über-politeness that had been ingrained in him, Kenzie recognized how important this must be to him.
She closed her eyes. Every cell of her body urged her to leave Halifax before it was too late. But she knew that would be a big mistake. If she was connected to Heather Rigby’s murder, high-tailing it the day after the body was discovered was a sure sign she was running away from something.