Bait: A dark erotic thriller (Hunter & Prey Book 2) (33 page)

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.

“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 three 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.

We didn’t spend every night together, but more nights than I had expected I could stand in that house. I knew that Darren was well aware of my ongoing resentment. He never mentioned anything, but I could tell that it annoyed him. It was likely a testament to the new balance that we’d carved out in our relationship that he neither taunted nor chided me about it. Last night he’d even hinted at looking at penthouses in the city.
 

In the meantime, this was my new home—my place of power, my fortress, my parlor—and I loved it for exactly that reason. It was mine, like the girls were mine.
 

Stepping up to the wall of windows, I looked outside, letting my gaze roam over the city. My city.

I had no idea what tomorrow would bring. Would that thing between Darren and me that we called love last? Would we tire of each other, maybe even end up killing each other in mutual spite? Would we become one of those asinine elder couples who still laughed about their inside jokes and stole kisses like shy teenagers?
 

Time would tell. But one thing I knew for sure. I’d returned to Chicago fully expecting to find nothing here for me except death. What I’d found was life. And I intended to hold on to that, come what may.