A Kiss of Revenge (Entangled Ignite) (17 page)

Deposition for another case in NYC tomrw. Then I’ll be back. Fly if I have to
.

She closed her eyes and clutched the phone under her chin for a moment. She could get through this endless waiting now that she knew when she would see him, even though the thought of him being on a plane made her nauseous. After sending him a quick answer and turning off her phone, she went back inside for a few more hours of nothing. She read the newspaper to Brian and ate a disgusting dinner from the vending machine before finally kissing him on the forehead and heading home for the night.

When she pulled into her driveway she sat for a while, engine idling, studying the house and property. Nothing seemed amiss, though her damned lawn needed mowing again. The setting sun glinted off the windows, the maple tree in the backyard waved in the breeze, and she soaked in the peace of it, grateful for a reprieve from drama.

She’d barely taken a step toward the front porch when a car pulled into the driveway behind hers. She groaned, recognizing Andrew’s cruiser. There was no good reason he should be here. He looked grave, almost wary as he strode across the grass, his hand on his gun belt.

She braced herself. Maybe they’d found something at the Alpine house that connected to her, or maybe he had other reasons for heightened suspicion. So much for her reprieve.

She didn’t speak when he stopped—a few feet away, as he would if he were about to arrest someone unpredictable.

“I’m afraid I have bad news.” He removed his hat and fiddled with the brim, the gesture removing some of her tension, but not much.

She swallowed hard, bracing for the worst and having no idea what it could be.

“It’s the bakery.”

The words were meaningless, not connecting to anything she was dealing with right now. “What about the bakery?”

“There was a fire.”

With a flash of horror, she understood. Then came fear. “Oh, my God! Sarah?”

“She’s fine.”

Thank God
. Her tension eased, but only halfway. “What was it? Faulty wiring, or—?” But she knew before he shook his head. It was too coincidental.
Big K
. The asshole couldn’t leave her with anything, could he?

“It wasn’t an accident.” Andrew moved closer, letting the hand holding his hat drop to his side. His other hand came up, as if to catch her if she fell.

“It was deliberately set?” Her voice sounded amazingly calm, betraying none of the rage taking over her entire being. A sharp pain sliced into her palm. Her nails, pressed by her clenched fist. “As in, arson?”

He nodded slowly. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the front window. I’m sorry. It’s completely gone.”

…

Shock wasn’t the right word.

Devastation seemed more appropriate, but that emotion implied weeping, screaming, railing at the sky, and as Reese stood in front of the blackened, gutted building, she could summon none of that.

Loss had been part of her life since her earliest memory, and each kind of loss had its own flavor, its own color. Loss of a parent was purple, heavy with the spice of sorrow. Loss of a spouse had more red, with sharper, more citrusy flavors.

For the first time, she felt the loss of a dream, and it was heavy. Spoiled cream, but brown. Burnt-edged. Though that could just be because of the fire.

“No one was hurt?” she asked Andrew again.

“No, it was late. Sarah said she’d been tired and hadn’t even cleaned up properly. Felt pretty guilty about it.”

“I’ll talk to her.” She’d put it on the list. Somewhere between going back to the hospital to determine the next step with Brian and calling the insurance company to deal with this. Part of her wanted to just let it go, but she couldn’t allow the ruin to remain here, downtown, among all the pretty storefronts.

“You’ll have to file a report and talk to the fire chief. Tomorrow’s soon enough. Come on. I’ll drive you back.”

She allowed him to show her into the squad car and drive the few blocks to her house. On the surface, her brain sifted through all the things she needed to do and how quickly they could be done. Underneath, she seethed uncontrollably.

Big K was responsible for this. She’d screwed herself good, revealing her existence and intentions. But he was a fool if he thought he’d scare her away. Instead, he’d given her one more reason to follow through. One more motive to kill him.

“You haven’t asked if we caught who did it,” Andrew observed.

She started, jerked out of her reverie. He was right, she hadn’t asked a single normal question. Cringing, she covered with, “I didn’t think you had any suspects, or you would have told me.” The obvious dawned on her. “You don’t think
I
hired someone, do you?”

Obvious, but ridiculous, and luckily Andrew agreed. “Do you have any ideas?” he asked.

She shook her head. Even if she wanted to tell him, it would take hours to explain, and he’d probably haul her to jail. Or the psych ward. “Thanks for coming to tell me. How did you know I was home?”

“Deputy spotted you coming into town. I tried your cell phone.”

She shrugged. “I forgot to turn it on after I left the hospital.” She opened the cruiser door as soon as Andrew stopped at the curb. “Thanks again. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

He started to lean over, maybe to catch her hand or arm, maybe just to say something, but changed his mind and straightened, nodding. He didn’t insist on following her inside, and she was grateful. Still, he waited until she’d closed the door behind her before driving off.

The first thing she did was search the house, wondering why they hadn’t torched it, too. She’d taken the hard drive with her this morning, and they had plenty of time to search her house again. Wouldn’t their message have been stronger if they’d destroyed everything she owned? Wouldn’t she be more vulnerable? Either they had other intentions, or they’d left something inside. But she found nothing—no bombs in the basement, or loosened gas lines, or anything deadly or harmful.

She didn’t feel any better.

Maybe
that
was their intention. Keep her on edge, wondering where the next swing would come from. Or maybe she still had something they wanted.

She should run. Hide. Drop everything. But that wasn’t responsible or practical, and it would leave her with no direction.

Because she had to, she made a list of all the people to contact and actions to take about the bakery and Brian’s care. Once that was done and uploaded to her cloud account so she could access it from anywhere, she turned to the object she’d tried to forget existed—until the moment Andrew had told her about the fire. After that, she couldn’t get it out of her head.

Missirian’s BlackBerry.

It had no password protection, which was so stupid she kept flicking around the apps, expecting to find something odd or cryptic to hint at a second, deeper layer. But there was nothing. Still certain she would hit a brick wall at some point, she started with the contacts list. And there it was. Not protection or encryption, and simpler than any code. All the contacts were listed by initials only. She could run the phone numbers, but he had over a hundred contacts in the list, and eighteen of them had the last initial K. None of those numbers came up in reverse lookup or Google. So she moved on.

E-mail was next, but he didn’t seem to have this unit automatically tied to an account, and it looked like he deleted everything as he read it. The deleted-mail folder was empty, and she didn’t have the tech savvy to retrieve anything else. Maybe Griff could, but he wasn’t here, and she refused to interrupt his sleep one more night.

She spent a good two hours digging around files, many of which were—finally—protected. Again, some tech savvy would come in handy right now. She didn’t know how to break passwords without guessing games or those cool devices they used on TV, the ones with the rotating number and letter combinations. Knowing nothing about Missirian, guessing seemed an inefficient way to go.

She flipped through innocuous-looking documents, forcing herself to pay attention to mundane details when her eyes glazed over and her mind wandered.

She stopped on a PDF invoice for auto parts, her finger hovering over the screen. Something here was off. She had no idea what the parts were, and there were no names anywhere. She scrolled up…and there it was. The address listed for Alpha Corporation wasn’t the house in The Charms. It was in Nassauga, Massachusetts.

Her body flared with a burning, joyful anger.

Gotcha, you bastard
.

Of course, she’d thought so before, with The Charms and the boat and Chelsea. Each of those had been a step, but in her core, she knew this was the finish line.

After all Griff’s work, all the risks she’d taken, it had come down to luck. Missirian was careful and good at his job, but everyone made mistakes. There was no reason for this PDF to be on his BlackBerry. His oversight would be his employer’s downfall.

She’d never heard of Nassauga and quickly pulled it up on the computer. It wasn’t a town, but a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts. She found a promotional website and skimmed the information. Quaint, touristy but isolated, ideal for romantic getaways and day trips.

A zing of certainty went up her spine. This
had
to be it. There was a page about property and the ability for complete privacy due to development restrictions. The rocky terrain, both on and offshore, and the pattern of the ocean currents made boating to the island problematic, so…

A soft sound outside caught her attention. She lifted her head and froze, listening, from her seat at the kitchen table. Was that a voice? She started to rise, slowly, silently, as she strained to hear.

She was almost ready to dismiss the sound as her imagination when it came. The tinkling of glass, a low
whump,
and a crackle in the living room.

She rushed to the archway, but the living room was already half engulfed in fire.

“Bastards!” she shouted, squeezing the BlackBerry in her left hand.
That
was what they were waiting for. For her to be home and asleep so they could kill her.

Or flush her out.

No. Fucking. Way
. If he thought he’d get rid of her this easily, he wasn’t paying attention. She was going to live.

And make him pay.

She whirled, but knew without looking they waited in the backyard for her to burst out the back door. She couldn’t escape that way, and the fire was raging too fast for her to stop it.

“Where, where, where?” She spun again, trying to think. The heat already had her sweating. The flames crept toward the hallway, threatening to cut off that route. Not that there was anywhere to go down there. The basement door in the hallway, the bathroom and bedrooms looking out on the front and backyards. All deadly traps of one sort or another.

She had to go up, and hope she could find somewhere safe to jump. She shoved the BlackBerry in her back pocket, turning it sideways to push it down as far as she could, and ran past the reaching flames. The hallway was already choked with smoke, and going up would only be worse, but the attic was her only chance. If she could get out one of those windows to the roof, she might be able to see an escape route.

She coughed and squinted, covering her face with one arm and reaching upward with the other, trying to find the ladder’s string pull by feel. It brushed her hand but she lost it, waving in empty air for too long before finding it again. This time she held on and pulled. The swollen wood didn’t want to release the ladder. She held her breath and grabbed with both hands, yanking, hanging with all her weight on the string, praying it wouldn’t snap.

Finally, with a long, protesting groan, the ladder pulled free and unfolded. She scrambled up and took precious moments to close it behind her, hoping the wood panel would keep the smoke and flames at bay a little longer.

The attic was more of a crawl space, full of insulation between rafters with no floorboards, only a few plywood pieces around the access hole. She rested for a second on one of them, knowing she wasn’t any better off up here. She didn’t collect things, and never had to use the space for storage. So there were no old boxes to rummage through for rope or sheets or old flannel shirts or anything she could use to rappel down the outside of the house.

The air up here was still fairly clear, and she was away from the flames. She crawled quickly along two beams to the front dormer window and peered through the thick, wavy glass that was original to the house. The lawn looked empty, but a van was parked across the end of her driveway. She couldn’t tell if anyone was in it.

The window didn’t open. It had four small, heavy panes of old glass divided by solid strips of wood. The air in the room was warmer now, too, and she knew she was out of options. Gripping two rafters like a gymnast on parallel bars, she swung her legs and kicked at the window.

Her foot bounced right off. She kicked again, harder, to no effect, then moved closer to get more leverage and kicked again. And again. Her breath came shorter and her throat began to burn, and her barely healed knee protested the abuse. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw smoke curling through the crawl space.

She lowered her butt to a beam and rested, panting. If only she had something hard. A gun. A rock. Her only asset was the electricity she’d subconsciously collected.

She concentrated on channeling the energy into her legs. This time when she kicked, she pushed it out through the soles of her feet. The glass cracked, held together by the wood dividing the panes. She kicked a few more times, and most of the shards fell outward.

She felt an instant of cool air before the heated smokiness of the attic overwhelmed it. She peeked outside, keeping as much of herself hidden as possible, but there was still no one there. The van was motionless, and she saw no movement around the property. Above her, the roof overhung the window too far for her to climb onto it.
Dammit
.

She lifted one leg through the window and ducked her head and shoulders, holding on to the side of the window and preparing to hang. Luckily, she was facing the right direction to see a shadow move around the corner of the house, and froze.
Too late
. The person making the shadow spotted her and raised a hand. Was he the one who’d done this? Or just a concerned neighbor?