Broken Illusions: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (34 page)

Was terrified of the answer starting to form.

Then Aunt Sara responded, and the horrible, incessant drone became an all-out scream.

That’d be great, cher.

Everything stopped. It just … stopped.

“What necklaces?” I whispered, even as deep inside, I knew.

Dylan’s eyes met mine, but before he even spoke, the answer sliced through me.

That was not my aunt.

THIRTY-TWO

He put down the phone. He took my hands. He held on tight. Normally, when he touched, there was warmth. Normally I could feel it heal.

This time, I felt absolutely nothing.

“You’re scaring me,” I whispered.

“Your aunt’s friend, the one whose wedding she was going to. Do you know how to reach her?”

The sun was coming up. Light was bleaching out the room. But shadows edged closer. “Naomi? I…” I’d never had any reason to call her, and Aunt Sara didn’t have a landline where the number might be stored. “I-I think there’s a Christmas card list on my aunt’s laptop.”

Dylan’s eyes remained so very, very steady. “Go check.”

Five minutes later, Naomi’s sleepy voice shredded the kernel of hope I’d been trying to hold onto.

“She texted me,” she said, confused. “Said she’d come down with a stomach bug and couldn’t get out of bed…”

*   *   *

My aunt’s name. During the dream, when I’d been running, I’d cried out for her—and Dylan had heard. That’s how he knew …

“She never boarded the plane,” Detective LaSalle gritted out, throwing his phone across the room. “She never boarded the fucking plane!”

I’d called him the second I’d hung up with Naomi. He and Detective Jackson had arrived within minutes.

“I dropped her at the airport,” he said, staring, but I had no idea what he saw. His eyes were too glassy, too drenched in darkness. Everything else was pale, even his mouth. “I walked her to security and kissed her good-bye.”

And no one had seen her since. For two days. Fifty-one hours. Three thousand, sixty minutes. Over thirty thousand breaths …

And no one had realized she was missing.

“She texted me,” I said sickly, but even as Dylan’s eyes met mine and the detectives twisted toward me, we all knew the horrifying truth.

Whoever I’d been texting with, it had not been my aunt.

“I should have known,” I said, wrenching from the sofa and shooting across the room, to the votives on the bar. But the second the words ripped from me, the truth bled through.

I had known.

I’d known it the second I walked back into the condo. I’d felt the emptiness. I’d been
told
.

But I’d been too consumed by what happened in Belle Terre to connect the dots.

“Jesus,”
LaSalle muttered, and I could tell it was all he could do not to put a fist through the wall. “I should have realized. The second she said she loved me.”

I spun toward him. “What?”

“In a text Friday night, after the wedding. She said that she wished I was there, that she loved me.”

My throat tightened—and his eyes went flat.

“That was the giveaway,” he said, and I had to wonder if he realized his hand had slid to the gun at his side. “She never said that before.”

I crossed to him without thinking, took him by the arm. “You have to find her! You have to find her before it’s—” I froze as the memory scraped in, the knife lifted high …

“What?” Detective Jackson asked, taking over. His dreads and baggy plaid pants made him look all funked out, but his eyes were like lasers. “Before what?”

Blindly, I looked from him to his partner. “She was running. I think she tried to get away. He followed—”

The horror of it all circled around me, pulled tighter. “She was wearing the dress from the wedding.”

“What else?” Detective Jackson stunned me by asking. He wasn’t one to believe. “What other details?”

“I don’t know! It was so dark. I—
oh, God,
” I cried, only vaguely aware of Dylan crossing to stand beside me. I don’t think he touched, but wasn’t sure, because I couldn’t feel.
Anything
. “This is all my fault.”

The transformation was fascinating, the steely-eyed cop pushing aside the worried man and taking charge. “Your fault? Why would you say that?” LaSalle the detective asked.

“Because he knows. He knows I can see him.”

The two detectives exchanged a sharp look.

“The dreams—the things I see. They’re from him, not Grace. And somehow he knows, and when he couldn’t get me … he got her.” And again I had to wonder, where was the beginning, where had it all started? Last weekend, when Grace had gone missing? Or had the seeds been there far longer, back years before, when the girl named Faith had first lifted a brush—and painted my face?

“It’s like I’m being punished,” I whispered sickly.

Something flashed in LaSalle’s eyes, something obscene. “Or
played
with.”

The buzz started all over again, low—incessant. “What do you mean?”

He lifted his hands and pressed them together, as if in prayer, and tapped them against his chin. I could see him pulling away, back, could see him drawing lines between the dots. “Have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse?”

Automatically I looked around for Delphi—

She’d known. So many times I’d pulled myself awake, only to find her crouching beside me, her unblinking eyes focused on something unseen, her ears flat.

And now she was gone.

“They don’t kill them,” Detective LaSalle said. “That’s not the point.”

Slowly I turned back toward him. “Because then they can’t play anymore,” I realized numbly. “Dead toys aren’t fun.”

And that’s what I was.

A toy.

“No,” LaSalle said. “They’re not. And for him, that’s what it’s about—the fun, the challenge. He has no conscience, no sense of right or wrong. It’s all about the game.”

A sociopath, I knew. Just like the man who killed my parents.

Jackson grabbed the dreads behind his neck and held them there, revealing something dark and faraway in his eyes. “Until they get bored.”

LaSalle frowned. “And a different kind of game begins.”

*   *   *

They wanted me to wait. They wanted me to stay in the condo, sit there and hang out, answer the five thousands texts Victoria had sent since the party last night or play on Facebook, while some psycho had my aunt.

Games, I realized sickly. We all played them, whether we wanted to or not.

Thirty minutes after LaSalle and Jackson left, I dressed and put on my shoes, pretended to play along. I pretended to wait. I pretended to be calm. I pretended to sit quietly while Dylan made breakfast.

Except, he was playing a game of his own. He may have stood benignly at the stove, his shirtsleeves shoved up his arms and bacon frying in the skillet, but even when he didn’t turn toward me, he watched.

Silently, we both waited.

The only way I was getting out of that condo was behind his back. I just needed him to turn it.

Somewhere between cracking eggs and pouring milk, his phone beeped, and my breath readied. But I did not let myself move, not until I saw his shoulders stiffen. Then a quick glance showed him turn from me—

There was only one door. The angle of the kitchen made it possible to reach it without being seen. And I had the key to the double cylinder dead bolt. All I had to do was put the door between us. If I could get into the hall and jam the key into the lock before Dylan caught me, he wouldn’t be able to stop me.

“You’re not the one I need to stop. And if I did, you’d keep trying. And sometimes it only takes a second…”

His words chased me through the foyer. I twisted the knob and pulled, lunged into the hall and yanked the door as I stabbed the key—

It wouldn’t close.

I yanked harder, but the door pulled me back toward the inside of the condo. And then I saw his foot crammed through the opening. I let go and spun, started to run. The stairs—

He caught me in two steps. Like steel bands his arms closed around me, dragging me back to him. I twisted as hard as I could, swinging elbows and stomping on his bare foot.

He held firm.

And in that moment I hated him, even as the fight drained and reality set in, as I sagged against him and he gathered me close, sliding down the wall to hold me there in the exposed-brick hallway.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, his face a whisper from mine. I could feel him, the movement of his mouth against my hair. “I promise it’s going to be okay.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “You
can’t
know that.”

“We’ll find her. Detective LaSalle—”

“No.” I twisted to look at him, stilled when I realized how close he was. “You won’t. You
can’t
.”

Dark hair fell against his face, not in a sharp line, but stringy.

It stunned me how badly I wanted to smooth it.

“He won’t let you,” I whispered. “It has to be me.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“But it has to. Don’t you see? It’s me he wants … me he’s playing with.”

“I don’t care who he wants—he’s not getting anywhere near you.”

“But—”

“What?” he asked before I could finish. “What do you think you’re going to do that the police can’t? Where are you going to go? Someone’s already gone after you. What if they’re watching? What if they do it again? What if you’d succeeded in locking me out—what then?”

Deep inside, it started, the shaking I’d been fighting from the moment Dylan had ripped me from the dream.

“It’s not his game anymore,” he said roughly. “And I swear to God he’s not going to win.”

“Then quit trying to stop me,” I whispered. “
Help
me.”

I never saw his hand move. I never saw a thing, not until his fingers slid against the length of my neck. “Then quit shutting me out.”

My breath stumbled. The riff of my heart stabbed deeper, and it was all I could do not to close my eyes, and believe.

“I need to go back.” I’d been so blind, so consumed by terror, so busy spinning to someone else’s tune, I’d failed to see the obvious answer.

“To sleep. That’s the only way I’ll find her.”

“Do you think you can?”

I
had
to. It was the only way.

“She tried to warn me,” I said, pulling back. “Grace did. She must have known, too—she must have felt me or something, that’s why she screamed that he was one step ahead, that he knows everything.”

That he was dangerous.

Dylan pushed to his feet and held out a hand.

I took it, held on as he led me back inside. The warnings had been there all along, like a circle being drawn around me, first so very far away, closer with each grind of the marker.

I could see it now, the beginning. Chase’s accident had been a distraction, something to throw me off track. And it had worked. I’d been so distracted I’d never realized when the next move was made. First Grace, then Delphi …

“He was here,” I breathed as Dylan closed the door.

I handed him the key. “Delphi was here when I left for Belle Terre,” I said. “If he has her—”

He turned the lock and looked back at me.

“They’re right,” I said sickly. “Detective LaSalle and your dad … It’s all some sick twisted game.”

“Come on.” Taking my hand, Dylan led me to the big table my aunt called her baby. Once it had sat in a plantation home, custom-ordered from France. Now it dominated the far side of the condo.

Seeing it, the project my aunt had been working on, the antique cross charms and brass beads, the clear crystals scattered against mahogany, made my throat close up.

“I don’t know the rules,” I murmured, fingering a small brass cross. “How can I win if I don’t even know the rules?”

Dylan came up behind me. “We make our own.”

I twisted toward him, looked up, and finally, finally felt a whisper of warmth move through me. “Thank you.”

There’d been so many big, explosive moments between us. Our paths didn’t cross simply or quietly or casually. There was always something intense going on, a chase or a threat, an accident, a fire. Everything was always perched on a razor’s edge, moments lit from the inside out.

But there’d been very little quiet. Very little slow and easy. Very little time to take stock and simply let the moment be.

But for that moment, for that brief suspension in time, it
was
quiet. And slow. And easy. And the moment just was. And despite everything, I smiled.

It only seemed fitting that his phone would buzz, and those beautiful, fragile edges would crumble. He stepped back as he retrieved the BlackBerry, his finger sliding to view the text.

I knew the exact second he read the message. I saw it in his eyes, the shift from simmer to grim. And even had I not seen, there would have been no mistaking the way he stepped back.

“What?” I asked, tracking him.

He tapped something out and waited a heartbeat before another message arrived. Abruptly he turned away, hunching his shoulders like a shield.

It was obvious he didn’t want me to see.

I moved without hesitation, hurrying up beside him and pressing into him, looking over his arm as he tried to twist the phone away.

I grabbed on and tugged, could tell there was some kind of picture on the screen.

But nothing prepared me for the sight of the pale, naked body strewn along the edge of the river.

THIRTY-THREE

I let go and staggered back, bringing a hand to my mouth as if that could prevent me from throwing up.

“Omigod,”
I whispered. “Omigod!”

Dylan came after me, reaching me in one quick step and taking me by the arms. “I didn’t want you to see that—”

“It’s him,” I said, horrified. Processing. “It’s him!”

The guy from the gold car.

“They found him half an hour ago.” His voice was stripped bare. “LaSalle sent the picture for confirmation.”

I tried to breathe. “What happened?”

“LaSalle didn’t say much, just that he’d had his throat slit before he was thrown into the water.”

My stomach twisted. The guy who’d tried to hurt me was dead. He’d been killed, murdered. Disposed of.