Her head went light, and she fought off the slow, sickening spin, unable to think over the roar in her ears. Chase was dead. Chase was
dead
. But then she shook her head, refused to believe it. “No. You’re lying. You didn’t kill him.”
Sam pierced her with a dark look. “I have no reason to lie. Not anymore.”
“I don’t believe you.” She wouldn’t.
Couldn’t
. She would sense it if Chase were dead, would somehow
know
.
“I left the Explorer running in the garage and closed the garage door. He was cuffed inside, with no hope of escape. He went to sleep, Kylie. And he won’t wake up. Ever.”
No, she thought.
No
. Eye on the ball. Focus.
Breathe
. She swallowed the rush of grief. “Why? Just tell me why.”
“It’s your fault,” he said, calm again. “I tried everything to send you running back to LA, everything to stop this moment from coming. I don’t want to be this person, this . . . this . . .
bad
person. But it’s coming at me like a freight train, and no matter how hard I try, no matter what I do, I can’t get off the tracks. And it’s
your
fault!”
He lunged forward and backhanded her hard enough to tip the chair onto its back legs. When it slammed back to all fours, Kylie’s body snapped forward, held in place by the restraints, and she sat with her head slumped down, quiet and still, fighting the black dizzy spin of pain reverberating inside her skull.
Don’t pass out. Do
not
pass out.
The salty, metallic taste of blood in her mouth focused her, and she started to raise her head, to face the monster who killed the only man she’d ever loved. She’d make him pay. Somehow. Some way.
But she froze at the cold, hard pressure of metal against the top of her head, followed by the unmistakable, heart-stopping slide and click of a cocking gun.
“I should have brought a gun that day,” Sam said. “We wouldn’t be here now if I’d had the balls. But all I really wanted to do was take something important from you, something you cared about, just like you took something from me.”
She didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Sweat trickled between her breasts, gathered on the tip of her nose. She needed to spit out the blood gathering in her mouth but didn’t dare. Instead, she swallowed it and the encroaching terror.
“I’m sorry, Sam, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember you.”
“You know how incredibly offensive that is? You changed the course of
my life
, and you don’t even remember doing it.”
“What did I do? Please tell me what I did.”
“Patti Robinson.”
Kylie closed her eyes against the sting of tears and perspiration. Oh, God, Chase.
Okay, think, focus. Patti Robinson . . . yes, one of three other girls she and Trisha had hung out with in high school. The five of them had been inseparable. More regret: She’d lost touch with all but Trisha when she fled for LA.
The barrel of Sam’s gun dug into her scalp. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember Patti.”
“Of course I remember Patti,” she said quickly. “She was one of my closest friends.”
“I asked her out. On a date. I bet you don’t remember that.”
Kylie cycled through memories scattered by two swings of a baseball bat. She vaguely remembered a conversation with Patti about a guy who’d been busted for . . . something. Kylie had advised her not to go out with him alone. Had that been Sam?
“You talked her out of it,” Sam said, every word getting a bitter twist. “Said I wasn’t good enough for her, that I was beneath you and your popular friends.”
Kylie shook her head, heard the scrape of her hair against the gun’s tip. “That’s not what I said—”
“She ditched me,” Sam cut in. “
Ditched
me, made me look like an idiot to my friends. Because you had your nose stuck up so high in the air no one else was considered worthy. You had everything,
everything
, handed to you. You hung out with cheerleaders and football players and could have gone out with any guy you wanted. Kendall Falls worshipped at your feet. The world
revolves
around people like you. And me? I had
nothing
. I was just a dumb skinny kid with zits who got caught smoking pot in the bathroom. The
one
thing I wanted, the
one
thing that could have made my world livable—a girl as sweet and special as Patti—you took away from me without a second thought.”
As he adjusted his grip on the gun, Kylie squeezed her eyes closed. “Sam, please—”
“Look at me.”
At the higher level of gravity in his voice, her heart stuttered into a new, hyper pace, and she didn’t dare move, didn’t dare twitch as the ligaments and tendons in her arms began to cramp. Everything hurt. Her shoulders, her jaw. Her heart. Chase . . .
“
Look
at me,” Sam said again, and tapped her head with the pistol. “I want to see your face when I blow your brains out.”
She lifted her head slowly and met his crazed, red-rimmed eyes. She’d never known hate before. But here it was, and maybe, just maybe, she could understand what Sam must have felt ten years ago when Patti rejected him. This man took Chase away from her, and if she had a baseball bat and free hands, she wouldn’t hesitate to swing for the fences.
“Step away from her, Sam.”
At the quiet statement, Sam jerked around, toward the door leading into the dining room, where Chase leaned unsteadily against the door jamb.
Kylie gasped, at first relieved beyond belief—he’s alive!—then horrified at how bleary-eyed he looked. Perspiration trickled down the sides of his flushed face, and blood bathed both of his wrists and hands. What the hell happened to him?
Sam whipped back around and had the gun aimed at Kylie’s chest before anyone could draw another breath. “Don’t do anything stupid, Chase,” he said. “I mean it.”
Chase held onto the frame of the door for support, blinking as though trying to focus. “Same goes.”
Sam, having gotten a grip on his composure, cast him a grim look of approval. “So you were able to get free after all. What’d you do? Rip apart the interior?”
“Something like that,” Chase said. “Takes longer to die by motor vehicle exhaust these days, remember? Catalytic converters.”
“Looks to me like it wouldn’t have taken much longer,” Sam drawled.
“I got lucky. Now put down the gun.”
“No, thank you.”
“Then point it at me, not at her.”
“No,” Kylie said. Her stomach lurched at the thought of Sam, precariously balanced on a very narrow ledge of control, aiming a loaded gun at Chase. “Don’t.”
Chase didn’t acknowledge her plea, or her, actually, his attention laser-focused on his partner. “Sam, please. I’m on your side.”
Sam’s laugh sounded like a psychotic cackle. “You’re on my side? Are you fucking
serious
?”
“Whatever happened in the past, it’s the past. We can talk it out. What have you got to lose?”
“Everything!” Sam shouted. “I’ve got everything to lose! Why the fuck do you think we’re here?”
57
CHASE STOOD STILL, TENSE AND WATCHFUL AS HIS
carbon-monoxide-deadened senses began to sharpen and the roar of blood in his ears retreated. Chancing a glance at Kylie, he tried not to react to the terror sparking in her eyes or the blood on her mouth. Sam, the son of a bitch, had struck her. Chase would make him pay for that first.
“Tell me what’s going on, Sam,” he said evenly. He’d always had a knack for sounding reasonable while the inside of his head threatened to disintegrate. “I’m sure we can work something out.”
Sam’s jaw muscles flexed. “I’m going to have to kill you again.” His voice broke on the final words. “Christ, Chase, I don’t have a fucking choice.”
“Tell me why, Sam. Tell me what went wrong.”
Sam shifted his aim to Kylie’s head. “She. Came. Back,” he ground out, punctuating each word with a mimicked recoil of the gun.
Chase’s stomach cartwheeled. Jesus! He cast a glance at Kylie, to try to calm her with a reassuring look. The strain of discomfort showed clearly on her face, creasing her forehead and shimmering her brow with perspiration. But instead of staring at Sam in abject terror, she watched Chase with pleading eyes. Her voice seemed to echo in his head when she mouthed:
Be careful. Please be careful.
Chase’s heart wrenched. Sam was pointing the gun at
her
, yet she feared for
him
. He couldn’t have loved her more.
“I thought it’d be okay,” Sam said, voice wobbling all over the place, “until she decided to build that damn tennis center right
there
. Right where I buried all the evidence.”
Kylie cast one last pleading glance at Chase before she shifted her rock-solid focus to Sam. “Tell us about Mark,” she said, as steady and calm as she’d been the day she walked out on the court for the Australian Open final. “What did he do wrong?”
Admiration swelled inside Chase’s chest. That was his Ky, grace under pressure. He didn’t like, however, how she demanded Sam’s full attention. Maybe she thought it would help, perhaps give him an opening, but Chase couldn’t take the chance that Sam’s reflexes would be faster than his at the moment.
Sam edged to the side and, without turning, jerked open the refrigerator with one hand so he could scan the inside door. Spotting what he wanted, he grabbed a bottle of beer and shut the door with his hip. His gaze stayed on Chase and his gun on Kylie while he popped the metal top off the amber beer bottle.
After a long gulp, and apparently fortified by the additional alcohol, Sam said, “Mark couldn’t handle it. He freaked out.”
“Couldn’t handle what?” Chase asked, rewarded when his partner shifted his squinted eyes to him. That’s right, Sam, look at me, only me.
Sam drank again, so deeply that beer dribbled down his chin, but his gaze never wavered from Chase. “He wanted to do it just as much as I did. Hated that bitch”—he cut his eyes back at Kylie—“as much as I did.”
“Sam,” Chase said sharply. “I’m over here. Talk to me over here.”
Instead, Sam glanced down at his shoes, as though gathering his thoughts.
Chase’s muscles twitched, but Sam looked up. “Don’t.”
Chase raised his hands in a supplicating gesture. “Okay. It’s okay. I’m not doing anything. Just tell me about Mark.”
“He balked in the middle of it,” Sam said, giving his head an incredulous shake. “Can you believe that shit? We’ve got her on the fucking
ground
, and he
balks
.” He paused, his Adam’s apple bobbing spasmodically as he pressed the cold bottle to his temple. “Fucking
asshole
starts crying and arguing with me while we’ve got her on the ground. I mean, Jesus Christ! How am I supposed to get it up with him whimpering in my ear?”
Chase flinched at the implication, and a new roar began in his ears. “You were going to rape her?”
Sam gave the gun an impatient wave. “Hell yeah. We had the prettiest, smartest, most popular girl in school all to ourselves out there in the middle of fucking nowhere. You think we just wanted to hit her in the knee and run away? We had some plans. Some
very
hot plans. She wasn’t
ever
going to forget that day.”
Chase couldn’t stop himself from checking on Kylie. One glimpse of her haunted eyes told him she was back on that path, two threatening figures looming over her and a brand-new terror staring her down.
A chill raced the length of his spine, and his instinct was to step in, to shield her from that, but he couldn’t without irking the man with the gun. And that just made him want, all the more, to reach down Sam’s throat and rip his lungs out. But the time it would take him to cross the six feet between them, even at a dead run, would be all the time Sam needed to pull the trigger.
So, instead, he vowed to keep Sam talking. Eventually, he would make his partner scream. Sam, the evil son of a bitch, was going to scream and writhe and piss himself from Chase-inflicted pain very soon.
“But Mark screwed it up,” Chase said, his tone even, professional. “He freaked out.”
Sam drained the rest of the beer, then set aside the bottle with a carefulness that contradicted the gun in his hand. “He kept saying, ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ like I’d asked him to put his dick in the mouth of a shark. Fucking pussy. When he took off, I had no choice but to go after him before he ratted us both out.” He shifted his attention to Kylie, and his teeth flashed white in his ruddy face. “I got in a few good swings, so the afternoon wasn’t a total waste.”
“What did you do to Mark, Sam?” Chase asked, his voice sharp. He didn’t like the considering way Sam looked at Kylie, as though it had occurred to him that while he hadn’t gotten what he wanted that day in the woods, he might be able to get it today.
“Sam,” he said again. “Look at me and tell me what you did.”
Sam cut his alcohol-glazed eyes back to Chase. “I caught up with him at the Bat Cave. Dipshit was sniveling in the corner, sobbing and crying like a baby. Maybe it was the drugs. We tried something new that day. A joint my dealer gave me, laced with something. I’d never felt better, stronger. Everything was crystal sharp, and it pissed me off that Mark was being such a baby. So I hit him.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, as though the violent memory pleased him. “It felt good to hit him, so I kept doing it, just hitting him over and over again. Blood was flying everywhere. And then I saw the bat on the ground where I’d dropped it when I got there, and I picked it up. And swung.”
Clasping his gun hand with his left, he brought both back to his shoulder then swept out with a smooth, slow-motion follow-through, knocking an imaginary ball out of the park.
“Oh, God,” Kylie whispered.
Chase glanced at her, alarmed at the way her head sagged forward. Was she going to be sick? Had she fainted? He stared at the top of her head, willing her to look up, to look at him. As if feeling his pleading gaze, she raised her head. She was so pale, her blue gray eyes wide with pain and horror and fear. He swallowed back the gush of rage, quickly followed by a groundswell of helplessness. She needed him to do something, and all he could do was stand there and let crazy, insane Sam call the shots.