I’m in hell.
Maybe the sight of the body killed me and this is the eternal punishment I’ve landed in for being up to my eyeballs in debt.
Each breath tears through my raw throat like a razor blade. My heart pounds so fiercely that I can barely discern the individual beats, and my stomach has knotted so tightly from stress that I’m not even sure I can straighten up.
All I wanted was to go home. In a blink, I ended up dragged into a car, and then I woke up to an interrogation by a man as thickly muscular as a brick house. Like the cops, all he cares about is the body and none of my answers seemed to satisfy him. I was so certain he was going to kill me until that woman appeared.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but something made him angry enough to punch and damage the door. Then something changed.
I beg for darkness to take me as the huge bulldozer of a man walks back toward me with his gun gripped tightly in his right hand.
“You want to live?” he asks in a voice tinged with an accent I can’t currently place.
My mind races with a plethora of offers he might make, and I think I would say yes to anything if it would get me out of here. I nod rapidly, unable to stop my lower jaw from trembling enough to answer.
“You will do something for me,” he states. “Once you complete it, you will be free to go. Do you agree to these terms?” He adjusts his grip on the gun, and my heart leaps painfully up into my throat.
I should ask him what he needs first rather than agreeing blindly, but that thought is drowned out by the sheer panicked need to survive and walk out of here.
Wherever here is.
So I nod again.
“Say it,” the man barks, making me jump.
I sniffle, blinking rapidly through the ever-flowing tears. “Y–Yes,” I manage to force out. “I–I’ll do anything.”
“If you want to live, you will return to the police station and bug the detective in charge of this murder case. You’re familiar with her already, I imagine?” With the flick of a wrist, he pulls a card from his pocket and tosses it down onto my lap. “And if you value your life, you won’t get caught. Are we clear?”
All I see is freedom, so I nod as fast I can. “Yes, I understand.”
What the fuck?
Bugging Sarah? Is that because these people are responsible for the murder or because they want to know more? I can’t tell. All I know for sure is that this man is dangerous and the dead body is important to him in some regard. But the details don’t matter. I can play along until I get a window and then I can run. I can just run away and not stop until I reach a place where no one knows me.
“Cormac,” calls the woman from the door, putting a name to the face of the muscular, armed man in front of me. “Cian will be here in the morning.”
“Understood,” Cormac replies. With a nod, the woman leaves and Cormac closes the distance between us. I flinch, fearing he’s going to strike me or his fist is heading back into my hair, but neither of those things happen. He reaches around me and unravels the rope around my wrist in a matter of seconds.
“It’s late,” he says, his gruff voice thick. “Follow me.”
He strides away, and I try to follow, but fear has my muscles locked up and I’m unable to stand from the chair. Hurriedly wiping away my tears, I massage my thighs and clutch the detective’s card, begging my body to listen to me. By the time Cormac reaches the door and opens it, I’m finally on my feet.
Each step is jerky and I’m unable to control the tremor that’s settled deep in my skeleton. Every part of me shakes as I stare at Cormac’s back and follow him through a warmly lit hallway to a door near the end. He opens it and jerks his head inside.
“You can rest there until morning.”
He doesn’t even look at me as I pass him, and as soon as I’m inside, the door thumps shut.
I hold my breath, waiting for something to jump out at me in the darkness, but there’s nothing—just a faint scent of cotton and vanilla and air that’s cool against my skin. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I make out the shapes of a chair, a few cabinets, and a bed.
The bed is my destination, and the tears pour the second I throw myself onto the softness. Grabbing the nearest pillow, I curl around it and sob my aching heart out.
What the fuck is going on?
I find a dead body in my shitty job, become scarred for life at the sight of it, face intense interrogation by the cops, and then get kidnapped and have my life threatened by a terrifyingly large man.
All in the past twenty-four hours.
I’m scared, more scared than I’ve ever been in my entire life. This isn’t what my life is supposed to be. I make bad financial choices, I fight with my mother over her neglect, and I work a shitty job to pay off debt. That’s supposed to be the extent of my stress.
But that man knew everything, even my favorite restaurant. Whoever these people are, it’s clear I don’t belong here. I don’t want to belong here.
I want to go home.
I cry into the pillow until the sheer exhaustion of the day steals over me, and I fall into a troubled sleep filled with gaping wounds, pools of blood, and gigantic shadows that smother me to silence.
One shadow in particular keeps its hand over my mouth and suffocates me to the point that my body is about to burst from the lack of air.
My eyes snap open and I jerk back from whatever is in front of my face, panting harshly. Fumbling with the bedside table, I scramble at the light and eventually turn it on, revealing that the only thing smothering me was the pillow I had chosen before I fell asleep. I must have rolled into it during my nightmare and become stuck.
As for the pain in my abdomen, that’s not from the lack of air.
I really, really need to pee.
But I don’t want to leave.
It becomes a debate between whether it would be scarier to run into Cormac in the hallway while looking for the bathroom or to face him after I have an accident in this bedroom. A bedroom that, at a glance, holds more expensive-looking furniture than I’ve ever seen in my life.
Soiling this room definitely wins out as the scarier option, so with my heart in my throat, I move on my tiptoes and sneak out of the room.
The place is quiet. As I hold my breath in the dark hallway, not a single sound reaches me. No voices, no clinking of dishes or signs of life. Everything is dark and quiet. They wouldn’t leave me here alone, would they?
Maybe this entire thing is just one long, bad dream.
It takes me a few long minutes to find the bathroom by peeking into doorways, but eventually, I locate the facilities and relieve myself with a groan of relief. Washing my hands, I try not to look at myself in the mirror. What makeup does remain on my face is smudged and messy, barely covering my blotchy skin and red-rimmed eyes. Caring about what I look like hardly feels important right now, but having to go through all of this in the terrible maid’s outfit from the motel just makes the entire past day feel like some horrid joke.
I splash water on my face, then cup some in my palm and drink a few sips. I have no appetite, but the growing ache in my skull is definitely from dehydration. Or Cormac’s hand in my hair or the earlier blow to the head.
I can’t decide.
Heading back to bed seems like the best choice. I’d rather sleep until someone comes to get me, but on the way back to where I think the bedroom was, I spot a light coming out from underneath one of the closed doors.
I should leave it alone. Every part of my body screams at me to leave it alone and go back to bed, but since I haven’t seen a soul since I woke up, curiosity wins out.
The door opens silently, and I peer around to see what’s inside.
It’s a lounge filled with plush leather sofas and chairs, a wooden wall cabinet filled with alcohol bottles, and floor-to-ceiling windows opposite the door, through which streams of early morning light pour. Seeing a pink morning sky is beautiful, and I watch it for a few long seconds. Just as I’m about to leave, a soft thump catches my attention as a glass half full of amber falls into view on the other side of one of the chairs.
The glass teeters on its edge, and my heart jumps, watching it fall over. I dart inside the room without a second thought and snatch up the glass before too much of the alcohol spills onto the rug, but even a few droplets are enough to ruin the pure cream pattern on the rug. I should clean it. I want to clean it because it will bring me peace of mind, but I can’t move.
Cormac is asleep in the chair. The glass must have fallen from his relaxed fingertips, and for the first time, I can look at him—really look at him.
He sleeps soundly with his auburn brows pulled low in a scowl, even in slumber. Thick copper-red hair sits quaffed on his head, and a dark five o’clock shadow hugs his wide, chiseled jaw. He’s topless, exposing a broad muscular chest covered in a dusting of red hair and more thick scars than I care to count. There’s a cluster of triangles tattooed onto his thick neck, and his left arm is wrapped in a colorful tattoo sleeve filled with flowers and birds.
He’s incredibly handsome when he’s not brandishing a gun and threatening my life.
Each slow breath makes his impressive muscles shift and rise, creating a ripple across his torso which draws my eyes down to his tight abs and the soft start of a snail trail that disappears into the waistband of his belted slacks.
Did he lose his shirt in another spilled alcohol incident?
The longer I stare, the harder it is to move, but eventually, I kick myself into gear and set the glass aside on a coaster resting on the glass coffee table. With limited access to any cleaning supplies, the best I can do is a small bottle of white vinegar that I find on the bottom shelf of the drinks cabinet. It will help only a little, but it will have to do.
I hurry back to the stain, but as I crouch down next to Cormac’s sleeping form, my hair falls forward and brushes over his empty fingers. Every nerve in my body pulses in fright as his hand twitches, but he doesn’t wake. I breathe out a slow sigh of relief and uncap the vinegar.
Cormac is on his feet in an instant with his hand around my throat, hauling me upward with a growl. The vinegar bottle slips away from my grasp as my hands shoot to clutch at his thick arm, and for a searingly terrifying second, I’m held aloft, staring into stormy blue eyes. In the same second, Cormac appears to realize what he is doing and he immediately releases me.
“Shit,” he croaks gruffly. “Sorry.”
I cough sharply, clutching at my throat as he steps away. My heart hammers and fear pours through me like acid in my veins, but then Cormac places his warm hand on my shoulder and the burn suddenly fades.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “Didn’t expect you to be there.”
“Do you always go for the throat?” I ask, my voice tight.
Cormac snorts as if he finds humor in my words. “Maybe. What are you doing?”
I suddenly remember the vinegar and dart down to grab the bottle, but it’s too late. The vinegar has poured out and soaked into the rug, filling the air with its sharp scent.
“I was looking for the bathroom and then I came in here and saw the glass fall. I was just trying to stop it from staining. I’m so sorry, it was an accident!” Will he kill me for ruining the rug? For spilling the vinegar? This man scares me, and I tense up, ready for anger or the gun or anything.
Instead, there’s nothing. When I glance up, Cormac waves one hand at me and turns away toward the drinking cabinet.
“It’s fine. It’s just a rug. Doesn’t fucking matter.” As he grabs a glass, he throws a glance over his shoulder. “Your life is on the line and you cared about my rug?”
I clutch the vinegar bottle to my chest. “I like to clean. It soothes me. When everything inside is a mess, it helps to clean the outside, y’know?”
Cormac grunts. “You’re in the perfect line of work, then.”
“Sort of.” It’s all I can think of to say. My stomach writhes like a nest of snakes as the awkward conversation falls into a lull, but my feet don’t obey my desire to leave. I watch Cormac pour a full glass and then drain it in two gulps. He couldn’t have been asleep long if I saw the other glass fall. I watch him pour another, then he glances at me again.
“Do you drink?”
“A little. Though maybe not right now.”
“I shouldn’t drink either,” he replies, lifting the glass. “Shouldn’t do a lot of things.”
As he drinks, it suddenly hits me why there’s something oddly familiar about this. My mother, as cold and distant as she was, had a period of drowning herself in wine after the death of my father. It made my teen years terribly painful, but the way Cormac bunches himself up as if trying to make himself small and drinks like the burn in medicine… It’s familiar.
He’s grieving.
“That man,” I say softly, taking a cautious step forward. “He was important to you, wasn’t he?” Previously, I worried that Cormac was the killer, or someone around him was. His earlier desire to kill me would make sense if he wanted to hide what I knew. But I see it now.
He wears grief on his wrist like the ink on his arm. It’s just smothered in anger.
“He was my brother,” Cormac replies finally, his words ejecting from him in sharp bursts. “Family.” That word cracks out of him, and Cormac lifts his glass, but it doesn’t meet his lips. A subtle shudder moves through his entire form.
I’ve seen a lot at that motel over the years, and I know the signs of someone in pain. Closing the gap once more, I lightly touch his arm, and he jumps ever so slightly, but he doesn’t pull away. The glass lowers and he sends me a side-long glance.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say softly. For a moment, staring into those blue eyes, I choose to forget the kidnapping and the threats just to let him know that I am sorry. My description of what I saw in the bathroom takes on a colder truth when I realize I was describing this man’s brother.
Cormac holds my gaze, then his eyes narrow ever so faintly. “You should be telling me to go fuck myself.”
“Maybe,” I reply softly. “But I am still sorry about your brother.”
There’s a second where the world stops spinning, my heart stops beating, and a pulse of warmth rises between us. I can’t decipher its meaning. Maybe it’s just adrenaline from everything that’s been happening or a mixture of fear and something else.
Something like attraction.
Whatever it is, it passes in a split second before the door opens and the man who dragged me in from the car walks in. His brow lifts like he’s surprised to see me, and Cormac draws away from me as he turns.
“What is it, Hank?”
“Your mother,” Hank says, and he holds out a phone.
Cormac accepts it, then glances at the silver watch on his wrist. “Hank, get Evelyn a change of clothes.” He glances back at me, and the hardened coldness has returned to his eyes. “Time for you to plant a little bug.”
