Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) Rachel Caine (best e book reader for android .txt) 📖

in Easy’s eyes make me swallow hard. “She’s okay,” I whisper to him. “Just resting right now.” I hug him, and feel him shaking. Sam pushes a chair over so Easy can sit down, which he does, wincing as he favors his bad leg. He looks years older than he did when we last visited him just a few weeks ago.

Prester doesn’t look much better, if I’m honest about it . . . his usually healthy dark color has taken on a silvery undertone, and he seems thinner. Slower, somehow. He gestures me to the other side of the room, and I head there with him. “She tell you anything about what happened?”

I give him as much as I can remember, and he nods and notes it down. When that’s done, he pockets the notebook and gives me a bleak look. “She thinks Sheryl Lansdowne’s actually a killer,” he says. “Probably killed her own girls too. But I don’t know why. Based on what the TBI’s told me just now, Sheryl got in that SUV of her own accord early Monday morning; they’ve got video of her at a truck stop. Kez found it before she took off in hot, stupid pursuit.”

“Was he waiting for her to find it?” I say. “Jesus.”

“Don’t know if it was that, or he was working out a way to wipe that footage somehow and they just crossed paths. If so, that was bad luck. Either way, Kez took the bait, and he reeled her right in. She’s out of this. No more, Gwen. And you get out of it too.”

“We’re out,” I tell him. What I can’t tell him is that I don’t think that means anything at this point. I think the man in the black SUV, the ghost Kez chased, is the same man who paid Len to send me those letters. He’s been awfully busy, but I suspect Len’s not the only help he’s hired. Flyers could be posted by anyone; once he got them going viral, he didn’t need to do more.

I have no proof that MalusNavis is the driver of that black SUV . . . except one thing.

I take the credit card that Len gave me out of my pocket, sealed in a plastic bag. “I ran across this today,” I tell him. “Someone who was hired to harass me had it.” That’s close enough to the truth, without leading him into dangerous territory. “Look at the last name.”

“Maguire. Jesus.” He turns his sharp eyes to me, and as always, I’m sure he sees more than I intend. “Why’s he harassing you?”

“Because I was helping Kez.” Also true. Just not completely accurate.

“Well, like I said, you get the hell out. Now.”

I just nod. I don’t want to promise him anything, because I know that we’ve gone way past that particular exit. Maybe there never was an exit at all; maybe the second I went to that pond, the second he saw me there, he intended to come for me. I don’t know.

But I do know he’s coming. I just don’t know how he’ll do it, or how bad it will be. He promised I’d have a choice.

All I have to do is choose not to engage. I hope.

16

KEZIA

I hate hospitals worse than the woods. I hate being hooked up to tubes, and it’s strange but I’m scared to bend my arm in case something tears loose. I have nightmares, bad ones, but I can’t seem to wake up.

When I finally open my eyes again, Pop’s there, with Prester looming in the background. If we talk, it disappears into vague smears when I start to drop off again. He holds my hand; I feel the warmth of it like a promise. I have a blurry, unformed impulse to tell him about the baby, tell him the baby’s okay, but I don’t act on it before I slip away into dreamless rest.

When I wake up again, they’re gone. Instead there’s someone in the room placing a gigantic bouquet of flowers on the ledge across from my bed. It’s a vague shape in the dim light, and I blink to try to bring him—I’m pretty sure it’s a him—into more focus. He’s white, with close-cropped hair, wearing some kind of uniform jumpsuit and a baseball cap. I say, “Who sent those?”

“Don’t know, ma’am,” he says. “I just deliver them. There’s a card if that helps.”

I look over at the door, and the Knoxville police officer is there holding it open. He seems tired and impatient. “Okay, let’s go, buddy, let her get some rest. On your way.”

The deliveryman nods and half turns toward me. Says, “I hope you get well soon.”

When I blink again, he’s gone, the door’s closed, and I’m halfway convinced that I hallucinated the whole damn thing, except the flowers are still there. A riot of color in the otherwise bland room.

I sleep again, and it’s deep dark outside the window when I wake up. A nurse comes in and changes IV bags, takes my vitals. I need to pee, and she helps me drag my IV stand into the bathroom, then gets me back safe in bed. I feel pretty good, considering. Better than I expected. I tell her so.

“You’ll be sore by morning,” she tells me. “They’re taking you off most of the medications, but you tell me if you start feeling too bad, okay? Oh, and you have a visitor who arrived. It’s really late, and we don’t usually allow them, but he says he’s your boyfriend?”

“Javier?” I struggle to sit up. “Can you let him in, please?”

It occurs to me too late as the door opens that it might not really be Javier, that the man who crashed my car might have come back to finish the job, and I start to call out to the cop stationed outside . . . but then I just gasp. I cry hot tears of relief at the sight of Javier, really here, rushing toward me. Then he’s