Page 105 of Wicked Sins

Hide.

Padding as silently and as quickly as I can, I dart into the bedroom’s walk-in closet. His cloying scent is nauseatingly thick in here.

“They probably think I fucking killed her, that’s why!”

My heart shrinks to a withered grape, and my stomach twists up inside me. I collapse into a little ball, scrunching my way into the first dark space I see. Fabric drapes the top of my head, my shoulders, but there’s not enough of it to cover me fully.

“Tomorrow at eleven.” he couldn’t be further than a yard away. He sounds calmer, but the fact that he’s so close has my skin prickling with unease. “I couldn’t care if you’re in a fucking coma. You’re there to represent me, or you’ll never practice law in this state again.”

I hold my breath, straining for the slightest sound so I can calculate how close he is. Whether he’s moving away, or toward—

Wayne steps into the walk-in closet. He’s yanking on his tie, a grimace distorting his mouth. His gaze is fixed on nothing in particular.

In the center of the narrow room, alongside a cabinet where cuff links and jewelry take center stage, sits a crushed velvet stool.

My eyes are drawn to a flash of green on that cabinet before Wayne draws my eye again.

He sits on the stool, leaning back to kick off his dress shoes. Next are his socks, tugged off with a crooked finger.

“Probably the same they’ll be asking tomorrow,” he growls. “Where I was, where Diana was, where the kids were.”

He shrugs off his jacket, coming to stand again. Then he walks right up to where I’m huddling. Because I was stupid enough to choose his damnsuitcupboard to hide in.

Air washes over me, filled with his unique scent; cologne, musk—but also something new.

Cigarettes?

He stands less than two feet away from me as he shrugs off his blazer. Keeping his phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear, a wooden hanger rattles above and to the side of where I’m cowering as he hangs it up again.

“I told you, we were both at home. Kids were at school.” There’s the clink of metal, but he’s blocked out by the tuxedo dangling beside my shoulder. Then he turns, and I watch a sliver of him as he yanks open his belt and rips it from his suit pants.

“No.”

His belt drops silently to the carpet.

“Because she’s not here anymore.”

Mom?

I so desperately want to breathe, but I’m too scared he’ll hear me, somehow sense the change in temperature when I exhale.

Wayne unbuttons his shirt, fingers fast and agile as he works his way down before yanking his shirt from his pants.

“Not by tomorrow.”

He makes an angry sound as he rips off his shirt and lets it drop to the floor. My stomach tightens into a ball tighter than the one I’m huddled in.

There’s a tattoo on his chest. It’s faded with age, but still legible.

invictus maneo

Blood turns to ice in my veins.

“You sound just like them. It was anaccident,” Wayne says. He unzips his fly and steps out of his pants. Black briefs cling to him as he turns and grabs another hanger, his suit pants going right alongside the suit jacket. “Which happened a long fucking time ago. That’s got nothing to do with this.”

He moves to a set of shelves and takes down a pair of sweat pants. With his back to me, all I can do is watch the muscles under his skin move as he steps into the sweats and tugs them up his legs.

Then he’s out of the closet. I hear him moving around in his bedroom.

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