Page 61 of Indecent Secrets

The desire to find Leigh was all-encompassing. I felt like I was fighting through a red haze and had to ignore it to focus on the task at hand.

There were servants in the house, naturally. The older Weston was old-fashioned that way, having live-in staff rather than just a team that came in every week to clean things.

I kept things quiet as I moved through the house to the bedroom, but David wasn’t there. I moved back downstairs—and in the library, I found him, sitting at a desk and going over papers, including the ones I’d signed as ‘Jack’.

They were quite possibly copies. But even if he’d sent the originals on to someone like his father or his office, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t Jack Lawton and the signatures would duly prove to be forgeries.

David stood up as I entered. “What…”

“The name’s Bryce, by the way,” I noted. “Not Jack.”

I flung the knife so that it flew across the room and embedded itself in his throat in a direct hit. David collapsed into the chair, eyes glassy, a look of shock still on his face.

It wasn’t what I wanted to do to him. I wanted to torture him. I wanted him to feel all the pain and fear that Leigh had undoubtedly felt, times ten. But that wasn’t going to work. It had to look like a quick murder and leave the police confused and guessing. If I left his body broken and tortured, there would be a hell of a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer. And getting rid of a dead body was always exhausting.

My lip curling in disgust, I pulled the knife out to take that piece of evidence with me, left David’s body where it was, and went to search for Leigh.

Chapter 23

Leigh

* * *

I woke up with a sore throat and my head pounding.

For a second, panic set in as I felt like I couldn’t breathe—but then I inhaled through my nose and I realized that it was just my mouth that was covered. By… duct tape?

I tried to sit up, only for me to slide right back down. My hands were tied behind my back with more duct tape, which hurt against my skin, and there was even more duct tape around my ankles, trapping my legs together.

My legs were draped over the edge of a porcelain bathtub, forcing my lower body to lay against the bottom of it. To make it even worse, David had tied a rope from my ankle to the towel rod on the far wall, which made it impossible for me to draw my legs down into the tub and scoot up to a sitting position.

I could try and get leverage to sit up, but it was difficult with my hands behind my back like this. I tried anyway. It felt like doing an intense sit-up, and I fell back onto the bathtub.

Shit.

My throat still felt tender, so that I could really feel every swallow. It was disconcerting, and not in the way I enjoyed with my collar on. Why had I been left like this? Why in a bathtub of all places?

I had no idea how long I lay there for, trying to strategize—and occasionally trying to lift myself up and out of the tub with no success—but eventually the door opened.

My blood went cold.

David stared down at me, as dispassionate as if I was a bug. “Ah, you’re awake. I wondered if you would be. I’m not an expert at this whole thing.”

An expert at murder. I rolled my eyes.

David walked over and knelt by the tub, and for a moment I thought he was going to remove the duct tape to let me talk.

Instead, he leaned over and turned on the water.

A scream wrenched itself out of me as I realized what was about to happen. I thrashed, my ankle throbbing as my movements caused me to tug hard on the rope, but I couldn’t lift my upper body up out of the way of the water.

“I wish this could be as clean and simple as before, but… you’re not an old man with a medical condition. Luckily, there’s plenty of room on the property to bury you.” David stood up. “Goodbye, Leigh.” His hand stroked my leg and I shuddered. “I really wish you hadn’t figured out the murder. We could’ve worked so well together.”

Then he left the room, closing the door.

Fuck. Fuck. I screamed, even though I knew nobody would help me and David wasn’t going to have a sudden change of heart. The water was filling up the tub fast. I could already feel it hitting my ass, and soon I would be lying in several inches of it.

I was going to drown if I didn’t find a way out of here.

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