Page 92 of By the Time You Read This

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Delaney

Day Seven

Delaney stared at the police radio app as if the voice would come on and say the suicide at the harbor was a false alarm.

If it wasn’t, Delaney truly did have the man’s blood on her hands. She should have called the cops when she’d watched Gabriela drive away with him. She should have called Raisa, at the very least.

And all she’d been able to do was stand by helplessly, like she had all her life.

She closed her eyes, thinking about that evening two years earlier when she, Raisa, and Isabel stood in a loose circle, guns all trained on each other.

Delaney hadn’t pulled the trigger. Because she’d never been strong enough to do so.

The story she told about herself was that she was logical, highly intelligent, awkward, but with a strong sense of justice.

After all, she’d been ridding the dark web of monsters for more than half her life now.

But all that had ever taken was anonymous tips to the FBI. She wasn’t the one who kicked down doors, who chased bad guys. She wrote an email, made a phone call, all from the safety of her computer.

She was a bystander.

“You’re as guilty as me,” Isabel had said, and for the first time Delaney believed it.

She waited until the sun came up before packing all her things. She wouldn’t be coming back to the motel.

Delaney swung her bag into the beat-up tin can of a fourth-hand Toyota that she was still driving and then nearly screamed when she closed the trunk.

Roan Carmichael stood there, his face all shadows as the sun rose behind him.

“You can’t leave.” His voice came out strange, wrong.

Delaney huffed a breath and started toward the driver’s side. “Watch me.”

“No.” He lashed out, his hand gripping her arm tight, his fingers pressing into the soft flesh. There would be bruises there tomorrow. “You. Can’t. Leave.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Raisa

Day Five

Raisa and St. Ivany staked out the motel for about an hour after Delaney led Roan Carmichael back into her room. Raisa deliberately blocked any thoughts about what they were doing from her brain. Instead, she tried to find everything she could about Roan, while St. Ivany called her partner for his take on the man.

“Seems straightforward,” Raisa said as they drove back toward town, the motel shrinking in the side mirror. “Isabel killed his brother, he met with Emily because she found him through their shared interest in true crime’s effects on the victims’ families. Did he kill Isabel, then?”

Wouldn’t that be strange? If they’d looked into all these other deaths and they hadn’t had anything to do with Isabel’s.

“Seems like a possibility,” St. Ivany said. “We already know he’s a liar since he told me he was just a friend of Emily’s passing through.”

Raisa said, “I don’t know where Delaney comes into all this, either.”

“Maybe she’s next,” St. Ivany mused, sounding interested enough in the possibility that Raisa almost wanted her to turn the SUV around. But if they did, if they barged into that motel room, apart from it beingpotentially incredibly awkward, they would also scare one or both of their suspects into completely clamming up.

They wouldn’t be able to arrest them for anything, either. So all they would accomplish was losing their upper hand.

Raisa didn’t think either of them was going to die tonight.

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