Page 47 of By the Time You Read This

“Depends on if it’s a good question.”

St. Ivany’s lips twitched in the same way Kilkenny’s did. Acknowledging the humor while not really giving in to it. “Why do you think the SUV was aiming for Agent Kilkenny and not you?”

Raisa thought about Kilkenny’s warning.Isabel wanted you in Gig Harbor.If Kilkenny had taken a hit meant for her, she wasn’t sure she would be able to live with herself.

Her mind supplied an alternative. “I think they just wanted to scare us, and they didn’t care who was hurt.”

St. Ivany nodded, but her expression remained clouded. “I’m going to post a uniform by the door. Just in case.”

The fact that someone else had reached the conclusion that Raisa might have a target on her back made it seem all the more real. “You think someone’s after me?”

“Or Kilkenny,” St. Ivany said, neutrally. “But it won’t hurt to have someone in place.”

St. Ivany wasn’t wrong. And there wasn’t just the possibility of one threat out there. Whoever had been driving the SUV could have been Isabel’s protégé working under her direction, but it also could have been a relative of one of Isabel’s victims, operating independently of anything else.

“It’s not just me who might be in danger,” Raisa said slowly, finally,finally, shrugging off the anger that stopped her from acknowledging it. “It’s also my sister Delaney.”

St. Ivany’s face flickered with an emotion gone too quick for Raisa to catch. “Well, there’s only one of you I can protect.”

Chapter Fifteen

Delaney

Day Four

The eyes on the back of Delaney’s neck had returned.

When they had caught up with her—how they had caught up with her—she didn’t know.

But they were there.

Delaney stripped out of the costume she’d worn down to the bonfire to meet Gabriela Cruz, and then she flipped the motel’s shower on, watching it ramp up from a trickle to a stronger trickle.

At least the water was scalding. Usually in places like this she had to deal with both a weak flow and glacial temperatures.

It took a while, but eventually Lana Parker swirled all the way down the drain and she was back to being Delaney.

A comfy pair of sweats finished off the transformation.

Delaney made a cup of coffee that was more water and false promises than anything else, then grabbed her computer and went to sit on the edge of the kidney-shaped pool outside.

Her socked feet dangled over the chippedno divingwarning painted on one of the walls, and she stared at the one other room that was lit up against the night. She wondered who else was there with her.

She didn’t think it was whoever was hunting her. They wouldn’t announce their presence like that.

The air smelled of weed, even though there was no one around, and Delaney wished the pool were full. She wanted nothing more than to slip beneath the cool water and disappear, really disappear. There would be no eyes on the back of her neck, no sour scent clinging to the inside of her nostrils, no memory of Isabel, staring at her from across the table of the visitors’ room at that correctional facility, a master plan brewing behind her eyes.

But there was no water and Isabel’s face would forever be burned in her mind and there was definitely someone tracking her.

Maeve? Or maybe Maeve was just someone her hunter had hired. Someone sent in to get a lay of the land before the real predator struck.

Delaney sighed and woke her laptop up. She punched in Lindsey Cousins’s name, as she always did. No new articles about the “drowning.”

She was going to be forgotten as just a tragic statistic. That was probably for the best.

A headline at the bottom of the page caught her eye.

Police Mull Curfew as Search for Emily Logan’s Killer Continues

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