Page 97 of The Woman at the Funeral

Nowhere had windows like that.

Except warehouses, right?

I was somewhere industrial.

Even as I thought that, I could see several large, darkened shapes way on the other side of the cavernous building.

What were those?

Boats?

No.

Cars.

They were cars.

Cars.

It was all sharpening into focus.

Stab her already.

Right before I’d passed out, I’d realized I remembered that voice.

Oh, I knew that voice alright.

And that also meant that I knew exactly where I was.

But just as it dawned on me, footsteps approached somewhere to my side, making me jerk hard.

A flashlight sliced through the darkness before the torch illuminated my face. The pain ratcheted up, making me squeeze my eyes shut to try to ease it.

“Good. You’re not blabbering anymore.”

My blood turned to ice in my veins as the voice washed over me again. The same way it had in the not-so-safe house. When they’d been pinning me to the ground, their knee shoved in my back, holding me still as someone else injected me with something to knock me out.

Ronny.

Of course.

There wasn’t a single thing the Ferraros did alone. There was no way Matthew was involved with something serious and his family wasn’t in on it.

Ronny had been the one to help him haul those boxes of baseball cards into my apartment while praising him up and down, telling him what a genius he was, and how he was going to be so rich. And how he was such a good person because he wouldshare his wealth.

She’d said that last part with a pointed look in my direction.

She’d also been the one to go with him on garage sales every weekend, grabbing more useless crap that would fill up my closets until I finally made him get a storage unit.

There was no way he’d been working on something—possibly for months or years—without his mom knowing.

Actually, with a little thought, there was no way he’d even come up with the plan by himself.

Or came up with it at all.

Matthew, for all his superficial charms and inflated ego, was not the brightest guy. His schemes were always simple: selling baseball cards, revamping curbside furniture, doing a graphic t-shirt business.

I didn’t think it was possible for him to come up with the idea to collect sensitive information about the Costa family, let alone figure out how to try to sell it to the highest bidder.

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