Page 9 of Shattered
CHAPTER 3
Rourke
On a better night, I would have checked the entire house before I took any action, but that wasn’t tonight. Music circled us, whatever garbage the corpse had been playing. The dim light from the hallway silhouetted her from behind, highlighting the curves of her thighs. A large shirt hung over her breasts, leading down to panties barely covering her round ass. Her face hidden in the shadows. If we were in another world, seeing this woman’s body illuminated like this would have been a treat. But a dead body lay between us. This woman hadn’t taken a breath since she had realized Colin was dead.
She took another step backward, her hands curling into fists. I stepped over the body, pocketing the used cord.
“I said don’t move,” I repeated, my words manipulated through the voice changer, coming out machine-like. Another step forward, and she took another step back. I shook a hood and cable ties from my back pocket, readying them. “Don’t—”
She bolted backward, racing down the hall. I lunged after her, pulling her wrist and enveloping her in a tight embrace. She struggled, thrashing out of my grip as hard as she could, but I linked her wrists together with one hand, using the other to keep her still. Another few movements and her wrists were locked together in a cable tie. I grabbed the hood and threw it over her head, and she stilled then, silenced by the darkness. Her hands continued to flex and release, but she was done fighting. For now.
I led her back to the master bedroom. When her feet knocked into the body, she grimaced.
“Is this your boyfriend or your roommate?” I asked.
“Roommate.”
That was lucky for her. It was easier for them when they weren’t romantically attached, when they didn’t hold their partners in such high regard. She lifted her foot high, wanting to gracefully step over him, but I shoved her forward, knocking her into the bed. Pushed on her ass until she rolled onto it, lying down.
“You killed him,” she breathed, her voice muffled by the cloth fabric. “Why? Why did you do it?”
I got the feeling she knew why, like she was used to hiding his secrets, that the surprise was more about how he had finally been exposed. But I answered her anyway.
“Because he didn’t deserve to live.”
“What did he do?” I pulled her wrists until she was lying flat on her back, then I pulled off the hood. I looked into her eyes.
“He knocked a woman’s head into the dashboard.” I held her wrists down, leaning my weight into them. “She asked for the money he owed her, and that was how he had repaid her. A broken nose.” And the woman wouldn’t be able to get decent jobs for a few weeks. Pity tricks would only work for so long.
The woman’s thick red hair lay in streams along the mattress, though her brown eyes blinked, watering at the sudden exposure. I realized I recognized her. She looked different than I had expected. Melissa.
She was supposed to be at work. How had I been so focused on Colin that I had failed to realize that she was home?
To call it stalking would be accurate, but it wasn’t my intention to capture her. Only to find out more, for curiosity’s sake, about the woman who had framed her own murder on me. Aldrich fit my base criteria, but he didn’t venture into my usual hunting grounds.
Melissa used colored contacts at work, then. Dyed her hair. Played the role she created for herself. But now, she was in comfortable clothes. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
“What do you want from me?” she said. The helplessness of that question typically did nothing for me, but there wasn’t anything weak about her. She was restrained, underneath me, but there was an emptiness to her words. She wasn’t scared. In fact, she was brave.
Finding her here was good luck. I could use her to take the fall. The police already knew her association with Aldrich. One more body next to her would help guide their hunches.
Her legs twitched against mine, her warmth coming through my pants. Her lips opened, sucking in a quiet breath, but still, there was no fear. Only emptiness. A quality I recognized in myself. That wasn’t something I had anticipated.
It was never my intention to kill her anyway.
I ran a leather-gloved hand along the side of her face. “I want everything,” I said. She stared back at me, not sure where to look when there were no pupils to find in the global eyes of the mask.
With one hand on her wrists, I used the other hand to find a fresh cord in my pocket, then swathed her neck inside of it. I pressed the mouth of my mask to her neck; she may not have been visibly scared, but her pulse was throbbing through the layers of material.
“This will only take a few seconds,” I said.
Her eyes widened and I pulled the cord. Her eyes watered, staring into me. She struggled to speak. She whimpered and gulped.
And there it was. She relaxed, loosening into sleep. I released the cord and quickly cut the cable tie on her wrist. As I closed the door behind me on the bedroom’s balcony, Melissa sharply inhaled.
Removing my mask, the fresh night air was welcoming. I threw on a button-up shirt and tucked the mask into one of my large pockets. I let myself down over the railing, jumping to the ground. After I hopped the fence to the canal running behind the house, I walked. My car was waiting a few blocks away. I welcomed the crisp air. It was a chance to realign myself and think straight.
I had made a few errors that night.
