Page 127 of Sweet as Sin (Bad Habit 1)
I tried to roll to one side, to get upright again, but couldn’t manage it. The pain was too much. My head was spinning. I knew I was about to pass out, and fought it, biting my tongue to keep me awake.
For the first time, I noticed how cut and bloody my hands were. One of my shoes was missing. On my left leg, the black trousers I’d borrowed from Grace had been shorn apart and a ragged gash ran the length of my inner thigh. Blood dripped down my leg in long red streams.
Michael stalked toward me. He grabbed me beneath my armpits, hauled me to the lit wall, and threw me against it. Unable to hold myself upright, I slumped sideways to the floor.
Michael sighed. He came back and propped me up carefully, arranging my limbs as you would a doll on a shelf. The room took on a dreamy, hazy quality. I moaned and let my eyelids drift shut.
“It’s no use, Kat. I know you told Nico about our little talk. And even though I’ve been listening in on all your conversations, and nothing sounded amiss, I finally realized he wouldn’t have acted the way he did afterward if you two hadn’t cooked up some silly scheme to try to throw me off. But, as you can see, I wasn’t. And now you’ve forced me to do something unpleasant. You only have yourself to blame.”
I opened my eyes. As he came into focus, I whispered, “Listening in?”
So Barney was right.
“Did you think that nighttime visit of mine was some kind of voyeuristic jerkoff?” Michael sounded insulted. “Please. I was there with a specific purpose: to ensure you’d uphold your end of the bargain I was going to propose to you. Bugging phones is just one of the many talents I’ve picked up in my travels. I’m sure you’ve figured out by now I’m pretty good with hacking computers, too.”
High, unsmiling, he stood over me looking like something the Boogeyman would run from, then stepped back, cocked his head, and stretched out his arms. With his hands, he made a frame. He looked at me through it. After a moment, he grinned.
I understood with bone-chilling clarity what was about to happen.
“You have such eloquent eyes, Kat. Like a silent movie star’s.” Michael’s tone had turned almost tender. “It’s too bad you’re short. With that face, you really could have been a model.” He dropped his arms and stared at me. “Well. At least this once, you will be.”
He went to the tripod. He looked into the camera and adjusted the lens. “Say cheese.”
A flash went off. Then another, and another. Michael was photographing me, bloodied, semiconscious, splayed against the wall in his dead sister/lover’s bedroom. He was taking the final photos of my life.
I knew who he’d be sending them to.
Well, brain, I thought frantically, now’s as good a time as any to prove your existence.
“Amy told me about you. The day we met.” My words sounded a little slurred to my own ears, but they must have been perfectly clear to Michael, because he froze, then stood ramrod straight, his eyes wide.
“What?”
I nodded, licking my lips, surreptitiously looking around the immediate area for a weapon. Any kind of weapon. “I was hired to do the makeup for the band’s video—”
“Yes, yes, I know. And?” Michael held so still he might have been a statue. His gaze on my face burned.
“Well . . . she seemed a little sad . . . so I asked her what was the matter.” Ceramic cat statue on the dresser. Lamp on the nightstand. Framed photo of Avery on the wall. In spite of my head and my pain and the direness of the situation, I had to smile. That would be a bit of poetic justice if ever it existed, smashing in Michael’s skull with a picture of his sister.
“What did she say?” prompted Michael impatiently.
I heard a noise. A creak, or a pop. Most likely it was something inside my own body. I whispered, “She said . . . ” Was that a shadow creeping down the hallway? No, my eyes were playing tricks on me. “She said . . . she said she really wanted . . . ”
Michael moved tow
ard me. He shouted, “What? What did Amy say she wanted?”
From the doorway, a deep voice snarled, “Peace.”
Michael spun around. He pulled a gun from the waistband of his jeans. A shot rang out, then another. As blood sprayed crimson against the wall above my head, Michael staggered back, cursing, but didn’t fall.
With the last remaining ounce of my strength, I lunged to the dresser, grabbed the ceramic cat statue, then smashed it against the back of Michael’s head on my way back down to the floor.
Michael crumpled to the floor beside me. He didn’t move again.
Then Nico was kneeling above me, his eyes tortured, his face red with fury. The whine of sirens rose far off in the night.
I whispered, “Glad you could make it, superstar. Hope I didn’t interrupt a hot date.”
