Page 125 of Sweet as Sin (Bad Habit 1)
I’d put on actual clothes. (They were Grace’s, and they didn’t fit right, but who cared.) The snuggie had been rolled up and shoved in the closet. I’d brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and consumed a fortifying shot of tequila.
“Send him up,” I said to the concierge, and sat down to wait.
Three minutes later, a knock came on the door. I opened it, not knowing what to expect, but it was only Barney with two lumpy duffel bags, standing in the doorway with his calm smile, his crisp suit, and the bulge of his gun beneath his breast pocket like some kind of assassin Buddha.
“Barney,” I said cautiously.
“Kat.” His gaze dropped to the hollow of my throat. A ghost of a smile lit his face, then disappeared.
“Come in.”
He ambled into the foyer of Grace’s elegant apartment, looked briefly around, then set the bags down beneath a mirrored console. He turned back to me. His gaze flickered to the light fixture in the ceiling, to the oil painting that hung on the wall in the hallway, to the phone on the console where he’d set the bags.
“Nice place,” he said and set a finger to his lips.
All the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Holy shit, is he telling me what I think he’s telling me? “Uh . . . yep.”
Barney nodded slowly, his gaze meaningful. He glanced at the bags. “That should be everything. Nico didn’t have time to bother with it, so I did my best to find whatever of yours was lying around.”
“Okay.”
Barney and I stared at each other. His gaze dropped again to the hollow of my throat. “Sorry about all this, Kat. You always struck me as a nice girl. I hate to see him acting like such a dog so soon after you broke up.”
My voice shook with emotion when I answered. “Well, it’s like you said. He’s a musician. There’s always something more important to them than you.”
Those were the exact words Barney had said to me on the phone, which were also the exact words I’d said to Nico the day I walked out on him before Avery’s death. I remembered the other things, too: when I’d told Nico about how I thought life was a boot camp, and when Grace had said I’d been through worse the day the paparazzi first showed up at my house. Put together, they were much more than coincidence.
They were a code. Nico was telling me something. But what?
Barney stepped closer. He reached out and touched the chain around my neck. I’d had it repaired the day after Nico had torn it off. Looking into my eyes, he said, “Take care, Kat,” and he tapped the gold pendant twice.
And I understood what he was really saying: trust.
I had to shove my fist in my mouth to stifle my gasp. Barney nodded, holding my gaze, then turned and let himself out. As the door closed behind him, I dove at the bags he’d left on the floor near the console and tore open the zippers. In a frenzy, I dug through the contents of one bag until I reached the bottom. In it were only clothes, some makeup, a few pieces of my jewelry. I tore into the other bag, crushed when I didn’t find anything, thinking the entire thing was in my head, manufactured from desperation and denial, but then my fingers brushed a smooth surface, and I froze.
A folded piece of paper lay at the bottom of the bag.
I picked it up with shaking hands and read.
Phones tapped. House(s) bugged. Barney’s waiting for you downstairs, parking garage level two. PS – I’m gonna give you such a goddamn spanking.
Sweet relief flooded me. I laughed and sobbed at the same time, tears springing to my eyes. I found a pair of Adidas in the mess of clothes on the floor and tugged them on, not bothering with the laces, then dashed off a note for Grace, and left it on the console. When I got to the lower parking level, Barney leaned out the driver’s window, impatiently waving me over to the Escalade.
I sprinted to it as if I were being chased by a herd of stampeding elephants, jumped in the passenger seat, slammed the door behind me, turned to Barney, and shouted, “What the hell is going on?”
His response was a curt, “Seat belt.”
Without waiting for me to comply, he threw the car into drive. We burned rubber around a corner and leapt up the incline to the first parking level. The force threw me back against my seat. Deciding now would be a good time to follow Barney’s instructions before I cracked my head against the dashboard or the window, I fumbled with the strap of the seat belt as we screamed around another
corner, roared down a straight section, and blasted past the parking attendant hollering at us to slow down.
We flew out into the street. Barney made a hard right, and the Escalade fishtailed for a moment before righting itself. Barney stomped on the gas pedal and the SUV jumped forward with a spine-tingling bellow. An intersection loomed ahead, which, judging by our current speed, we would be barreling through just as the light turned red.
“Christ, Barney, slow down!”
I turned my head to shout at him again, but the words died in my mouth as I looked past him, out the driver’s window.
I just had time to scream before the other car smashed into us, dead-on.
