Page 6 of Silent Vendetta (Vendetta Duet)

“I love you, Hunter. Please. Just let me go.”

He hesitated for a moment that stretched on endlessly.

“You can trust me,” I added.

For a brief moment, hope surged within me as our eyes locked. There was a flicker of something—doubt, regret, affection? It felt like I might’ve gotten through to him.

But then the shrill ring of my cell phone shattered the fragile truce. Panic surged as I realized it was in my back pocket.

Hunter lunged for it. I twisted away, trying to protect my only link to the outside, but he was stronger, easily overpowering me and snatching the device.

A voice mail notification beeped, cutting through the tense silence. Hunter scrubbed his jaw, looking at the phone before holding its screen up to my face to unlock it.

And then, he put it on speaker and pushed play.

“Luna!” Detective Rinaldi’s voice had lost the calmness she’d learned in police training. “What the hell is going on? I have units on the way to the Lockwood estate, but they’re seven minutes out.”

My stomach dropped. Emergency response times in Chicago were an ongoing issue—I recalled the mayor even mentioning it at the gala that night. But seven minutes with a serial killer might as well be seven years.

Especially one who looked mad as hell.

“You called the cops,” Hunter accused as he glared at me.

CHAPTER6

Luna

“Why the hell did you come home?” Hunter shouted. My heartbeat skyrocketed in my chest as he pointed the knife in my direction. “You were supposed to be at the hospital.”

“You brought Franco to your home. Did you not think that was risky?”

Okay, why the hell did I just say that?

I tried to hide the trembles in my hands.

“How did you find the hidden passage down here?” Hunter demanded.

“I heard screaming.” My heart tried to crawl out of my throat as if it could escape without me. “That drew me to your closet, and I found the door to the stairwell.”

I hated how cold it was down here—it was hard to hide my shaking, and I was trying to look strong. And I hated how our every word echoed off the stone, because it made the entire situation all the more menacing. But the thing I hated the most was the sound of blood drops splatting to the ground from Franco’s head wounds, creating a mosaic of tiny expanding ripples in the puddles of crimson.

Splat.

Splat.

Splat.

His shoulders were still rising and falling, still breathing in his unconscious state, but it didn’t make the horror much better.

“And you came down it,” he snapped.

“I thought you were getting tortured.”

Hunter rubbed his forehead. “And you still walked toward the sound.”

His lips twitched upward for a moment before they tightened, his face reddening, veins bulging on his forehead.

“You’d already called the police.”

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