A loud oomph leaves his lips as I kneel beside him.
“What the hell?” he snaps, rubbing his side as he glares at me.
“When did Olivia call? And don’t tell me she hasn’t.”
He looks genuinely confused.
“I haven’t felt it safe enough to contact her with a new number yet, considering there was some federal activity on her name. I set her phone up for alerts to notify her if anyone got wind of her trail, and had her a new identity ready and waiting. If she has to leave, she’ll go to the safe house, and I’ll get an alert when she does.”
He holds up his phone and I sink to the sand a little more as I hand him my phone to read.
He skims the article at first, then bolts upright to a seated position.
“Olivia wouldn’t have shot him,” he says, shaking his head. “She was content with drawing it out as long as possible once his organs started failing.”
“Apparently something happened. I never pictured her as a crotch shooter, but that’s where he bled out from.”
“Maybe she spent too much time with you,” he quips, still reading it.
I remember the day Jake figured it out. I’d already been suspicious, but couldn’t bring myself to fully believe it. Not until Jake walked in and we both confirmed the worst case scenario together.
He had all the copies of his father’s DVDs in his hands, and tears were in his eyes. We watched the trial again together, saw the occasional slip up when Christopher would smirk as my father sobbed.
It became overtly obvious during one home video when his father couldn’t look away from my mother at a birthday party. And his jaw was grinding when my father came up and kissed her, causing her to giggle in his arms.
It was the most painful realization.
My father’s best friend.
My best friend’s father.
The same man who had sat at our table for holidays when we were growing up, was the same man who’d sentenced my father to the worst death imaginable.
That’s when we called Olivia.
Jake didn’t even hesitate. He hated him already, but he said his father was dead to him after that.
He started the regimen Olivia concocted—a new synthetic parasite she’d been working on in her lab—and so it began. The first thing to leave him was his sex drive. Not even a little blue pill could fix that.
The second thing to go was his energy.
From there, things just slowly, agonizingly, started getting worse and worse. She assured us the pain would grow to be unbearable, and she was all too happy to make it happen.
Jake helped her get the synthetic parasite off the lab property and even hacked the files that held the information about it. She also took a few extras for later on—the endgame.
My part was miniscule. All I had to do was be the lookout during the planning of this.
This wasn’t just my revenge. It was theirs more so than mine.
Christopher Denver wronged my father in more ways than I can even fathom, even played his best friend and lawyer, but at the end of the day, Jake was his own son. He was wronged the most.
Because of his father, Jake lost the love of his life back then.
Because of his father, Olivia’s sister was raped and murdered.
My misery was placed on the backburner. I had enough people to kill.
“This is crazy. Olivia should be on the run if they suspect her,” Jake says thoughtfully, drawing me out of my own reverie.
“It says they have a male suspect they’re looking into,” I say, confused. “They don’t suspect her.”
“Can you find more on it?” he asks as I try scaling down.
“No. It’s just a small article that barely even cares to mention this at all. I’ll see what I can find, but I know someone far better at all this computer stuff than me.”
I shove at his chest, and he grunts while rubbing the spot like I hurt him as he winks at me.
“Not right now. I was in the middle of dreaming up a good threesome. I’d like to return to that dream.”
I narrow my eyes at him, and he groans while lying back down.
“I’ll look into it later, Lana. I genuinely don’t give a shit who killed him. I’m just glad the fucker is finally dead.”
He covers his face, his breathing already steadying as he starts drifting back off to sleep. Rolling my eyes, I push back up to my feet and walk back to the house.
For once, Bennett doesn’t attack my feet the second I walk in, and I kick off my shoes while looking around and making kissing noises. “Bennett! Come on, Kitty. I need to give you a bath.”
He doesn’t come, and I frown. Usually he’s all over us after we’ve been gone for a minute.
Deciding to chase him down later, I go to the fridge and grab a bottle of water, but my hand hovers over a bottle as I stare and tilt my head.
It’s a habit to count things and take in my surroundings, always aware of any change. And I’m positive there were three beers beside my water this morning. Now there’s only one beer.
Slowly, I grab my water as a chill slides down my spine. It’s possible Jake has already started drinking, but doubtful, considering there were no beer cans near him.
It feels like someone else is here, but I don’t make it obvious by looking around. The living room is just beyond me, and I grab a knife and an apple, acting as though I’m about to peel it.
Abandoning the water bottle, I stab a new nail into my wax apple to represent the man I wanted dead the second most, but I pause, noticing it’s been turned. I look at this apple every single day. I know it’s not facing the right angle.
I move through the house, seeing nothing obviously out of place, but there is more sand in the dining room than normal. Bennett should be all over my feet right now, but he’s not.
Slowly, I start peeling the apple as I move into the living room, and the chill in my spine has it stiffening. There’s no doubt that I feel eyes on me right now.
“If you’ve hurt my cat, you have no idea what that will cost you.”
I spin around, the knife in hand as I drop the apple, but my entire body turns to stone when I see someone smirking at me from the corner.
Logan pushes off from the wall, and I’m tempted to pinch myself just to be sure I’m not hallucinating or dreaming.
“Your cat’s name is Bennett?” he asks, his lips twitching as the knife tumbles from my hand. “I’m not sure how I feel about that,” he goes on, stalking closer.
My bad leg tries to give out, and I stumble, but Logan’s arms are immediately around me, his scent engulfing me as those hands grip my waist.
I tilt my head back as unshed tears start clouding my eyes, and he stares expectantly.
“You’re here,” I rasp, which is a ridiculous thing to say after three months.
“You let me think you were dead,” he says, his voice strained.
“I didn’t want to risk contacting you and getting you in trouble,” I quickly explain. “They were monitoring your calls because you were stirring up trouble even on leave and—”
He puts a finger over my mouth, silencing my babble.
“They still don’t know it was you. Did you kill Jason as a sign to me that you’re still alive, or was he just unfinished business? The torture was mild in comparison to the others, almost as though you were in a hurry.”