She rocked on the balls of her feet, dizzy, head spinning, tongue huge and bloated in her mouth. The smallest of whimpers dripped from her lips. Hand rising as if it didn’t belong to her, disembodied, floating, her fingers slid beneath the opening at the monster’s neck, the sensation like touching cold inhuman flesh.
She ripped off the mask, tossed it aside, and without knowing quite when she’d closed it, opened her one good eye.
The Greek God stared at her out of soulful brown eyes and, for a moment, she wondered how he’d crept into her dream. Only a dream. Nothing to be afraid of.
“I know about you,” he whispered as he reached for her with suddenly empty hands. The platter with Cameron’s head had disappeared. “I know everything about you.”
His fist closed around her heart, squeezing until the blood pushed up to the whites of her eyes, bathing everything she saw with a tinge of red.
“Take off his mask.” Cameron’s voice again.
This time she jerked the Greek God mask from its wearer.
And stared into Bud Traynor’s black gaze.
She did scream then.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Witt hissed in her ear. “You okay?”
She tasted blood. She’d bitten her tongue.
“Did I scream?”
“No. Dug your nails into my arm.”
She looked down. Her nails were still in his arm. Pulling free, she surveyed the physical damage. Half-moons marred his forearm where he’d shoved back the sleeve of his rugby shirt.
She checked out the boy opposite. Eyes closed, earbuds in, he’d neither seen nor heard a thing. Two flight attendants handed out a final round of drinks a few rows ahead, another buzzed back and forth to the galley. Beside the boy, the businessman buried his nose in ... ohmygod, a romance novel. The woman kitty-corner to Witt shook the pages of a newspaper. No one had noticed a thing.
Even so, why the hell couldn’t she have the really bad dreams in the privacy of her own bed?
“This is fricking embarrassing. What if I’d screamed out loud?” But she hadn’t. Just as she hadn’t cried out when Witt made her orgasm. God, she’d lost all that sweet lassitude he’d given her. She drew in a deep breath, but didn’t close her eyes, afraid she’d see Traynor’s black and evil eyes once more. A dream. A bad dream. Damn Bud Traynor, thoughts of him stripped her of every good feeling she’d managed to find earlier with Witt.
“Tell me about it.” Shades of Cameron, Witt offered a shoulder to cry on, someone to share the fears with.
She almost didn’t tell him.
His fingers slipped beneath her palm, curled around her hand, held it. Ooh, so nice, his concern so comforting.
Take his hand. Tell him. Trust him. She couldn’t tell whether it was Cameron’s voice in her head or her own thoughts.
She gave him the edited version. No graphic details, no death’s head rings, no Mystery Man following her. Witt would be pissed she hadn’t told him earlier. She’d deal with what the guy wanted when they got back. Unless he showed up in Lines. For Witt, she kept to the basics. He’d read the police report about that night, he didn’t need more. “And it sort of had Bud Traynor in it, too.”
Silence, strained, then, “Sorta?”
She sighed. “At the end. He was staring at me. His was the face behind all the masks.”
“Shit.” Witt didn’t usually swear in front of her. Unless he was disturbed. “You have a distinct problem with that man.”
She narrowed her eyes on him. “He’s a murderer. You should have a problem with that, too.”
“We haven’t been able to pin a thing on him to this point.” Knowing Witt’s penchant for truncating sentences, it was a sign of his agitation that he’d added all the requisite nouns and verbs.
Her chin jutted. “You haven’t so far.”
Bud Traynor had murdered his business partner, the man’s wife and daughter, his personal financial advisor, even his hairdresser. There’d been other deaths along the way, too, ones Bud Traynor would have called incidental. And there’d been what he’d done to Angela, hardened yet still I Angela.
But the worst, the crime Max vowed to make him pay for, was the murder of his own daughter. Wendy. He’d molested, abused, and destroyed her, then he’d had her murdered.
“Obsession is a bad thing.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not obsessed.”
“Those murders were solved,” he said. She hated it when he read her mind like that. “It’s written on your face,” he added. Damn, she hated that, too.
“He engineered them all. His weapon was another person. He manipulated people into doing what he wanted.”
“None of the perpetrators implicated him.”