Or maybe sewin’. Or Cohen. Or Samoan. Can’t really be sure. I’ll just go with Rowan.
My blood is fucking volcanic. My heart thunders. Every cell in my body screams with need. It takes everything in me to start moving away again, but then I hear something strange coming from farther down the wall.
A quiet groan.
I creep toward the source of the sound.
Another groan. A garbled whisper. When I press my ear to the surface, I still catch the faint buzz of Sloane’s toy. But much closer is the distinctive sound of someone wanking off.
I recoil from the wall and note the structure. About two-thirds down, toward where it joins the back of the room, there’s a right angle where the wall comes farther into the living space. So I make my way there, each step careful and silent.
Heel. Toe. Heel. Toe.
I stop at the protrusion of the wall and press my ear next to the brass frame of a portrait painting.
A man’s whisper finds me over the rhythmic sound of a hand pumping an erection. “Yes, baby… just like that…”
Rage floods my veins.
I step back and scan the room for something I can use to destroy the fucking wall before I have to resort to using my bare hands. My gaze lands on the nightstand and sticks there. If inanimate objects had feelings, the brass lamp next to the bed would be shitting itself.
I march over to it and rip it from the plug, gripping its long body like a baseball bat as I turn toward the section of the wall where the pervert is hidden. I’m just about to take my first swing when the eyes of the painting flick open. A real set of human eyes stare back at me and widen with alarm.
“Oh shit,” a man’s voice whispers.
My instant of shock dissolves into fury as the eyes disappear, leaving dark and empty holes behind. “Motherfucker.”
I rush the wall and smash the painting with my weapon, lurching halfway into the tiny, hidden room when the thin canvas gives way with nothing behind it. I don’t even catch sight of the other man—I can only hear him scurry away like the fucking rat he is.
Sloane’s shriek rises above the chaos from the next room over, her string of expletives merging into a cascade of vitriol.
“Rowan Kane you fucking Irish perverted weirdo WHAT THE FUCK are you doing I’m going to FUCK YOU UP—”
“No no no,” I protest, though she doesn’t hear me over the continued string of swears and now crashes of sound. She must be hurtling her belongings at the wall. My imagination instantly takes me right to whatever vibrator she was just using as a heavy thunk slams against the plasterboard. I stumble backward into my room and out to the corridor, the lamp still clutched in my hand as I rush to her room and pound on the door. It swings open before I’ve even finished the third knock.
Sloane is fucking fuming.
“There was a man in the wall,” I blurt out.
“I know,” she snarls as she shoves me with both hands. “His name is Rowan Kane and he has no fucking boundaries because he’s a fucking pervy weirdo—”
“No, I swear—”
“Were you spying on me getting myself off?”
“No,” I protest, but she glares at me as though utterly unconvinced that I’m telling the truth. It doesn’t help my case that she’s wearing a tiny pair of sleep shorts and a spaghetti strap tank top, and she’s probably able to hear the no bra alarm blaring on repeat in my head. “Okay, I heard you but I stepped away from the wall—”
“Rowan—”
“And then I heard something else,” I say, grabbing her wrist with my free hand. I tow her behind me. She squirms and protests, but I refuse to let her go. “You’re right, there was someone watching you in the wall. And he took off before I had a chance to see his face, let alone bludgeon it with a lamp.”
We stop at the gaping hole where the ruined painting hangs askew and I drop Sloane’s wrist so she can peer into the narrow room. She leans in, twisting to assess the exit point to a hidden corridor in the back wall.
“Motherfucker,” she whispers.
“Right? That’s what I said.”
Sloane turns to me, her arms crossed over her chest. I expect to see lingering anger or suspicion, not her eyes dancing in the dim light and the murderous grin that sneaks across her lips. “I fucking knew it.”
A heartbeat later, Sloane is marching past me.
“Wait…what’s going on?” I follow in her wake to stop at her door as she tosses on a plaid shirt, not bothering with the buttons. She slips on her sneakers and whips her sheathed hunting blade from the floor, and then she’s pushing past me again to stalk down the corridor toward the staircase. I toss the lamp into her room with a crash of broken glass and jog after her, catching up as she hurries down the stairs.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m boobing boobily, Rowan. What does it look like?”
“You’re…what?”
“Chasing that motherfucker down, that’s what.”
“Who?”
“Francis,” she says as she storms through the lobby. “Francis Ross.”
All the pieces click into place, the picture coming into view. The car in the river. The plates from New York. When the right victims made the wrong decisions and wound up at the Cunningham Inn, he watched them. And sometimes he killed them.
He watched Sloane. Maybe he would have tried to kill her too.
Rage stains my vision red as we burst out of the lobby and into the night.
The thought that he could have hurt her collides with another realization, stopping me dead in the parking lot as Sloane storms forward on a paved path that winds around the side of the hotel, leading toward the caretaker’s house. “That emo wannabe fuckboy with the pink tie is the killer? And you went on a date with that wanker?”
Sloane snorts a laugh but doesn’t stop. “Gross.”
“Sloane—”
“It’s a competition, Butcher,” she says as she reaches the corner of the hotel. She doesn’t even look over her shoulder as she gives me the finger and leaves me with two parting words: “Get fucked.”
Sloane turns the corner with a devilish cackle, her running footsteps consumed by shadow.
“Like hell,” I hiss.
And then I take off after her into the night.
7
CUBISM ERA
ROWAN
S loane’s figure is little more than a silhouette as she runs up the hill toward an old black house, the steep peaks of the roof jutting toward the moon like javelins. Wedges of yellow light spill from the windows, down the steep garden and the path that cuts through it, giving me just enough illumination to spot my quarry.
My grin is feral as I eat the distance between us.
I run full-force into Sloane and take her out in a rugby tackle. We twist in the air so I suffer the brunt of the hit. Grass and gravel grind into my forearms as I slide to a halt and roll us over to pin her beneath me.
Sloane’s heavy breaths flood my senses with ginger and vanilla. She blows a lock of hair from her eyes and glares at me before she squirms beneath my weight. “Get the fuck off. He’s mine.”
“No can do, Peaches.”