He lowered his chin at me, and I nodded once.
“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing me to walk into the living room.
I stepped into the room, the wall briefly hiding me from the judge’s view. Praying I hadn’t misread the signal, I grabbed the end of the cart and shoved it with all my might just as Atkins rounded the corner.
There was a crunch, a groan, and a muffled shot followed by three louder, rapid shots.
I patted down my torso and was exceptionally relieved to find no holes in me or my dress.
“Son of a bitch,” Atkins gurgled as he lost copious amounts of blood on my hardwood floor from wounds in his neck, chest, and torso.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” I chanted as Wylie picked up Atkins’s gun. “What do we do now?”
“I really hate to do this to you, Sloane, but you gotta understand,” Wylie said, pointing both weapons at me.
“Seriously, Wylie? Why the fuck do you still want to shoot me?” I screeched.
“Tying up loose ends. With you and the judge gone, there’s no one left to point a finger at me. The money I got from Hugo was nothing compared to what Atkins got. A few thousand here and there. I never even cared about it. I only cared about the job.”
The job he’d abused. The job Nash had taken from him.
“So what if I made a little money on the side? A police chief’s salary ain’t nothin’ to write home about. I was proud of my work. And Nash Morgan took that away from me. I’m sure as hell not gonna let his little friend take my reputation too.”
I closed my eyes for a second as the realization sunk in. “You put Nash’s name on that list, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity. Metzer was makin’ a list. I helped him out. My fee was adding one more name.”
I shook my head. “So you set it all in motion.”
He shrugged. “I have a legacy to protect. It’s all I have left.”
“That’s not a legacy. That’s a pattern of bad behavior.”
“You don’t know what it takes to protect an entire town.”
“Yeah? Well, obviously neither do you. You put a seventeen-year-old boy in jail and let his abusive father nearly kill his mother because you were fishing buddies.”
“Say what you want because it don’t matter. Only one of us is walking out of here tonight, and it ain’t gonna be you.”
“What are you going to do? Shoot me with the judge’s gun?”
“Seems like a good plan to me.”
I heard a squeal of tires on the road out front and prayed that help was on the way.
“No one is going to believe that you just happened to come upon a district judge threatening me and shot him,” I told him.
He shot me a crooked grin. “They believed it once already.”
His words sank in slowly. “Jesus! You didn’t kill Tate because you were protecting Nash. You killed him because you were protecting yourself.”
“I waited till he pulled the trigger, thinking either he would take care of Nash for me or he was out of bullets. Son of a bitch never did learn to count his rounds. I hated to do it. He was my friend, but Tate was a loose fucking cannon. He would have run his mouth to the wrong guy eventually.”
“So you killed your own friend.”
“According to the official report, I shot a man defending an officer of the law,” he corrected.
“And what’s the official report going to say this time?”
He shrugged. “I was just returning my library books.”
He was going to do it. He was going to shoot me and ruin Nash and Lina’s rehearsal night. I grabbed a hefty hardback off the side table and hurled it at Wylie’s head. Both guns went off as I launched myself over the couch.
I landed hard, catching my jaw on the sharp edge of the console table leg. More bullets flew, this time through my couch. I rolled, gained my feet, and sprinted low through the dining room, pulling chairs down after me.
He was close, but I knew every inch of this house. I darted through the kitchen and backtracked into the hallway where I took the stairs two at a time.
The sirens were getting louder now.
“You can’t run from me,” Wylie shouted from the foot of the stairs.
“And you can’t expect me to stand still so you can shoot me!”
His boots hit the stairs.
A streak of fur passed me on the landing as I hustled for the second floor, I heard a thump and muffled swearing.
Thank God for asshole cats. Meow Meow had just bought me precious seconds.
I heaved myself up the last steps and ran face-first into a hard, male body. I was just getting ready to kick the shit out of him when a hand clamped over my mouth and I was lifted off the floor.
47
Wrongs Righted
Lucian
Stop kicking, Pix,” I hissed as I shut and locked her bedroom door behind us.
I released my flailing fiancée, and she spun around to face me. She was wearing the pink cocktail dress that I’d personally picked out because it clung to her curves in all the right places. Her hair was secured in a high, platinum ponytail with strands escaping everywhere. Her glasses were a spring green that only served to make her eyes look brighter. There was a bloody gash on her jawline.
“I’m going to fucking kill him,” I announced. Rage bloomed inside me like a deadly flower.
Sloane lunged for me and held on tight. “You can’t. It’s Wylie.”
“I know. I saw the security footage just before it cut off.”
“He made me think he was going to help me. Then he shot the judge. Oh yeah. The judge was here too, but I think he’s dead in the foyer. And then he tried to shoot me. Wylie, not the dead judge. And he’s the one who put Nash’s name on the list, not Dilton. Oh my God, and he murdered Dilton to keep him quiet, not to save Nash. I am so pissed! Do you know how long it’s going to take to get bloodstains out of hardwood? And they burned my library!”
The words came out in a deluge of indignation, but her explanation only served to light a match inside me.
“You can’t hide from me long enough to stay alive, Sloane. I’ll drop you where I find you before the cops get here,” Wylie announced from the hallway. We heard the clomp of his boots and the creak of doors as he started checking rooms.
In the distance, I heard sirens. I’d just pulled into the driveway when I heard the gunshots. It had taken years off my life.
I grabbed a clean handkerchief from the dresser and pressed it to Sloane’s face.
“Ow!”
“Come on, baby.” I half dragged, half carried her to the window seat.
She eagerly climbed onto the cushion and swung a leg over the sill of the window I’d left open. “Let’s go,” she said.
I shook my head. “You go first. I’ll make sure he doesn’t see you on the roof.”
She flinched. “Lucian.”
“Sloane. Go!”
The footsteps were getting closer, and that lock on the door wouldn’t hold back an overly excited golden retriever.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said stubbornly.
I cupped her face in my hands. “Pixie, I need you to trust me this time. Trust me to handle this. I’m asking you, but in a second, I’m going to be telling you. I need to deal with this, and I can’t do it if I’m worried that he has a clear shot at you. Trust me to do this.”
The doorknob rattled, followed by Wylie’s raspy cackle. “I know you’re in there, girl.”
“Ugh. Fine. But I’m also trusting you not to murder him,” Sloane said.
“I’m not promising that.”
She swung her leg over the windowsill. “Don’t let me down.”
Women.
“Oh, also, he has two guns. His and the judge’s. He was going to make it look like he caught the judge murdering me.”
The sirens were screaming down the street now, and an anger unlike any other I’d ever known tinged everything a bloody-murder red.
I shoved her out the window onto the roof. “I love you. Now get the fuck out.”
“I love you too. Don’t end up in jail,” she whispered.
I shut the curtains on her just as a boot landed a hard kick to the door. It flew open on the second kick, rebounding off the wall as I hurried across the room and flattened myself against the wall.