by Nalini Singh
Only after the last echoes had faded from the air did she turn and meet the eyes of the man who had abused her mother until even Haeata’s gentle and warm spirit couldn’t take it. “I want nothing to do with you,” she said calmly in Māori. “I have no forgiveness in my heart for you and I never will. Forget you ever had a daughter.”
He was old now, her father. So many lines on his face, so many cracked veins from his drinking days, his bones pushing up against the sinewy brown of his skin. He’d been bigger before, with a thick neck and thicker arms, a physically strong man who’d yelled for his dinner, yelled for Anahera to shut up, yelled for his wife to bring him a beer or he’d give her a busted lip. Now he was smaller, grayer, more pathetic, but Anahera would never forget what he’d been.
“Your mother wouldn’t have wanted this,” he said.
“No, you don’t get to bring her up. You lost all rights to her the first time you beat her, the first time you kicked her, the first time you made her less than a person.” She saw him flinch at her unvarnished words, but she wasn’t about to hold back.
He’d never held back his fists or his kicks or his words. “You’re the reason she was living alone in this cabin so far from town. Even if you didn’t push her, you’re the reason she lay at the bottom of the ladder for three long days before I found her.”
Anahera had been studying then; she shouldn’t even have been back in Golden Cove that day, but, homesick, she’d decided to surprise her mother. As always when she first stepped through the door, a part of her had been braced to discover that her father had finally beaten her mother to death.
What she’d found had been far worse.
Haeata crumpled at the bottom of a fallen ladder, the glass front of a framed picture of her and Anahera smashed on the ground beside her, and her dried blood a dark stain against the wood.
All those dreams of happiness gone. Just like that.
Later, the authorities had told her that her mother’s heart had given out, but they hadn’t been able to meet her eyes when she asked if it had been before the fall or after. They’d wanted her to believe Haeata had died quickly and without suffering, but it was equally possible that she’d lain there too hurt to summon help but conscious and in pain.
Her mother’s heart hadn’t always been weak. It had been destroyed by stress, by fear, by the constant anguish of living with a man who treated her worse than he would a stray kurī. “I’d like it if you got off my property.” She didn’t take her eyes off him. “And don’t come back or I’ll have you charged with trespassing.”
A twisting flash on her father’s face, his hand fisting by his side.
“Yes,” she said softly in English, “leopards never do change their spots.”
Angry red rising under the darkness of his skin, Jason jumped back behind the wheel of his truck and reversed out of the drive in a grinding screech of rubber against stone.
Only after she was certain he was gone did Anahera turn back to the ruins and allow her tears to fall. Those tears were for her mother, for all the dreams that Haeata hadn’t been able to realize, for all the pain she’d suffered in her forty-one years of life. And for all the dazzling hopes she’d had for her daughter.
“Auē, aroha mai, māmā, aroha mai,” Anahera said, the words of apology a rasp and the smell of burned wood in her throat. “I’m so sorry I came so close to giving up on life. I promise you I won’t do it again. I’ll fly again, get out of this damn town.” Rubbing away her tears, she went to the cliff edge and watched wave after wave crash onto the sand in a natural symphony as haunting as those she’d heard in the great performance chambers of Europe.
At the sound of footsteps on gravel, she turned expecting Will. He might’ve been out cold when she left, but she knew he wasn’t a man who slept much. But it wasn’t Will walking toward her. “Vincent,” she said, trying not to think about those bonfires on the beach and how eagerly he’d crouched by the kindling. “What are you doing here?” At the same time, she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a vehicle.
“Decided to get in a run before a set of virtual meetings.”
His clothes seemed to bear that out: running pants in black that hugged his legs and a fitted long-sleeved dark gray hoodie with black stripes down the sides, his hands gloved against the cold. Mud coated his shoes and splattered his running pants halfway up his calves.
“Took the bush track down from my place,” he said, catching her glance. “I heard about the cabin, wanted to see how bad it was.” He pushed back the hood to reveal the golden strands of his hair, his tawny eyes returning to her after a quick look at the ruins. “I’m sorry. I know how much it meant to you.”
“I’m just glad I wasn’t in it at the time.” Using the excuse of turning to regard the damage, Anahera took several steps away from the edge of the cliff. Paranoia or not, she felt a hell of a lot safer now that she wasn’t anywhere near an edge over which she could be pushed. “Do you remember that summer when my mum and I moved in and we all had a picnic in the yard?”
Vincent angled his head slightly, his breath fogging the air. “I wasn’t here, remember?”
Frowning, Anahera thought back, the past unraveling in a string of faded Polaroids. “No,” she said slowly. “You weren’t. I guess I’m so used to thinking of you as part of my childhood that I put you into memories where you weren’t actually present.” He’d been one of her closest friends for so many years, before life splintered them into shards going in different directions.
Before they all made choices.
Vincent’s smile was that guileless, sweet one that made her heart ache. “It’s funny,” he said. “I do that, too. We had some good times, didn’t we?”
Anahera nodded, far enough away from the edge that she felt comfortable talking with him. “Too bad we couldn’t stay children,” she murmured. “But then, I never much liked being a child.” Playing with her friends had been one thing, but the helplessness of her size had eaten away at her. All she’d wanted was to get bigger so she could physically fight her father when he began to beat on her mother.
“Neither did I.” Vincent’s smile faded. “Always had to listen to my parents telling me who I was supposed to become, the man I was supposed to be.” He flexed and closed his hands by his sides. “Sometimes, I felt like a prize poodle, being trained and given pats on the head when I behaved properly.”
It was odd, Anahera thought, how thoroughly he’d stifled his anger as a child and teenager; they’d felt sorry for Vincent but he’d seemed fine going along with his parents’ demands. “Your parents took tiger parenting to the next level,” she said aloud. “But you’ve found your own way, reached for your own dreams.” That wasn’t quite true, but she wasn’t heartless enough to point out that he was still following the blueprint the senior Bakers had drawn up for his life.
“I loved her, you know.” A soft confession by a handsome golden-haired man gilded in the morning light. “She was the first thing I loved in all my life that was mine. That no one had trained me to love, trained me to like.”
Anahera stilled. “You’re not talking about Jemima, are you?”
“Don’t pretend, Anahera,” he said, dropping his head. “You’re sleeping with that cop. I’m pretty sure he’s told you.”
Anahera didn’t say anything, waiting, watching.
58
“Miriama was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” Vincent murmured, his eyes on the ocean in the distance. “Like a dancer even when she was standing still. I wanted to wrap her up and freeze her in time so that nothing would ever hurt or destroy or taint her. At the same time, I wanted to take her to every glorious corner of the earth and show the world that she was mine.” A rough exhale. “I booked us a surprise trip to Venice. It was to be this month.”
“I think she must’ve loved you, too.” Anahera didn’t have to lie to speak those words. “For
her to break the rules by which she’d been raised. I remember how she and Matilda always went to church on a Sunday, rain or shine.” Matilda in her best matching long skirt and top, Miriama in her white church dress with a ribbon in her hair.
Vincent held her eyes, his own welling with pain. “She resisted at first, but I kept on pursuing her, kept on courting her.” A faint smile. “That’s such an old-fashioned word, isn’t it? But that’s what I did with her. Because she was like that. Had to be treated with care.”
Vincent, Anahera saw, had put Miriama on a pedestal. And she’d walked away from him. Had the rejection pushed him over the edge, caused him to seethe until he lashed out and destroyed the very thing he professed to love? Men did that. Anahera’s knowledge was born of a thousand dark memories of screams, of the sound of a fist hitting flesh, of guttural, drunken swearing that turned a person into a thing.
“Did you hurt her?” she asked because the question was a ticking bomb between them.
Vincent’s smile turned lopsided. “Thank God you asked—it’s so stupid to just ignore it, isn’t it? No, I didn’t hurt my Miriama.” He swallowed, his throat moving. “If I was going to murder anyone, it’d be Jemima.”
The flatness of his tone had Anahera very grateful she’d put distance between them. “You don’t mean that,” she said, thinking of Jemima’s recent joy and the Vincent the other woman must’ve seen in comparison to the one standing here now. “She’s deeply in love with you.”
“I didn’t say I would.” Another smile, as if they were talking about the weather or old memories. “I’m just saying it would make more sense. Jemima’s the trap, while Miriama was my freedom. With her, I could be the man I would’ve been if my parents hadn’t decided to mold me into their image of a perfect son. If only Miriama had been patient a little longer, I would’ve made it happen.”
With every breath she took, she inhaled the memory of fire until it seemed to be in her hair, her skin, her mouth. And she remembered another fire. The one that had ended with two dead people and Vincent finally free of his parents. “Were you thinking of divorcing Jemima and marrying Miriama?” she asked, playing along with his delusion that he’d been willing to walk away from his perfect life for a girl with the wrong pedigree to fit that illusion.
“I already bought the ring,” he said in a voice so soft it was nearly snatched away by the quiet wind. “I just wanted her to wait until my kids were a little more grown, but she couldn’t. And now she’s dead.”
Anahera’s heart began to thump, her skin burning from the inside out. Maybe it was grief causing the flat patches in Vincent’s delivery—or maybe it was a cold kind of calculation. All the smiles, all the sadness, what was real and what wasn’t? What kind of a man could talk so unemotionally about murdering his own wife?
“Jemima told me you came to see her,” he said without warning. “She’s very happy to have made a friend in town.”
Oh, Jemima. Controlling men like Vincent didn’t like for their wives to have friends. “I understand what it feels like coming into a tight-knit community,” she said, trying to make light of the situation. “It was the same for me when I moved to London. All the people I met were friends with Edward. It was hard to make friendships of my own.”
Vincent’s intense expression gentled. “You two don’t actually have that much in common.”
“I know.” She said what he wanted her to say, what he needed her to say—alone on a windswept cliff was not the time to antagonize a man who spoke with easy casualness about ending his wife’s life. “I don’t expect us to become best friends. But I’m still enough of the Golden Cove girl to not want a visitor to feel unwelcome.”
He chuckled. “Jemima would’ve had an easier time of it in South Africa, but she didn’t have the head to go into the family business. Being my wife, looking after my children with the nanny’s help, looking good for photos, that’s more her strength. She’d last about two minutes in the real world.”
Anahera stared at his profile as he turned to look at the ocean; he wasn’t even attempting to be subtle. Or was he so used to putting Jemima down that this was his normal, and Anahera had just never spoken to him long enough on this subject to see it?
There was another, more dangerous option: Vincent didn’t care about showing her his true face because he didn’t expect her to have a chance to tell anyone about it.
“Will you be happy together now, do you think?” She kept her tone friendly with furious effort of will. “Can you get past your feelings for Miriama?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Vincent’s tone changed, became almost confessional. “Miriama made me happy inside from the instant I saw her as a woman, but I’ve always had something else that never fails to give me joy. I’ve decided to go back to that old hobby.”
Anahera took a step backward, her body poised to run . . . But she was too late. The Taser was in Vincent’s hand well before she was out of range. “It’s so hard to get an unregistered gun in this country,” he said. “Especially when you have a profile and people want to hold things over you. Even getting this was a bit of a mission—but it’s worked out the better choice for my needs.”
Anahera held up her hands. “What are you doing?” She thought of the phone she had tucked in her back pocket, knew there was no way she could make the call before being hit and disabled.
“Haven’t you figured it out, sweet little Ana?” The same angelic smile he’d given her so many times across the years. “Slim, dark haired, dark eyed, vibrant with life—my father kept her in Auckland, introduced me to her on my thirteenth birthday, when it was time for me to become a man.”
His face twisted. “Be a man, Vincent! Fuck her like you mean it! Slap and choke the bitch until she does what you want! Baker men aren’t pussies!” The ugliness faded, the angelic smile back in place. “I got a taste for a certain kind of woman.”
Anahera’s gorge rose. “That’s unforgivable. You were a child.”
“You’re a good person, Ana.” The hand holding the weapon never wavered. “It is a little sad to be so predictable in my tastes, but oh well, it makes me happy.” He chuckled, as if he’d made a joke. “And the bastard’s bones are worm food, so it’s not like he can crow over it.”
Anahera’s breath came in shallow pants. “The murders,” she said. “The hikers.”
“Clap, clap.” His voice was smooth, warm. “I didn’t feel the urge to indulge while I was with my Miriama. But with her gone, I need to find happiness in life again.”
“What about all those years after the three hikers?” Anahera scrambled to keep him talking. “You and Miriama only got together after she turned eighteen.”
“Yes, I differ from my father there—I don’t like children.” A shrug. “I travel a lot. New Zealand is an inconveniently small country for a man with my needs.” He sighed. “People here miss women.”
A knot formed in the pit of Anahera’s stomach. If he was openly telling her of his murderous history, there was no way she’d be able to talk her way out of this. But the longer she kept him talking, the longer she gave herself to think.
Her one advantage was that he seemed to want to talk, want to boast about his exploits. “You killed Miriama because she walked away from you?”
Patches of red on his face, his eyes blazing. “I would’ve won her back! That pissant doctor has nothing on what I could’ve given her.” Cold words that trembled. “I didn’t put a finger on my Miriama. All I did was love her.”
Anahera ran rapidly through her options. She could go right, toward the bush, or she could go left, toward the cliffs. She had no idea of a Taser’s range, but she knew Vincent was a fast runner. He’d been a sprinter in high school. He was also dressed in running shoes while she wore her normal everyday boots.
Out in the open, he’d catch her in a heartbeat. Her only chance was to go into the bush and lose herself amid the dense dark
green.
Sweat trickled down her back. “Since it’s just the two of us,” she said, slowly putting down her hands while making sure to keep them in open view, “can I ask you some questions before you kill me?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you hoping your washed-up cop will come rescue you?”
“I don’t expect any man to rescue me.”
Expression nearly tender, Vincent said, “Your father’s a cowardly shit. If you want me to get rid of him, I’ll do it as a special favor.”
“No, I want him to stew in regret.” She flexed her muscles as much as she could to prepare for her break toward the trees. “As for the questions, call it curiosity. It’s not every day I find out my friend is a serial killer.”
His laugh was golden sunshine. “I always loved the smart-aleck things you’d say.” Such affection in his voice and yet he planned to brutalize then murder her. “It’s all for the greater good, Ana. You should be proud to be one of my women.”
“Strange, but pride’s not my topmost emotion right now.”
More laughter, utter delight in every inch of him. “All right, ask your questions,” he said after wiping the tears from his eyes. “We’ve got plenty of time and I’ll hear anyone coming down the drive. If the cop does get suspicious, the pathetic creature I married will say exactly what I tell her to say.”
Anahera knew Vincent was feeding off her fear, but she couldn’t stop her heart from beating faster, her blood from pumping harder and harder. “When did you find out you liked murder?”
“It was by accident,” he said in a conversational tone. “I was walking in the bush one day, pissed off at my spineless excuse for a mother, when I ran into a dark-eyed Italian hiker who reminded me of my father’s whore and how much fun I’d had slapping her around.”
