Barrett Carlisle will never be able to escape this moment: a moment he goes to extraordinary lengths to recapture, to recreate, time and time again. He’s only really alive in this moment, I think. For all his talk of helping victims find justice, it’s clear to me now: he lives to get even.
If I can, and if he’ll let me, I’m going to help him find the peace he sought for me. But first things first...
“Who else knows about us?” Carlisle presses his gun to the man’s glistening forehead. “Who did you tell?”
He mumbles something I can’t decipher, and then hacks up a grave, chesty cough. It seems to excite a rumbling chuckle deep in the sick-pit of his stomach. He assaults us with a toothless, blood-stained grin.
Carlisle leans closer. “Say that name again!”
More coughs, deathly wheezes. Again the mumbled word I can’t make out. But Carlisle seems to. He sits up, looking out to sea, his mouth pursed to a thin white line.
“What did he say?” I ask.
He holds a finger up to me, as if to say, give me a minute, Athena. I need this minute.
It reminds me of...my own finger. The ring... The needle... I lost it during my struggle with this man on the balcony. What if I...pricked him before it came off? Not Valdez, him. Is that why he’s so feverish? The poison was supposed to take twelve hours to kill. It has to be about that long since the balcony fight.
“Barrett, it’s my poison. That’s why he’s sick. He’s dying because of—” Carlisle pulls the trigger before I can finish, tosses the man overboard, and restarts the engine before I can tell him what I’ve done. Perhaps he already knows, and he killed the man quickly because he doesn’t want me having murder on my conscience. But it’s too late. I’m the same as him now, a child of the shadows. Wherever we go from here, whatever happens, I’m on the same dark trajectory as him.
And we have a rendezvous to keep.
*****
BWWM: SECRET (A Billionaire African American Romance) (BWWM Interracial Romance Book 1) Page 7
