by Vivi Andrews
And he needed her statement anyway—though technically he should let an officer who wasn’t also the only other witness collect it.
The gauzy curtain was mostly drawn on Madame Ramona’s Palm Readings. Through it Matt could see the outline of a figure inside the booth. A figure far too large to be Ronna.
His hand went instinctively to his sidearm before doubt flashed across his mind, reminding him that the thug and the palm reader might be in this together. He hesitated, inching closer and straining to hear what was being said inside the small booth. Cutter’s voice was low, and Matt could only hear one word in ten.
“Mr. Coretti appreciates your cooperation…important agreement…hate to disappoint Mr. Coretti…alert the police…”
She’s working with him. What other explanation was there for Coretti to be appreciating her cooperation?
Matt’s disappointment stabbed him in the stomach.
There was no reason he should care so much about a girl he’d just met. She’d probably been working with Coretti for months, planning the entire ruse, but Matt still felt a piercing sense of betrayal.
He hadn’t wanted her to be on the shady side of the law. Sure, it was naïve, but he’d wanted that kiss to be real. To mean something.
Matt slid his weapon from his holster, running through possible strategies now that he had two targets rather than just one. He hadn’t heard Ronna’s voice yet, but she had to be in there, hidden by the hit man’s bulk.
If he was even a hit man.
What if the entire hit had been a ruse designed to draw out the task force?
Had his bosses known this wasn’t a straightforward assignment? Was that why the usual guys were out of sight and they were using him instead? New blood on the front lines so he would be the one to take the fall? So they wouldn’t burn any of their usual personnel by having them IDed by Cutter?
The entire operation seemed much more ominous than a simple test.
Matt’s jaw locked as betrayal battered him from all sides. Even his own people were probably using and manipulating him. The feeling made his stomach roil. And this was what he had to look forward to if he got the job. A lifetime of this bilious twisting in his gut. Paranoia. Second-guessing. Deception.
A nightmare.
Matt flexed his hands around the grip of his gun.
He’d done the job. He’d made a damn target of himself like they wanted. Now he’d see it through. He would arrest Cutter and his little accomplice just as soon as he was sure she was the consultant the hit man had been sent to make contact with.
Matt leaned against the side of her booth, concealed from the hit man’s view, and waited for his moment.
“I don’t understand,” Ronna protested, though she understood perfectly. She needed to buy some time for the cavalry she prayed was on its way. Please, Matt, get here soon. “What does Mr. Coretti have to do with the carnival?”
Beneath the concealing volume of her layered skirts, Ronna drew her legs up, readying to spring toward safety the moment the opportunity presented itself. Provided she’d be able to spring. She was shaking like shutters in a hurricane from the force of the adrenaline surging through her veins, and she wasn’t entirely sure her body would obey her mind when fight came to flight.
“Nothing to do with the carnival,” Cutter growled, weaving the blade back and forth to catch the low light from the lamp in hypnotic flashes. “All you need to remember is that Mr. Coretti is a fine, upstanding businessman. That’s what you’re going to say tomorrow when that fuck-wit Brenden Henderson asks you to read him, isn’t it? A fine, upstanding citizen. Get it? No matter what you feel or see or whatever the fuck happens when you do your hocus-pocus bullshit, you say ‘Vito Coretti is a fine, upstanding businessman.’”
Ronna could spot a nonbeliever a mile off. “You don’t believe I can really read him. Why does it matter what I say?”
“Because Henderson believes in your bullshit and Henderson needs to believe in Mr. Coretti. Get it? So you’re going to cooperate and be a good girl and no one is going to get hurt. Isn’t that right, missy?”
“I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Especially not her. Or Matt. Cutter getting hurt would be okay.
“Neither do I,” Cutter purred, though his smile made the words a lie, sending icy chills down her spine. “And I’d sure hate to have to pay you another visit if I heard you’d shot off your mouth about our little agreement.”
“Yeah, I’d hate that too.”
“You sure would.” His slow, toothy smile added an edge to the threat. The man made alligators look cuddly.
“So we have an agreement. You go on like nothing has happened—no alerting the police, missy—and tell the world how honorable Mr. Coretti is, and I won’t have to slice open that pretty little face of yours.”
It wasn’t a question, but Ronna nodded readily. Anything to get him to leave. He must have sensed her insincerity, because he came around the fabric-draped table. Ronna shrank back. Where was a trap door when you needed one? He loomed above her, so close he was stepping on the edge of her skirt.
He wouldn’t hurt her tonight—if she was beat up it would look bad at the reading, wouldn’t it? But even knowing she was as safe as a person could be while sitting in a room with Cutter, she couldn’t stop remembering the sickening kaleidoscope of his thoughts.
He bent toward her, extending the blade like another man might offer his hand to a timid dog to sniff. Ronna cringed, folding herself away from him as far as possible, but he kept coming until the blade slipped under her chin, tipping it up with gentle taps like a lover raising her face for a kiss. She held perfectly still, the blade cold against the soft skin on the underside of her chin, too frightened to tremble.
“I think I need you to promise you aren’t going to double-cross my good friend Mr. Coretti,” he whispered. “I think I need you to swear on the neck of that pretty-boy cop boyfriend of yours who’s been following me around all night.”
Boyfriend. Had he seen their kiss? The thought was a violation in itself.
Please, Matt, get here soon. “I promise,” she mumbled, moving her jaw as little as possible to avoid cutting herself on the knife that held her face up to him. “I swear it.”
“Good girl.”
He held her there, suspended on the edge of his knife, drinking in her fear for several long, excruciating seconds. Then, with a reluctant sigh as if he were being denied a treat, he deftly flipped the switchblade closed and tucked it out of sight.
Ronna wasn’t fool enough to let herself breathe easy. He’d put it away in a heartbeat. He could have it out again just as quickly.
Cutter smiled his cold alligator smile and straightened, lumbering back a few steps until he leaned against the tiny table.
Leave, leave, please God, just leave. She tried to will him gone. He had what he had come for. She had agreed. But still he didn’t move, lapping up her fear.
“You’re a pretty little thing, aren’t you?”
Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Ronna’s mind blanked except for the jabbering of her fear. The last thing she needed was this monster thinking she was a shiny new toy.
Matt, where are you?
She could scream. The booths weren’t anything near soundproofed. The vendors nearby would hear her even if the customers had cleared out.
If there was anyone in the booths around her. She’d completely lost her ability to gauge time. How long had he been in here with her? It felt like hours even though she knew it couldn’t be.
No. If she screamed, help would come.
But it would be too late. He was close and strong and armed. She’d be bleeding to death, her throat split open, her assailant running out into the night.
She couldn’t call for help. She couldn’t get away. She couldn’t do anything.
And Cutter knew it. He wallowed in it.
“What did you see when you read me, pretty girl? Did you like touching me?”
He like
d to hurt. He liked the control of inflicting pain and fear, but he was frightened too. Frightened of Vito Coretti, of being replaced by a younger, crazier model, of falling out of favor, losing the trust of suspicious men and having his own work done to him one night. His mind was a zoo of insecurities, but when he was the cutter, he was in control.
She couldn’t tell him she had hated touching him. That it had made her feel sick. He would only make her do it again. She couldn’t tell him that she hadn’t. She wasn’t that good a liar. So she said nothing. And he smiled. The teeth were straight, the lips full, the curve pleasant, but to Ronna it was a nightmare vision. Freddy Krueger, eat your heart out.
Leave, she urged silently. Leave me alone.
Still he stood there. Still he smiled.
Chapter Six—Carnie Deathmatch
It had gone quiet inside the booth.
Cutter moved out of Matt’s line of sight, crouching down in front of the table. Matt couldn’t see him without standing directly in front of the opening in the curtain and being seen himself. Ronna had to be on the floor in front of Cutter, which didn’t make sense if they were in collusion together, but he couldn’t escape the evidence in the words. Agreement. Cooperation.
Still, his instincts pushed back against the words, the secretive sweetness of her smile casting his assumptions in shades of doubt. What if she was in trouble?
He should wait. He knew he should wait. If Ronna wasn’t the consultant, Cutter would come out of Ronna’s booth and lead him to the real target. If he stormed inside, all hope of identifying the mysterious consultant would be gone and with it any chance of securing a permanent position with a team he was no longer sure he trusted.
Matt waited for some sign, some indication that he was doing the right thing, but as the seconds ticked past, the feeling that Ronna was in danger, that he needed to get inside that booth and save her, rose in him.
Shit. His white-knight act was rusty as all hell.
The bells on the curtain jangled madly, announcing his presence with a tinkling riot. “Police! Hands in the air!”
Cutter wasn’t into following directions. He whirled, throwing the table at Matt. The pedestal caught him across the legs and he went down, buried under the wood and a mountain of fabric.
Matt kept his grip on the gun but couldn’t risk a shot in such close quarters with Ronna possibly in the line of fire. He kicked the table off his legs and rolled to reacquire his target, still tangled in the swath of colorful fabric that had draped it. Cutter was on him before he could raise the gun, an open blade flashing in his hand. The knife slashed down toward his throat.
Matt twisted and raised his arms in instinctive defense, the blade slicing into the flesh of his forearm. The wound surprised him more than it hurt, but he had no time to register the shock. Cutter’s blade was swinging toward him again, a swift, deadly arc.
“Matt! No!”
A compact figure covered in more fabric than sense slammed into the pair of them.
The force of Ronna’s intervention knocked both the knife and the gun loose, and they skittered across the dirty floor to the far edges of the booth. Cutter swung to grab her, but she wriggled out of his grasp, a frenzy of motion, twisting, kicking, biting, hitting and scratching every inch of him she could reach. Matt’s arms were pinned by the struggling pair. Her knee drove into his ribs, but most of her haphazard blows landed on Cutter.
Still, her frantic flailing wasn’t having the desired effect. The hit man wasn’t even fazed.
Then her nails raked down Cutter’s cheek and he snarled. He dove at the rainbow-hued nuisance, his fist swinging toward the delicate bones of her face. Matt, his arms freed by the sudden movement, lurched up and caught Cutter’s arm in a hammerlock before his fist could land.
Ronna rolled away, scrambling out of reach. She froze in a crouch at the door, wide-eyed and breathing fast.
“Run, dammit!” Matt shouted, just as Cutter’s elbow rammed back toward his face.
The bells at her doorway chimed as Cutter and Matt slammed to the ground again.
Ronna had taken a dozen running steps away from the booth before she realized she’d left Matt alone with a professional killer.
“Help!” She spun on her heel and stumbled back toward the booth where the man of her dreams—or at least her visions—was fighting for his life. Ronna sucked in the deepest breath her panic would allow and let loose her best horror-starlet scream.
The sound was sucked up into the night. Her only reply was the distant thrum of the bass vibrating through the air from the concert pavilion. No curious heads popped out of booths. No passersby ran to her aid. She couldn’t even call nine-one-one because her cell phone was still in her bag underneath her table—or wherever it had been thrown in the struggle.
She could go for help, but Matt. He didn’t have time to wait for reinforcements.
“Help!” she screamed until her throat was raw. Wasn’t there security around here?
The booths around her were dark and locked up for the night. Dammit, when had it gotten so late? The carnival was a graveyard.
No. Not a graveyard. No one is going to die. Matt isn’t going to die.
Ronna fisted her hands in her hair, willing her brain to stop spinning and work. What should she do? Matt had said to run. She had run. She could run for help, but it would take so long for that help to come and Matt needed help now. She couldn’t just leave him there. She had to go back. Even if he was angry with her for returning. He could be as angry as he wanted as long as he was alive.
A weapon. She needed a weapon.
Ronna spun in a circle, scanning the area around her, the tightly locked booths, the bare packed-dirt aisle. “A knife, a gun, a club, something,” she muttered aloud as she searched, each passing second sending stabs of desperation into her lungs, filling each new breath with sharp little needles.
A gunshot exploded inside Ronna’s booth. An involuntary scream flew out of her mouth as she fell back two steps. The blood. Not Matt, it can’t be Matt, please not Matt…
No longer caring that she didn’t have a weapon, Ronna ran toward the sound of the shot. “Please.” The word ripped raw from her throat, a stranger’s plea. “Be okay, be okay, please, Matt, please.”
The bells attached to her curtains jangled, the noise harsh against her ringing ears. A hand pushed aside the fabric barrier. A large, blunt hand. Ronna saw that hand and knew, but her mind fought the knowledge even as anguish slammed into her stomach like a mace.
Cutter stepped out of the booth.
“No.”
She was made of denial. Only that word, no, was real.
Ronna staggered backwards but couldn’t run. The threat of the large bloody man in front of her couldn’t touch her through the suffocating weight of her grief. The sickly sweet carnival smell pressed cloyingly against her. The harsh fluorescent lights that shone down on the darkened carnival burned her eyes. The distant sounds of the late-night rides, the late-night revelers, were hollow echoes, fading into the distance, swallowed by the dull ringing in her ears. She felt everything and nothing, paralyzed and as if each molecule of her body were screaming for motion. Or just screaming. A silent, cellular hysteria.
Cutter reached for her. It didn’t even occur to Ronna to run until his hand closed on her arm. He yanked her back toward the booth, and through her numbness, Ronna realized he was taking her there to kill her in private. The same way he’d killed Matt.
She had seen lives pass before her eyes for years. A casual touch, a brush of skin, a handshake. A thousand little lives, but she had never seen her own life flickering behind her eyes until Matt. It was as though she hadn’t truly existed until that moment.
Now, only an hour later, she saw her life again in the touch of another, but this time the rough hand on the bare skin of her arm conjured images dark and bloody. Her death, passing before her eyes, filtered through the thoughts of her killer as he dragged her toward the booth.
His thoughts
were poetic in their simplicity. No one had seen Cutter enter the booth. No one would see him haul Ronna back inside. No one would see him leave. By the time the police arrived on the scene, he would be long gone and the evidence would all point to a neat and tragic scenario. Murder-suicide. A domestic disturbance. So common, so tragic. No need to investigate further. Even if the murderer was once a cop. Such a stressful profession. Living so close to the edge, under such pressure. It was so easy to snap.
Ronna jerked back, digging in her heels. He was going to blame Matt for her death. The man who should have been the love of her life, whose loss dug into her soul and gouged out a piece, was going to become just another sad statistic, a cop gone bad, a jealous lover. She couldn’t allow that.
“Help! Murderer!” Ronna began to fight, a last protest against futility, shouting and twisting in Cutter’s iron grip.
He swung her around by his hold on her arm, whipping her in a tight little circle, her own momentum driving her jaw into the fist he held out. The blow stopped her cries abruptly, and she sagged in his hold as the world fogged and spun.
“It didn’t have to be like this,” he growled. “Everybody has to be a fucking hero.”
“Obviously not a problem you’re afflicted with,” Ronna dragged herself through the fog to mumble.
The bastard laughed. “Yeah, guess not. Lucky me.”
He was laughing. He had just killed the love of her life and he was laughing. Rage coalesced in her heart, sending pulses of vicious anger into her veins with every heartbeat.
Ronna dropped all of her weight on him. She wasn’t heavy enough to take him down, but the sudden move startled him enough to loosen his grip on her. She drove her heel into his instep, and he released his hold on her completely.
She ran, screaming like a banshee, but only made it half a dozen steps before a hand closed in her hair, jerking her off her feet. She clutched his wrist with both hands, trying to take some of her weight off her scalp. His other arm wrapped around her throat, and Ronna forgot about the pain in her head as she fought for breath.
