A Killing Kind of Love: A Dark, Standalone Romantic Suspense

by EC Sheedy

  She was breathing heavily; Camryn could hear the rasps, and she held the gun in both hands. “Gina, stay calm. Think this through. You don’t want to do this.”

  As if she hadn’t heard, Gina waved the gun. “I’ll shoot the first person who comes near me.” She tossed a quick, scared glance Sebastian’s way. “Even you, Seb. I’m sorry. So sorry, but it doesn’t matter now. One dead. Two dead . . . a dozen. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Gina, what are you talking about? What the hell is the matter with you?” Sebastian stepped forward. “Give me that thing.”

  “Stop!” she screeched. “I told you to stop!”

  He stopped.

  Dan stepped in front of Camryn, and when he spoke, his voice was as smooth as soft cloth. “Who’s dead, Gina?” He jerked his head toward the ceiling. “Who’s up there?”

  “Delores!” Sebastian said. “Jesus, no, Gina . . . You didn’t—” Sebastian took a step toward the open door. Gina fired. The bullet caught him in the knee. He dropped screaming to the floor and clutched his leg. Blood spurted to the carpet.

  “Oh, Sebastian …” She stared at him, her eyes moist—and terrified. “I told you not to move. I’ve got business here. Can’t you see that? Understand that? Doesn’t anyone understand?” She blinked against her tears and brushed at them jerkily with her left wrist.

  Sebastian writhed on the floor, clutching his knee, blood soaking his pant leg. “You’re crazy, just like our mother. You’re crazy. “

  “Shut up!” She arced the gun, took another step back, and waved it in a sweeping motion to encompass the parlor. “Shut up . . . Everyone just shut up! I’ll shoot again. I will. I’ll kill you all.” Her voice was pitched high, broke when she looked at Sebastian’s blood, the growing stain of it seeping into the ugly leaf-patterned carpet.

  Camryn, horrified and achingly sad, stared at her friend. “Gina, why?” she asked, her voice as calm and low as she could manage from her tight throat. “Tell me why.”

  The room filled with a grim silence. Dan wrapped his hand around her arm, tried to pull her back. “Camryn, move. Get back.” She refused to budge, determined to reach her friend in whatever way she could. He loosened his grip but didn’t let go.

  Gina waved the gun between them, then her mad, dark eyes met Camryn’s and held; the moisture of tears burning in their resolve.

  And confusion. . . .

  “Cammie, I . . .” Her voice trailed off, and for a moment she appeared limp, exposed.

  When Camryn took a step toward her, reached for her hand, Gina leveled the gun and shook her head. “No. It’s too late.” Her lips flattened over her teeth, and her shoulders straightened.

  Dan’s grip again tightened. He was trying to put himself in front of Camryn. No!

  “Please, you can’t do this! You can’t!” Camryn pressed the hand she’d extended to Gina flat over her chest—but it wasn’t the frantic beat of her own heart she felt; it was the pounding of Gina’s broken one, her aching weariness, and then the racing of her dark and chaotic mind. It was as if her friend’s thoughts flew out of pattern, fast, and too heavy and desperate to bear.

  Camryn knew this as if Gina had spoken it, had exposed her soul. Her own soul whispered back: Where are you, my smart, funny, Barbie-doll friend? Where are you? Wherever you are, come back. Come back . . .

  Their eyes met and held.

  Gina shook her head, the gesture one of longing and defeat. “I love too much. I hate too much.” Tears slicked her cheeks and made her eyelashes glisten. “Delores, Adam, Holly . . . even you. I even hate you, Camryn. I hate myself . . . what I feel. What I’ve done. I’m sick with hate, and there’s nowhere for it to go except the grave.” She pointed the gun at her face. “Why, Camryn? why does everyone get who they want… except me?

  “You mean Adam.”

  “My Adam. He’s dead, you know.” She half-smiled. “Dead and gone.” Pain slashed through her eyes.

  “No, Gina. You didn’t. You couldn’t.”

  She went on as if Camryn hadn’t spoken. “I love him and he’s mine now. He’ll always be mine.” She smiled fully then, wistfully. “He didn’t want this, you know. He refused to kill you, didn’t even want me to kill you for him. But, of course, I have to now. It’s the only way.” She gripped the gun in both hands, and spread her legs slightly.

  Dan tugged Camryn back a step, his fingers urgent, digging pain into her arm. “Camryn, move away.” His tone was low, urgent.

  She heard him but couldn’t react, couldn’t take her eyes from the death in Gina’s hand.

  “For God’s sake, get back!” He didn’t raise his voice, but he snarled. “Now!”

  Gina gave him a sad look. “It won’t do any good,” she said, her tone as steady and directed as the gun in her hand. “I’m going to kill you all. I have no choice.”

  Camryn stepped back, as if a few inches of distance from Gina’s ugly weapon would add time to her life, and, following the quick shuttering of Dan’s eyes, she looked down—and was instantly mesmerized. Her mind clicking through a disjointed series of events.

  A body. Behind Gina.

  More dead than alive.

  A wake of blood and ooze in its tortuous trail.

  A red-slicked hand reaching out, unfurling bloody fingers, coiling them around Gina’s ankle.

  Muscles straining their last. Finger bones locking. A deathgrip.

  Gina’s head turning, looking down. Too late. Her slow, blinking eyes. Their widening. Her scream. “No!”

  From the floor—the crawling thing, a groan, a heavy rattling breath, a last draw on strength—all as one.

  A hard, twisting yank.

  Gina stumbling, falling face forward. Her elbow hitting the floor. The gun exploding its evil load . . .

  The bullet searing through Camryn’s soft flesh, her falling with Gina. Eyes wide. Down. Down. Her head hitting something, an emptying of her lungs. Gasping.

  She lay beside Gina, heard Dan curse, saw him kick the gun from Gina’s hand, heard it clatter into the far corner of the room. Everything dimming. . . .

  “Camryn. Jesus, Camryn, are you okay?” His hands were on her thigh, tearing at her slacks. Good slacks, she thought, her thinking woozy, her eyes unable to focus. These are my good slacks. She saw Gina’s hand, her nails digging into the carpet, crawling.

  She reached for her, wanted to help, but the darkness denied her.

  Chapter 29

  Dan had applied a rough bandage to Camryn’s thigh. It was a damned nasty wound, but not as nasty as the brother’s knee. For both of them he’d had to make do with applied pressure and some hastily grabbed towels.

  There was little or nothing he could do for the woman.

  Sebastian was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the wall, his mother’s head on his lap. He was smoothing her tangled, blood-clotted hair off her face, whispering to her, telling her to hold on, that help was on its way. Her hand lay in his, but it was loose, its fingers lax and splayed. Considering the trail of blood she’d left from the second floor, if she made it to the hospital alive, it would be a miracle.

  “Hm-m . . .”

  Camryn. His attention snapped to where it belonged. She’d been out for only a few minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. “You’re going to be all right. Just take it easy. The ambulance will be here any minute. Everything will be okay.” He bent to kiss her hair and whisper, “Thank God, you’re going to be okay.” It was the closest he’d come to praying in too many years to remember. But prayer or not, he couldn’t wait for that ambulance to get here. The wound wasn’t deep, but she’d lost a lot of blood.

  She seemed ready to lapse into unconsciousness again, but then rallied and said, “Gina. How’s Gina?” She tried to get up, winced.

  “Don’t. Stay still. Gina’s fine.” He deliberated on his answer. “She’s in the kitchen, tied to a chair.”

  “Oh, Dan …”

  She didn’t have to finish for him to hear a “poor, poor Gina” in the
re. He didn’t feel the same, and didn’t add that Gina had slipped from a screaming, babbling crazy woman to a catatonic a few seconds after he’d subdued her. “I made her as comfortable as I could. She has a couple of bruises from when her mother brought her down, but other than that, she’s okay.”

  “Then it was Delores.” She swallowed, and it seemed to hurt her. “I couldn’t tell. She was so . . .”

  “I know.” Dan had seen some tough women in his time, but watching that unholy bloodied apparition crawl across the floor and grasp Gina’s ankle with enough force to topple her, he knew he’d seen the toughest of them all.

  Camryn slid her hand into his, and he squeezed it; it was like ice. “Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know. She’s got at least three bullets in her. She mumbled something about being strangled or taped in her chair. Maybe both. She said she’d got free, tried to call Adam. With the music, I think. But Gina came instead.” He stroked her hair. “Those were the second set of shots we heard.”

  “What about Adam?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know where to look—and I didn’t want to leave you to do it.” His attentions taken up by the living, finding a corpse had slipped low on his priority list.

  She lifted his hand, kissed it. “Thank you.” She smiled at him, but it was a strained smile, and he knew, now that she was fully awake, the pain from the gunshot would kick in.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, turning his hand to cover hers and doing a little kissing of his own. Her hand was so cool. So small in his. Almost gone . . . He sucked up a breath; no point dwelling on the “what ifs. She was here. She was safe. That’s all that mattered.

  “Find him, Dan. Please. He might be—”

  She winced again, couldn’t finish, but Dan recognized hope when he saw it. He touched her cheek, smoothed some stray hair back. She wanted to know, and right now all he wanted was for her to stay calm. “I’ll check, but don’t try to move.” He gave her as stern a look as he could, remembering as he did the fear in watching her fall, seeing her blood flow. It had damn near stopped his heart. He doubted it would ever beat steadily again. “Do not move,” he said. “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Dan headed for the stairs, the sound of sirens—finally— coming to his ear. Thank God.

  The sooner he and Camryn were out of this hellhole of a house, the happier he’d be. He took the stairs two at a time and strode quickly down the hall, opening doors—there seemed to be a hundred of them—before he discovered another set of stairs leading to an attic room.

  Which was where he found Dunn—in a massive pool of blood, with a good part of his lower torso blown away.

  Dead. Definitely dead.

  Dan set his hands on his hips, let out a long breath, looked away, and briefly closed his eyes. He thought about covering the body with a blanket from the bed but knew it would mess things up for the cops.

  He looked back at the ruined corpse, wondered if he was looking at the remains of the man who’d killed his wife. The father of the little girl he loved.

  His chest constricted, in some weird hybrid of anger and pity. Either way, it didn’t matter anymore. What was done was done. He guessed now he’d never know if Dunn killed Holly, and while he hated not knowing, one thing was certain, he wouldn’t have wished this kind of dying on any man.

  He walked out, leaving the door open.

  He met the police and a medic coming up the stairs, shook his head and pointed toward the attic. Let them do their jobs; he was going downstairs to Camryn, and he planned to stay with her—and Kylie—for the rest of his life.

  All he had to do was convince her of that.

  Chapter 30

  “Don’t you have a home to go to?” Camryn teased when she walked into the den and saw Dan sprawled on her sofa, shoes off, his long denim-covered legs stretched in front of him. She set the bowl of buttered popcorn she was carrying on the coffee table in front of him and experienced the usual stomach flip when he looked up at her and winked.

  She still limped, and she’d have a rather interesting and unlovely three-inch scar on her upper thigh to show off if she ever donned a bikini again, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about it. She was alive. Dan was alive. Kylie was safe, and they were together, even if it were an undefined relationship on an uncharted testing ground that neither of them seemed anxious to talk about. It was as if, in the three weeks since the shooting, she and Dan both needed the days of calm, time to gather their breath and thoughts. Be normal.

  “I am home.” Dan said, muting the TV. She glanced at it, expecting to see a game of some sort. It was an old black-and-white movie.

  She smiled and sat beside him. He immediately put his arm around her, drew her close, and kissed her temple. “Kylie asleep?”

  “Her and a hundred stuffed animals.”

  “Grantman called a while ago, when you were putting her to bed.”

  “How’s Erin doing?”

  “Good, so he says. That’s why he called. He’s flying down to see her.”

  “I’m glad. Glad for all of us: Paul, Kylie—it’s good all around.” She paused. “What about you and Paul?”

  He slid her a glance. “What about us?”

  “Do you talk? Are things okay between you?”

  “First off, men don’t ‘talk.’ They form pacts of manly silence. Grunts are optional.” He smiled at her.

  “That sounds tedious and ineffective.”

  He laughed. “Both. But it works. I figure in a few years, maybe we’ll go to a Seahawks game together. Now, that’s bonding.”

  For a time they watched the movie, soundless. “How’s the leg?”

  “How about you quit asking me that? Or are you angling to see my scar again?”

  He wiggled his brows. “How’d you guess?”

  “Maybe because the last time you had me drop my jeans, it went way, way beyond looking.” She picked up the bowl, held it out to him. “Have some popcorn.”

  He laughed again, took some popcorn, and settled back into silence. He looked as though he were watching the muted movie, but Camryn knew he wasn’t.

  “I called the Boston Police Department today.”

  Of all the things he might have said, she hadn’t expected this. She sighed, knowing their escape to normal was at an end. “And?”

  “They didn’t say as much, but I think they’ve put Holly’s file on the back burner. I think they’re chalking it up as a random murder.”

  “Meaning they have nothing? Nothing at all?” The idea of not knowing who killed Holly made her both sad and angry—and a bit sick to her stomach. It wasn’t right that justice would not be done, that there was someone out there who’d gotten away with murder. But, as she’d learned the hard way the night of the shooting, life wasn’t always fair—or just—and things weren’t always what they seemed or should be. Nor were people.

  He shook his head. “Same result from the P.I. Grantman hired. Everything comes up a dead end.”

  “It’s hard to accept, isn’t it? Not knowing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You still think it was Adam?”

  “Logic said he was a reasonable suspect. He was in Boston at the time. Holly had dumped him. He needed money, and getting custody of Kylie was his way to do that. It seemed to make sense.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, I think your famous”—he narrowed his gaze, showed a hint of stubbornness—“intuition, sixth sense, or whatever was probably right about him. A lot of not so nice things about the guy, but not the killing type.”

  “Plus, he refused to kill me—even though the same motivation still applied.”

  Dan nodded. “There is that. Thank God.”

  Again the room fell to silence. Camryn put her head on Dan’s arm and closed her eyes. She thought of Holly, Gina and Adam. She thought of herself those many years ago and wondered again why she’d been able to let Adam go and neither Holl
y nor Gina ever had. She couldn’t understand it. Just as she couldn’t understand why, of the three of them, she was the one who would never bear a child. At that thought, the usual sliver of pain pierced her heart. She took a breath and worked to let it go. She had Kylie. She was blessed.

  As blessed as Gina was cursed.

  “Sebastian is moving back in with Delores, did you know that?” she said. The words came out reluctantly because she didn’t want to think about the Solaris, their complicated, tragic lives. Or the deeply disturbed Gina, now in West Seattle Psychiatric, in the “padded room” she’d so often joked was reserved for her eccentric mother. “He said he’s going to stay until she’s ‘out of the woods.’”

  “I still can’t believe she made it. How many surgeries?”

  “Three.”

  Dan shook his head.

  Camryn’s heart seemed to slow in her chest. “Seb got Gina a lawyer.”

  “That’s going to be a tough one.” He met her gaze. “And my guess is you’d rather not talk about it.”

  She nodded. “I’m going to go see her—just not yet.”

  “Smart.” He said nothing more for a moment, then, “Have you heard from your dad yet?” He turned, put an arm over the back of the sofa.

  “Yesterday.” And the call had left her numb and uncertain. Maybe because of her dad’s unexpected coolness. She’d privately hoped his living with her these past few months might have changed things between them. His voice on the phone said otherwise.

  “You didn’t mention it.”

  “No.” She’d talked to Dan about her dad, their long non-relationship, how she’d always felt there was some skewed genes that made it impossible for her to connect with him, but she still felt guilty about it. Whatever was between them had never felt right. She loved him, but always sensed her love wasn’t enough, that he was too busy for it.

  “Is he okay?”

  “He says so.” And she’d wanted to believe him but hadn’t been able to shake the sense of unease she’d felt since hanging up the phone.