The Butterfly Collector

by Beth Yarnall

  “He didn’t want me to. He wants this baby.”

  “Of course he does. He wants you even though he doesn’t know you.” He moved away from the window, pulled a cigarette out of a pack on the table and lit it.

  Smoke curled around him, making him look mysterious and powerful. My body reacted to the scent of his tobacco like Pavlov’s dog. A trickle of moisture dampened my underpants and my nipples pressed against the cups of my bra. My stupid, traitorous body. I thought of Tru and the look on his face as he slid into me. An even more powerful wave of desire swept over me.

  “Come here.” He didn’t crook his finger, but he may as well have.

  I didn’t even try to stop myself from moving toward him. I wanted to be closer to him. I wanted to look into his eyes. I wanted to smell like I’d been smoking his cigarettes.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I don’t want the things I used to.”

  “Like me?”

  “And the life. I can’t lie the way I used to.”

  “You’re nothing but a lie to him. None of it is real. Only I know the real you.”

  “And yet my pregnancy surprised you.”

  He narrowed his eyes and blew out a stream of smoke over his shoulder. “You’re a fool. They’re never going to let you go, and do you honestly think he’s going to want you when he finds out who you are and what you’ve done?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “They’ll kill you. That’s the only way out.”

  “Not the only way.”

  His eyes widened with surprise. “You traitorous bitch. You’re not the only one with your dick out here.”

  “You think I care what happens to you?”

  “You think I’m going to let you betray me, leave me hanging?”

  “No.” I eased closer. “I know you won’t.”

  “You have a death wish then.”

  He bent to stub out his cigarette as I brought my arm forward, swinging with everything I had. The knife plunged deep. His gaze flew up to mine, his face stark with shock. Before he could move, I yanked the knife back and swung again. His hand went to the wound as he teetered back. I didn’t give him time to recover. Pulling out another knife, I got him in the back, bringing him down onto the coffee table. The legs broke and he crashed to the ground on a pile of splintered wood.

  Knives in both hands, I couldn’t stop. Over and over, I struck him. Blood flew out in all directions. Long stripes of it covered the walls, the furniture. Raw, animalistic sounds ripped from my throat with the force of my blows. His blue shirt turned deep red and still I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. Every indignity, every time I’d cowered before him, every time he’d made me do something I didn’t want to do, poured out of me and into my attack.

  I finally collapsed in exhaustion, my knives protruding from his body. His eyes were open, staring and fixed. I wondered what he had thought as I struck him. He’d been too surprised to stop me. I had never gone against him. Not ever until my pregnancy. Maternity had changed me. Seeing his reaction the night he snuck into my room started something that ended here in this generic apartment.

  I was free.

  I couldn’t help the laugh that escaped me. It filled the room and bounced off the blood-streaked walls. If Tru saw me now, he’d think I’d gone insane. Maybe I had. Carlos’s death wouldn’t be the end of it.

  It was only the beginning.

  6

  Before leaving Carlos’s apartment, I cleaned myself up as best as I could. I wiped away any evidence that I’d been there, including pulling my knives from Carlos’s body. He’d taught me well. I didn’t go straight home. Instead I wandered aimlessly, watching to make sure no one was following me. It was dark by the time I entered Tru’s apartment. A relieved breath whooshed out of me as I closed the door and leaned back against it. Carlos was dead.

  I would never be the same again.

  Killing him made me feel strangely adrift. Tru’s ring on my finger was the only thing anchoring me to the here and now, reminding me of the tasks that still lay ahead. My job with Tru was unfinished. I couldn’t just walk away from it. That’s not how things worked. Carlos’s death bought me some time.

  A plan had been formulating in my mind for a while. At first I’d chided myself for being so foolish as to hope for a life with Tru. Now it not only felt possible, it felt close enough to touch. I could marry Tru and have his baby. I could have the happily ever after I’d only read about in romance novels.

  I took a shower and bleached the drain. Wrapped in a robe, I started a fire in the fireplace. The weather was too warm for one, but I needed to get rid of everything that tied me to Carlos. Piece by piece, I tossed my clothes into the fire. My blouse was last. Bringing it up to my nose, I inhaled. The scent of Carlo’s tobacco lingered, along with the metallic stench of his blood mixed with the perfume I wore. I tossed the blouse onto the fire and prodded at it with the fireplace poker. The fire smoked and crackled. It was like watching Carlos die all over again. It seemed symbolic that this was the last time he and I would ever be joined.

  Just as I replaced the poker and the last of the pale pink browned then disappeared, Truett came through the door. As usual, there was a harried, disconnected air about him. His mind was still on his work. I watched him juggle binders and a briefcase and his laptop case across the living room until he dumped the whole mess onto the bar between the kitchen and dining area. He ran a distracted hand through his hair. There was a deep crease between his eyes and his lips pressed together. Something was wrong.

  He didn’t notice me until I stood, wrapped in my bathrobe, my feet bare and my hair damp from the shower. His mouth relaxed, but his brows still crowded together.

  “Oh, hey. I didn’t see you there,” he said, his attention focused inward.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head. “Not really. No.”

  I strode over to him. He wasn’t so distracted that he didn’t notice that I wasn’t wearing anything beneath the robe.

  I wrapped my arms around his neck. “Anything I can help you with?”

  “Work stuff.”

  I willed my body not to tense under his hands at my waist. “Is it very bad?”

  “A file’s missing. Not really missing, just… not right. Somebody messed with it.”

  “Messed with it how?” But I knew how. I’d been given the thumb drive with a duplicated file embedded with a Trojan horse. It had done its work when Tru connected his computer to the main server.

  “A worm or a Trojan horse, they think. They’re working on it now. I came home to see if I could find out how it got onto my laptop. It’s the only way I can think that it happened. I need to find out before I tell them it was me.”

  “Are you sure it’s from your computer?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  Dread licked my insides, turning my stomach queasy. “How?”

  His gaze met mine and the dread turned to fear. Did he know it was me? Did he know that what I’d unleashed could ruin him and us? That in order to get out, I’d gotten up from our bed last night as soon as he’d drifted off to do one last thing, one last betrayal on a long list of lies and hidden agendas?

  “Because I have systems in place to let me know when someone’s messed with my computer.” He took a step forward, forcing me to take a step back. “Someone’s after what they think is on it.” He moved us backward a couple of paces. “It took me a while to figure that out.” Another step and my back hit the wall.

  He pressed the full weight of his body against mine and braced his forearm on the wall above my head. His other hand twisted in the belt of my robe. He ducked his head and ran his tongue from the hollow of my neck to just behind my ear. I shuddered and fisted my hands in his shirt.

  “But I figured it out.”

  He knew. Not only that, he knew his apartment was bugged.

  I lowered my voice so only he could hear. “What did you figure out?”

  “Not enough. No
t soon enough.”

  “What is it that you think you’ve figured out?”

  “Who are you?” His whispered words against my ear made me shiver all over again. “Who are you really?”

  I brought his head down and put my lips to his ear. “Not here.”

  This was it. Time to confess.

  “Where?” His lack of anger and accusation was confusing. As was his arousal pressed against my hip.

  My head thunked against the wall as I pulled as far away from him as I could and raised my voice to a normal level. “I need to pick up a few things from the store for dinner. Want to walk with me and clear your head?”

  “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

  7

  “How about a walk in the park?” Tru asked as we left his apartment.

  I glanced up at the second-floor window of the building across the street, but it wasn’t relief I felt. When they found out Carlos was dead, I would be too.

  “That sounds nice,” I agreed.

  It was a risk. There were verdant areas of Central Park where a body wouldn’t be discovered for days, weeks even, if ever. I hadn’t considered myself maternal. Mostly I found pregnancy to be confusing and sometimes frustrating. As we entered the park, I realized that if it came down to him or me, I would kill the father of my child. I could only hope his paternal instinct would suddenly kick in as mine had.

  “What gave me away?” he asked, his voice low and seductive. The same tone he used to get me into bed.

  The question hovered in the air around us. We stared straight ahead down the nearly deserted path. Nothing between us had ever been honest. There had been so many lies, I wasn’t sure if I’d recognize the truth once I met it. But here was the moment to come clean. There was no other way around it.

  “There was a slight flaw in your background.”

  He looked at me then. “Were you the one who caught it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “Truett Nash wasn’t left-handed.”

  “Shit.” He shook his head. “I’m usually better than that.”

  “I know.”

  “So are you. Why so careless with my laptop? That’s not like you.”

  “I wanted to get caught.”

  He stopped and pulled me down onto a bench. The sun was low in the sky, casting long, pale shadows. The early autumn air still held the heat of midday and the stifling closeness of humidity.

  “Why?” he asked, his gaze searching my face, no doubt looking for any trace of dishonesty.

  “They were going to pull me off you. They didn’t like that I got pregnant. It complicated things.”

  He placed his hand on the swell of my stomach. “No kidding. I don’t usually make these kinds of mistakes.”

  “Neither do I.” I placed my hand over his. “Now what?”

  “I was hoping you would have an answer.”

  “I’m supposed to kill you.”

  “I’m supposed to kill you.”

  “You may as well. I’m dead anyway. They know I outed myself. They’ve probably already dispatched someone to take care of me.”

  Plus the fact that I’d killed one of their best agents when I’d stabbed Carlos to death. There was no going back from that. My only hope was to reveal myself to Tru. Either he’d kill me or I didn’t know what. I’d rather he kill me than someone from the agency I’d never met. A strange statement to make, I know, but I’d accept death from Tru. At least then I’d know if what we’d shared meant as much to him as it did to me. I didn’t want to die not knowing that.

  “You’re good. If you hadn’t given yourself away, I might have never known you were after me. I can’t kill someone as good as you. That would be sacrilege. Plus there’s this.” His gaze fell to where our hands covered the swell of the child we’d made together.

  “Yeah.” My voice was breathy with pent-up emotion. “There is.”

  “You want this baby?”

  I nodded. “You?”

  “More than I thought possible.”

  “Where does that leave us? They’ll come after you as soon as they’ve taken care of me. The people I work for don’t like loose ends.”

  “Neither do the people I work with. We’re doubly marked.” He placed the palm of his other hand on my cheek. “I love you, Gia, or whatever your name is.”

  “I love you, Truett, or whatever your name is.”

  “I have a contingency plan, a way out.”

  “So do I. Are we really doing this? Or are you biding time for a better time and place to kill me?”

  “We are, unless you’re biding time for a better time and place to kill me.”

  “I bet my contingency plan is better than yours.”

  “I bet it is.” He placed a gentle kiss on my lips. “Are you still going to marry me?”

  I kissed him back, needing the reassuring pressure of his mouth on mine to know that what was between us was real, that this was really going to happen. “Yes, I am.”

  He stood and held his hand out to me. “Paris is nice this time of year. None of this New York humidity.”

  I stood and took his hand. “I’m partial to Brunei.”

  “Brunei it is then.”

  The sun dipped below the trees as we made our plans. It wouldn’t be easy, it was certainly risky, but Truett Nash and I were going to carve out our own version of happily ever after. Just the three of us.

  * * *

  Thank you for reading The Butterfly Collector by Beth Yarnall. As a bonus here is the first chapter of the Daphne du Maurier winning novel A Deep and Dark December by Beth Yarnall.

  * * *

  There weren’t a great many things that bothered Erin December. For the most part, she considered herself a pretty even-keeled person. So why was her face hot and the back of her throat aching with the words she couldn’t let loose? As she sat in the Kavender Investments staff meeting, listening to Ramie Kavender heap praise on Austin for the success of the Petrie project, she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. That son of a bitch Austin accepted the compliments as if they were his due, never once daring to glance her direction or acknowledge that she had any part in the project, let alone admitting she had done the bulk of the work.

  She reminded herself that she was grateful for the job. The tiny town of San Rey, in central California, had been hit hard by the downturn in the economy. Kavender Investments was one of the few companies thriving amongst speculation of another recession. Without this job, she might be forced to leave the town she grew up in and move to a bigger town like Santa Barbara or Los Angeles. She liked her job and most of the people she worked with. She was confident in her work in a way she’d never been in any other position she’d ever held.

  But that didn’t mean she liked being stepped on by Austin on his way to a higher title.

  As soon as the meeting was over, she escaped to the relative quiet of her cubicle. She pulled up the report she’d been working on before the meeting began and started to recheck the data one last time before she turned it in. A shadow fell over her.

  “I have a favor to ask,” her boss Ramie said.

  She turned in her chair.

  “Chelsea went home sick. She had a Cash for Keys appointment this afternoon at four. Can you take it? Should be quick. You can go straight home from there.”

  That was in half an hour and she still had the report to finish. “Sure.”

  “Thanks. I owe you one.” He dropped the folder on the top of her already teetering stack and strode away.

  She suppressed a sigh and reached for the file. The tab had the name Lasiter on it. She knew a Greg Lasiter from high school. Opening the file, she confirmed that it was the Greg Lasiter she’d be meeting with. Great. Just great. He was an asshole back then and while he didn’t waste time picking on her anymore, he wasn’t exactly nice.

  The words in the file blurred, then blacked over. Her body seemed to shoot back as though she were on a rollercoaster, pain searing between her eyes.
The sensation made her stomach dip. She knew what this was. She hadn’t experienced this loss of control since she’d first come into her ability when she was eight. Shoved suddenly from one reality into another against her will, she found herself standing on the front porch of the Lasiter house. She worked to steady her breathing. Leaves danced across the lawn, the wind whipping them up, then sending them scattering.

  What was happening?

  She hadn’t called up this vision. She hadn’t chosen to be here in this time or this place. Trying to get her bearings, she glanced back at the neighborhood she’d walked through once upon a time on her way to and from elementary school. The street was empty.

  She never used her ability. Ever. Only her Aunt Cerie and her father, Donald, knew what she could do. She kept it that way on purpose, holding her secret inside since the night her mother had left and never came back.

  In the vision she was herself, knocking on the door of the Lasiter house, calling out for Greg. No answer. She pushed the doorbell and rapped on the door again. Silence. She shuddered from a chill she couldn’t feel. Something was off.

  Not real, she reminded herself. Her body still sat at her desk, but her mind had traveled through time. Was this the past or future? Why was she here? How did she get here? What did this loss of control over her ability mean?

  Turning the knob, she expected it to be locked, but it turned easily. She walked into an empty living room, stripped of furniture or anything that made it a home.

  “Greg?” she heard herself call out. “It’s Erin December from Kavender Investments. Hello? Anyone here?”

  A light around a door at the end of the living room drew her attention. Her steps weighted, she found she couldn’t stop. Any of it. Not her body from moving forward nor her mind from staying in the vision. She was stuck. Left with no choice. She closed her eyes, using the tools she’d been taught to search for a way out. But there was no ending it. The shock of that radiated through her. This had never happened before either. She’d always been able to pull out of a vision.