KILLING ME SOFTLY

by Jenna Mills

  She'd suffered. Her body, yes, but more than just the physical, it was the emotional scars he'd seen that morning, the same shell-shocked look he'd seen countless times as a cop from women whose only mistake was falling in love with the wrong man. He'd taken their statements, urged them to think with their heads and not their hearts, knelt beside their lifeless bodies while behind him their children cried.

  Sometimes there were no warnings. Other times there were. It was those situations that had always incensed him, made him wonder how a woman could stay with a man she didn't trust. But God help him, now he knew. Uncertainty and love didn't cancel each other out. They could live side by side, scraping and twisting, tangling, until it was impossible to discern one from the other. Just like love and hurt could.

  In the end, it was the dichotomy that destroyed.

  Frowning, he lifted his camera and searched for another target, but there was only Renee as she'd been that morning, gazing at him with through eyes huge and dark and bruised, as though he was the one who'd driven the knife into her back. Every time he saw her, the woman who'd betrayed him faded further, replaced by the woman who'd walked through hell and back to reclaim her life. The shadows in her eyes offered chilling testimony to the nightmare she'd endured, the heinous tug-of-war between faith and doubt that had shattered the woman she'd once been. But there was strength, too, and courage, more raw and gut-twisting than he'd seen from the majority of his brothers on the force.

  On a cruel rush of adrenaline he turned from the increasingly bloodred sky and slung his camera strap over his shoulder, heard his boot crunch down on a pile of twigs. His heart pounded with an urgency he hadn't felt since the night he'd run through the swamp searching for Savannah. Because God help him, she'd more than just endured. More than just survived. She'd come back to him. Against all odds and every scrap of cold logic, she'd defied the conventional wisdom that would have granted her the chance to start over fresh. She'd ignored the cesspool of evidence against him, which had given her the power to make sure he was locked away for a long, long time, and she'd come back to him.

  He, in turn, had walked away.

  Behind him the cry of the anhinga echoed through the swamp, but he no longer cared. There was only Renee, and the insidious knowledge of what he'd done to her.

  Awareness came slowly. First there was peace. Her body was relaxed, her mind drifting like clouds on a lazy summer day. But then came the pulses of confusion. She didn't remember going to sleep, couldn't place whether it was day or night.

  Alarm flickered next, bringing with it the realization that her body wasn't relaxed. It was heavy. And her mind wasn't drifting. It was racing—reeling.

  Memory slashed in last, and on a horrific rush she squinted against the shadows. The room wasn't small and dark and dirty, and the scent wasn't of death and decay. The surface on which she lay wasn't hard and damp. And her head didn't throb like it always, always did when sleep took her back to the night she'd almost lost her life.

  There were shadows in this room, but only because of the plantation shutters closed to all but a few streaks of sunlight. The scent was of apricots. Beneath her was a soft bed.

  Renee swallowed against a cottony throat and blinked against the haze, brought the room into focus. And the woman. She sat in a straight-backed chair near the bed. In her hands was a gun.

  "Feel better now?" she asked.

  Renee pushed against the lethargy, but the bindings at her wrists and ankles impeded movement. "V-Val…"

  The woman she'd considered a friend stood. "It's been a long time," she said, moving to the side of the bed. There was a gleam in her eyes Renee had never seen before, a malevolent light that made her blood run even colder. "It was so nice of you to stop by this afternoon. You saved me a bit of trouble."

  "I don't understand."

  Val lowered a hand to the side of Renee's face and gently stroked the hair from her eyes. Her touch was obscenely soft. "I always wondered what happened to you," she said in an odd singsong voice. "Why your body wasn't found." Her fingers stilled against Renee's cheekbone. "Sometimes I would dream of you. You would rise from the swamp, dripping and decaying, and come toward me, staring at me through vacant eyes."

  "It was you," Renee whispered, and the realization punished. She'd been blind to Val. They all had. She'd been like wallpaper in Gabe's life, something that was there but that no one ever paid much attention to. "All this time it was you."

  "And no one suspected a thing," Val said, clearly pleased. "It's the curse of being a woman, always overlooked and underestimated. But it's also the gift."

  Renee struggled to connect all the dots with lines that didn't make sense. All the seemingly innocuous conversations, little choices that shouldn't have impacted so many lives, the little lies. Val had always seemed clingy, almost desperate to hang on to Gabe. Renee had always thought it a little pathetic.

  Now she realized her friend's cover was downright brilliant.

  "Gabe loves you," she whispered, and her heart hurt for him. Thinking he might be responsible for all the deception had been hard, because she'd always thought of him as a stand-up guy, with a core of integrity that ran a mile deep.

  "Yes," Val agreed. "I worked hard to make sure that he does."

  "This will kill him."

  Val smiled. "Only if he finds out."

  Which Val had no intention of happening. Which meant she had no intention of letting Renee live to tell him.

  "You weren't supposed to die, you know," she said with a wistful smile. "At least not that night anyway."

  Renee's mind raced. She was in Gabe's house. He had to come home at some point. If she could keep Val talking— "What was supposed to happen?"

  "Your brother took something from me. Something important."

  "The Goose…" She'd heard the rumors, the whispers Cain had refused to verify that her brother managed to steal one of the small electronic devices that had brought the gaming industry to its knees.

  Val's expression turned dead serious. "I want it back."

  Renee's heart kicked hard. From the look in Val's eyes, she more than wanted it back. She needed it back. "That's why you abducted me. You think I know where it is."

  "I know you do," Val said. "You're his sister."

  Renee stared at the woman who'd fooled them all, tried not to see her as she'd been almost two years before, when she and Cain and Gabe and Val had shared drinks at the Golden Pelican. Adrian had come over to them. He'd flirted with Val, told her that if he wasn't already in love and if Gabe wasn't her almost fiancé, he'd make a play for her himself.

  Only a few weeks later she'd had him executed.

  The rage built like a vicious force within her. "My brother would never have said anything that would endanger me."

  Val ran her hand along the barrel of her semiautomatic … silencer already in place. "That remains to be seen. He was quite proud of the fact he'd hidden what he stole from me someplace where no one would ever think to look."

  "Then what makes you think I know?"

  "We gave him a choice. He could return what he stole, or you and Saura would die."

  Renee cringed.

  "So he relented. He said he'd return it, we just had to let him retrieve it." Val's eyes went hard. "He went, but I had someone follow him. He drove to a wooded area that bordered a swamp. Then he started to walk."

  Lying there on the bed, Renee went very still. Cain had been right after all. Adrian had gone to his death alone and of his own volition. "I don't understand. Why would you kill him before he could return the Goose?"

  Val's expression twisted. "Adrian got foolish, thought he could outmaneuver his tail. He circled back, tried to take him from behind. But my man was faster, took him out before your brother could so much as blink."

  Renee closed her eyes, saw the soft bed of leaves where her brother had fallen—and died.

  "We searched the area," Val added. "But came up with nothing."

  With his final breat
hs Adrian had tried to communicate something—not the name of his assailant, Renee now realized. But something else. Something more important.

  Cain … Evan … Lynn.

  "…checked it out," Val was saying. "According to some of his friends, Adrian used to go duck hunting in that same area. He and your dad." Her smile was slow, confident. "You're his sister. If anyone would know what he was doing out there, where he was going, it would be you."

  Heart hammering, Renee could see it all, the dense undergrowth and the knobby cypress knees, the ethereal Spanish moss and the sun cutting through the branches—and the tree.

  Not names, she realized on a hard surge of adrenaline. There was no Evan or Lynn. But there was an Evangeline—the old oak with the massive branch that swooped like a bench to the ground, the one he'd always loved, the one he'd called the Evangeline tree—the one Cain had photographed.

  "My God," she said because it was all so clear now. She'd had a few pieces all along, but Cain had had others, and Val had possessed the rest. They were all needed to see the truth. "The tree."

  Val stilled. "What tree?"

  "In the swamp," Renee said, and her heart pounded hard on the revelation. "Where he died."

  "There are thousands of trees in the swamp."

  "But not like this one. It was special to him."

  Val's eyes lit. "Then take me there."

  And surrender what Adrian had given his life to protect? Never, Renee wanted to shout, but she saw the gleam in Val's eyes and realized how desperate she was to find what Adrian had hidden. Maybe it was more than just the Goose. Maybe his investigation had yielded other fruit—fruit that terrified Val.

  The reporter Renee had once been screamed that there was more going on here than the mere search for an electronic device. And the survival instincts Cain had helped her hone went off like a string of firecrackers.

  "I can't," Renee said, pleased by the despondency she injected into her voice. "I don't know where it is." Val didn't need to know Renee had been there just that morning.

  "That's not a problem. I know where the area is."

  "But like you said, there are thousands of trees."

  Val's gaze hardened. "Then I guess you're not so useful after all, are you?" she asked returning the gun to point at Renee's chest. "Looks like this time there will be a body."

  "Wait." Adrenaline raced harder, faster. She'd risked everything to come back and reclaim her life. She wasn't going to let Val steal it without a fight. "There is a way," she said. "I know how to find the tree."

  "Did she say where she was going?" Cain asked over the roaring in his ears. Vaguely he was aware of the edge to his voice, the way the assistant hotel manager's eyes widened, but he was beyond the point of caring.

  "I'm afraid not," she said, coming around the hotel's reception counter. "Should she have? Is something wrong?"

  No one had seen her in almost three hours. No one had heard from her. No one knew where she'd gone. "I want you to call me, you hear?" he instructed. "The second she shows up, the second you hear from her, you're to call me."

  She nodded, but Cain was already turning from her. He'd just stepped outside when his mobile phone rang. He grabbed it without breaking pace, glanced at the caller ID box and saw the words wireless caller, stopped dead in his tracks.

  "Vannah?" he roared, fumbling with the buttons.

  "Cain."

  Her voice. Sweet God have mercy, it was her voice. "Where the hell are you?"

  "I'm where you told me to be," she said, and her voice was oddly calm, almost cold. "On my way out of town."

  His hand tightened around the phone. "What the hell—"

  "Because you were right," she said in that same monochromatic tone. "I never should have come back."

  His heart pounded harder. "Where are you, cher? Let me come get you—"

  "It's too late for that," she said. "I thought I could walk back into my life, but I can't. People change. Life goes on. It took coming back to realize that I was better off away from here. That I was happier."

  His gut twisted on her words.

  "But I'm hoping you'll do me a favor," she said blandly. "For old times' sakes."

  Coming from anyone else, the request might have made sense. But not from Savannah. She didn't ask favors, especially not from someone who'd slammed the door in her face.

  "What kind of favor?" he asked in the same deadly quiet voice he'd relied on to coerce information from informants.

  "Two things really," she said after a brief hesitation. "First I was hoping you could tell me how to get to Adrian's tree, the one that's in the picture hanging in your gallery. I'd love to see it one last time."

  Everything inside of him went brutally still. "And the second?"

  If she heard the silent understanding in his voice, she gave no indication. "I know I told you I wanted her back," she said, and finally, finally, a trace of emotion leaked through. "But I was hoping you'd keep feeding my dog."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The sun slipped low on the horizon, bathing the swamp in a crimson glow. Shadows fell from the trees and dripped from the gnarled undergrowth, while a cool breeze flirted with the Spanish moss. The air was damp and heavy, expectant. So were the birds. They cawed from all directions, unseen from their perches high atop the cypress and the oaks, but Renee felt them watching every step she took. Every step Val took.

  They'd been walking single file for almost thirty minutes. The tree lay just ahead. The gun jabbed into her neck served a constant reminder that time was almost out.

  Her heart twisted on the realization. She'd been so sure, so completely, totally sure that Cain would recognize the silent alarm she'd tried to trip.

  But now doubt crept in, and with it came the sobering realization that there was no guarantee he remembered the brief exchange at her brother's grave. Time had passed. Lives had moved on. Deception had marred what they'd once shared. His voice, normally rich and dark and drugging, had been calm and detached, clinical almost, as he'd given her directions. There'd been a brutal note of finality to his goodbye.

  This time there will be a body.

  The memory lashed through Renee as she shoved at a tangle of vines and neared the hollow where Adrian's tree had sprawled for over a century. Untouched. Unmarred. A strong solid reminder of beauty and sanctity, innocence. The place where Val planned to kill her—and frame Cain.

  "This way," Renee said, deliberately steering Val in the wrong direction. The second she led her to the tree, her usefulness was over. If she could mislead her until the sun went down … the darkness could once again be her friend.

  "What was that?" Val asked, and only then did Renee realize that she'd stopped.

  She turned toward her, saw the semiautomatic pointed at her heart. "What was what?"

  "That noise." Val's eyes were narrow, suspicious. "It sounded like twigs breaking."

  Renee heard it then, a soft crunch from the direction of Adrian's tree. "Probably just an animal."

  "Or a man," Val snapped, and Renee's heart kicked hard. "Check it out," she instructed, motioning with her gun. "And so help me God, if you try anything, you know who will pay the price."

  She did. Cain—and her grandmother.

  Renee turned toward the clearing and tore at a clump of moss, moved silently toward the gorgeous old oak. Adrenaline streamed frenetically, bringing a hot rush to her blood. She felt it swirl through her as she stepped from the dense undergrowth, and instinctively knew that she was not alone.

  "Adrian," she whispered, and her throat closed on the words. The moisture came next, warm, salty, burning her eyes.

  "Non." The soft word boomed through her like a shout. "C'est moi." He emerged from behind the tree and stepped toward her, all tall and strong and dark, but battered somehow. Mud streaked his camouflage pants and beneath the holster strapped around his shoulders, his long-sleeved T-shirt was torn. She recognized the gun immediately, the one he'd once put into her hands and taught her to use.
But it was the shadows to his face that stopped her breath, the strong set to his jaw and the glitter in his eyes.

  "Cain." Her heart pounded so hard she barely heard the agitated squawk of the birds. He'd heard. He'd understood. And despite the terrible things she'd done to him, he'd come. "You shouldn't be here," she whispered.

  Like a violent wind he destroyed the distance between them and crossed to her, took her hands in his arms. "The hell I shouldn't," he said hoarsely, then stunned her by crushing his mouth to hers. The kiss was hard and possessive and completely unexpected, and in it Renee knew she could drown.

  His lips moved against hers with shattering hunger, nibbling and claiming, whispering words that made her heart slam cruelly against her ribs.

  "No!" she rasped, pushing against his arms and ripping away, making herself breathe. Making herself think. Val was not fifteen feet away. She could see everything. Hear everything.

  If Renee couldn't get rid of Cain—

  "I know I hurt you," he was saying, but his words barely registered. A cool calm came over her as she looked at him standing there, at the steady rise and fall of his shoulders and the bulk of his chest, and she knew what she had to do.

  "No words," she whispered, stepping toward him and lifting her face to his, letting her hands settle against his stomach. Then as her eyes met his, she grabbed his gun and pushed away from him, curled her hands around the butt and lifted it between them. "Not another step, either."

  Shock flared in his gaze. "Vannah—"

  She forced a laugh. "My, my, Detective, you really have lost your touch, haven't you?"

  He stood there so horribly still, staring at her with a combination of dread and horror that broke her heart. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  Around them even the birds fell silent as the shadows kept slipping and merging, squeezing out the last vestiges of bloodred light. "Sorry, cher, but denouements aren't my thing." With a calm she didn't come close to feeling, she curled her finger around the trigger. "But I will thank you for making this so easy."