Love Kills

by Lisa Renee Jones

  “You—”

  “Love you. I love you so fucking much that, yes, I would kill for you. Yes, I will bury a million bodies for you. And yes, I will bleed for you, but I’m doing it all right here with you.” He lowers his mouth to mine and brushes his lips over mine. “We do this, all of it, together. Say it.”

  “Kane—”

  “Say it, Lilah.”

  “Together. But you better remember that and not get killed. You better—”

  He brushes his lips over mine and smiles against my mouth. “You can never just agree, can you?”

  “I’m never going to be that girl.”

  “Good. I bet if I asked you to marry me again, you’d say ‘yes, but’ to that, too.”

  My chest tightens, damn these emotions. “Kane,” I whisper.

  “Lilah,” he whispers, and then he’s kissing me again, and at some point, my hands are free, and I’m free with him. What I feel is no longer desperate but something softer, and I am never soft. Except with him. With Kane, perhaps, I’m human because he allows me to be all the things that I am. And when we’re lying together, in the darkness, listening to the rain, I flashback to that night on the beach. I flashback to me in that shower covered in blood. I flashback to him being there. We’re bonded in the very blood that once separated us.

  “What was all of this about?” he asks, rolling us to our sides to face each other.

  I sit up and curl my knees to my chest, withdrawing, but that withdrawal is about me, not him. He grabs his shirt and wraps it around me before he tugs on his pants. Somehow, he knew I needed boundaries, and he’s confident enough in himself and us, to not find that intimidating. He settles back on the mattress, and his hand rests on my knees.

  I tell him everything I’ve discovered, my reasons for keeping the toxin secret, and finally, those cigarette burns that lead to a threat against Roger. “I told him to leave town. He won’t.”

  His eyes narrow. “And?”

  I press my hands to my face and then scoot off the bed to stand up, pacing the room. Kane moves to sit on my side of the mattress. I pace some more and turn to face him. “A lot of times, I don’t feel what I should feel, Kane. You know that, right?”

  “What does that mean?” he asks cautiously.

  “Roger is being stupid. He’s going to die. I actually thought—okay, you want to be a fool. Die a fool. I felt no remorse. I don’t feel those things. I’ve always had that in me, but after my attack—”

  He’s suddenly standing in front of me, his hands on my shoulders. “You sent Beth away. You worried for Beth. You put her in the damn Ritz to protect her. You held back the toxin to protect her. You fight every day for people who died because you care. Stop making yourself the monster, Lilah. You are not the monster.”

  “But—”

  “You are not the monster. You’ve got your Otherworld for a reason. It’s your way of shutting off your emotions. It’s sanity.”

  “And you? Is that what you do?”

  His expression tightens. “I’m not you.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t need an Otherworld to shut things out, beautiful. You know that, even if you try to pretend it’s not true.” He cups my face. “A badge wouldn’t shut me down. The badge on you shuts me down. Stop fighting who you are.”

  “Roger—”

  “You don’t feel nothing. That’s not what this is.” He releases me and folds his arms in front of his chest, studying me. “You’re blocking out what you feel, just like you do when you go to a crime scene and mentally step into your Otherworld. What are you blocking out?”

  My brows furrow. “I don’t—I’m not.”

  “You are,” he says as if it’s just simply a fact. “I know you. You absolutely are.” He kisses me, a tender act that, in itself, defies his declared coldness. The warmth I feel with it defies mine. “I’m going to throw on some jeans and order us a pizza,” he says. “That’s your preferred thinking food.”

  “Hell’s Kitchen,” I murmur, as he walks into the bathroom to get to the closet.

  I stand there a minute, processing what he’s just said. I’m suppressing emotion rather than not feeling it at all. Am I? I dress, replaying that encounter with Roger and Melanie, looking for answers. I’ve just finished dressing when one of the phones in that envelope, the one that is still somehow on the bed, rings. Ghost is calling. Good. He and I need to have another little chat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Hello, Ghost,” I answer.

  “Lilah,” he says, and he doesn’t sound surprised. “Always a pleasure. Do you have a name for me?”

  “I told you, if I had a name, I’d kill him myself. Do you have a name?”

  “No, but he’s a sick fuck. I told you. I’ll kill him for free.”

  “He’s a sick fuck?”

  “He does it for pleasure. For you and me, it’s business.”

  “I do it to protect people. You do it for money.”

  “You need to justify it. One day, you’ll get over that.”

  Kane appears in the doorway in black jeans and a black long sleeve T-shirt, looking so damn arrogantly Kane Mendez, that I know I haven’t gotten through to him. “If you kill Kane,” I say to Ghost, “it’ll be all kinds of personal for me, and you will no longer be the best assassin on the planet. I will be, and you’ll be dead. And I’ll enjoy killing you.”

  Kane is in front of me now, taking the phone. I let him. I’ve said what I needed to say. “Ghost,” he greets, and then eyes me, amusement in his stare, in the quirk of his lips. “Yes. Yes, she is.” He listens a moment and says, “Time-sensitive.” Another pause. “When?” And then. “Yes.” He disconnects.

  “What was that?” I demand.

  “We do these things in person, Lilah.”

  “You can’t meet him. He’ll kill you.”

  “He’s not going to kill me.”

  “I will shoot you in the damn leg before you go meet him.”

  He catches my hip and walks me to him. “I love you, too.”

  “Kane—”

  “I know what I’m doing. You want transparency, Lilah. This is it. I could have pretended that was someone else. I would have pretended that was someone else in the past.”

  I inhale on that and turn away from him, before facing him again. He’s right. I asked for this. If I fight his every move, he’ll stop telling me the truth. “And yet, you didn’t want to tell me how you’re handling Pocher.”

  “I thought a lot about that today,” he says. “You’re right. I promised you that I’d stop shutting you out. I’m not doing that now, but I hope like hell we both don’t regret that.”

  I sit down on the bed, making sure he knows that I’m not running. “You’re going to have Ghost kill Pocher?” It’s obvious, of course, but I want confirmation.

  He sits down next to me. “And make it look like Umbrella Man did it. It’s not a far reach after he delivered that pig to a Pocher-sponsored event.”

  “He doesn’t kill men.”

  “I know that, Lilah.”

  My heart thunders in my ears. “Who else is he going to kill?”

  “I need your cousin to connect him to one of the victims.”

  This answer delivers relief. Kane isn’t going to kill someone just to cover up Pocher’s murder. I know him. I know this man, and suddenly, transparency isn’t going to prove me wrong. “It’s there already. Several of them donated to my father’s campaign. I can connect the dots to link Pocher. I just haven’t figured out how they’re picking who Umbrella Man kills.”

  “Whoever is behind the murders can’t talk. We can’t let Umbrella Man tell his story. He can’t be arrested. He has to die.”

  “Don’t expect me to object. I won’t.”

  “You understand what knowing these things means for you, right? You understand the liability?”

  “We can’t be us, and you live two lives, Kane.”

  “If anything ever comes back on me, you
deny ever knowing anything. Promise me. Promise me that you’ll protect yourself.”

  “Kane—”

  “Promise me or I just told you the last thing I will ever tell you that crosses a line.”

  “Damn it,” I curse, squeezing my eyes shut. “Fine. Yes. I promise.” I look at him. “I promise.”

  He studies me a few beats and then says, “You’re going to kill Ghost and enjoy it?”

  My lips curve. “What did he say about that?”

  “That you’re a badass. I agreed.” His words are light, but there is something else there, something hesitant, something hard. “What aren’t you saying?”

  “There’s more. There’s something I need to tell you, and you aren’t going to like it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I fight the urge to stand up and face him, but that’s confrontational, and we’re on new ground here. He’s talking to me. This is what I asked for. “I’m listening,” I say.

  “I made some calls about the poison.”

  My heart starts to thunder in my ears, and I blurt out, “Beth found out what the poison is.”

  Words I’ve already spoken when I hate repeaters. Repeaters are usually liars, trying to validate a lie. In my case, some part of me is giving him a reason to stop now, before he goes too far.

  “But what you don’t know,” he says, “is where Umbrella Man got that poison.”

  “It would be a lab or a facility that makes paint or varnish. It’s—”

  His hand comes down on my leg. That touch and the intensity rolling off of him silences me. “I made some calls,” he repeats. “My uncle’s ‘company’ takes special requests for a hefty fee. He filled an order for barium acetate.”

  My breath lodges in my throat, and I push it out. “You supplied the drugs that killed all the victims?”

  “Not me, Lilah. I am not involved in what he does.”

  I stand up and face him now. “And yet, it was you who just went and calmed a war the cartel was about to erupt inside.”

  He stands up. “And you know the internal battle I had with the idea that I would have to take over, but you know me. Do you think I’d let that happen?”

  “I guess this is the elephant in the room for us, Kane. Drugs kill people all the time. Drugs that your family sells.”

  “I don’t want to be a part of this fucking world my father created, Lilah. You know that, like no one knows that. But they keep coming at me. They keep fucking coming. You were wrong when you said I can’t live two lives. I have no choice. You say you want to know about those lives. You say you want to be a part of them. Well, here’s your chance to change your mind. This can be it. From this point forward, you don’t have to know.”

  “I’ve always known. Pretending I don’t has always divided us.”

  “We feel pretty damn divided now, Lilah.”

  I shove a hand through my hair and grab my bag, “I just need to think right now. I need to figure out how to fix all of this.”

  “You need to fix it, Lilah? Just you? Not me? Not us?”

  “No. Yes. I need to go to Purgatory.”

  “Right.” His lips thin, voice hard. “Go to Purgatory.” He heads toward the bedroom door and disappears into the hallway, thunder rumbling the windows in his aftermath.

  I turn and walk into Purgatory, sit down on the floor and pull out my computer, the Soap Opera Digest, and a stack of paperwork. I then grab the notecards and set them in front of me, but I do nothing but stare at them. Literally, stare at them. I have a million things pounding at my mind, and I want to talk to Kane about them. I want to talk to Kane. I never talk to anyone but that man, and I can say anything to him. And I just made him feel like he can’t talk to me. And, holy fuck. I stand up. Did he leave? Did he go to meet Ghost? No. No, he couldn’t have left like this.

  I take off out of the room, and I don’t stop until I’m on the stairs and shouting, “Kane?! Kane?!” I charge down the stairs as he rounds the corner to the kitchen.

  I close the space between us and stop dead in my tracks, and damn it, I’m breathing hard. “I thought you went to meet Ghost.”

  His expression softens. The only time Kane Mendez softens is for me. That means something. “Not until seven, after dark.”

  My hands go to his chest. “I need you to figure out how to fix all of this. I need you, Kane.”

  He drags me to him and kisses me. “And I, Lilah, need you.”

  “Then don’t go meet Ghost.”

  “I’m going to meet Ghost.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I counter.

  “No.”

  “Kane—”

  “No, Lilah. For ten reasons, including your badge—no.”

  He’s a wall of words. He’s not going to take me. I know the battles I can win. I won’t win this one. “Then kill him before he kills you.”

  “If it comes to that, I will. I’m always ready.” The doorbell rings. “Pizza,” he says. “And a conversation about Roger in Purgatory.”

  “Roger?”

  “Yes. We never finished talking about Roger. I think we should.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Kane and I are quick to sit down on the floor of Purgatory, with our favorite chairs at our backs. We don’t immediately talk about Roger. For just a few minutes, we take a timeout and eat our damn pizza. A slice in, I ask, “Anything more on Jay?”

  “The same,” he says. “I told him to get well so I can kill him for acting like a scared little bitch who was afraid of me.”

  I laugh because he’s joking. “He wasn’t scared, not of what was in the alleyway. He was too damn much of a hero.”

  “Who overreacted because he was scared of me.”

  “Hmmm,” I finish off a slice while Kane does the same. “Why is that I wonder?”

  “I’m good to the people who work for me.”

  “Until they screw up,” I counter.

  “Letting you get hurt would be more than a screw-up.”

  “I can take care of myself.” I grab another slice and shift the topic. “What about Roger?”

  He shuts the pizza box and shoves his plate in a trashcan. “He gets under your skin. He always has.”

  “He was my mentor,” I argue. “I was learning from him, and he wanted fast results. Every second that I let pass, that a killer is free, is a chance for him to kill again. That’s my life. He was preparing me for that.”

  He angles in my direction. “There you go. He put that on you. Do it now, figure it out now, or someone dies. That’s a big load to carry.”

  “It’s part of the job.”

  “He made you feel like a damn killer, Lilah.”

  “Roger didn’t do that.”

  “He mentally had you in a place that set you up for where you landed emotionally after your attack.”

  “My attack alone did that to me.”

  “No,” he insists. “You’d come home from working with him, frustrated, unable to figure out a case.”

  “I was learning.”

  “You had a mental block with that man. Once you were home, in Purgatory, once you were in your own head, you solved the cases. Not me. Not him. He didn’t make you better, and he’s not making you better now.”

  I pull a knee to my chest, thinking about what I felt in that lab earlier. “You’re right. I felt that today when I was with him. There was something in my mind, and I just couldn’t reach in and pull it out. I still don’t know what it was. It’s like I have flipping daddy issues with that man. And with my own father, who didn’t even call after last night, and you know he knows what happened. He’s running for office in New York City.”

  “Roger and your father. The only two people in this world I’ve ever seen fuck with your head.”

  “And you,” I say. “You did, too.”

  “Your issue was not with me, but my name and what it represents. And it never stopped you from telling me to fuck off or putting me in my place.”

  I snort. “Like that’s poss
ible.”

  “You sure as hell think you can.”

  “Think?” I challenge.

  He doesn’t take the bait, pulling me back to his point. “With them, you hold back, Lilah.”

  “Daddy issues,” I concede again. “I get it. And apparently, so does the Society, since they used Roger to get me to the first crime scene, and Umbrella Man pulled the pig stunt at my father’s event.” I frown. “That was to screw with my head and get him press.” A bitter taste touches my tongue. “You saved me before they killed me after my attack. You denied them the sympathy votes they wanted for my father. They have to make them up now.” A vacuum of history starts to suck me under. Does my father know they intend to kill us? “God, I really do have daddy issues.” I try to get up.

  Kane catches my arm. “Lilah—”

  “Do not even think about fucking coddling me, Kane Mendez. I need to work. I need to find them. I need to kill all of these bastards. And I can bury my own bodies this time.”

  His eyes darken. “Can I get you a shovel or some coffee?”

  And just like that, my boiling point, which is at about an eight, rachets down to a four, and I laugh. “No shovel yet, but coffee would be lovely. See, since you’re being all proper and polite, I can say something other than fuck. And you can throw some manpower in my direction, too. I can’t use anyone in law enforcement.”

  He releases me. “Get Kit details on whatever you need. He’ll make it happen. What else?”

  My mind is back on Kane’s observation about Roger. “Roger keeps saying this is about him. I think they’re using his ego against him and me.”

  “Meaning what?”

  I stand up, and he moves to sit in the chair. I start to pace, pulling my thought all the way through, before I explain. “Roger has a thing for the new medical examiner who I’ve linked to the Society. Her brother works at a hospital that stocks barium, which is why I thought he might have supplied the drugs.”

  His lips tighten. “He didn’t.”

  “I know. I get it. I stepped in shit on that one, but that’s not the point. She was at a few events with Roger. They must have seen his interest in her. They also knew that if they involved him in this case, which explains the cigarette they left at the first crime scene, they needed to pull him into the investigation, so he’d know what I was doing on the case. They wanted to scare Beth away so that they could bring in Melanie and use her to extract information from him.”