Deadly Truths: Kiss Her Goodbye #3

by Royce, Rebecca

  Besides, if she did, I could get in again the same way I had before. You and I are done here. Move.”

  She shook her head. “What were you doing over there?”

  “Remembering my father. Move it. I’m not kidding. I regularly kill people. So unless you want to be the latest name on my murder list, you’re going to move your ass, now.”

  I didn’t know what made her move. I expected more argument from Alyssa. She’d never complied, not once, without having some lengthy discussion about it. Even after she made agreements, she seemed to forget what she said or compromised on. I really didn’t care. To have her just comply? It stank of manipulation.

  Still, I was getting what I wanted and that was what mattered. If I had to figure out how to out play whatever move this was later, then I’d do so.

  I’d get my guys, get back here and grab the things she shouldn’t see. Then we could go disappear somewhere. Somewhere Kade would hide us in the world. He was good at not being found. Alerted to Mercer, he wouldn’t be so easily found this time.

  Or maybe we could kill Mercer. I was holding a gun. Maybe it made me more bloodthirsty or maybe it came down to the fact that Mercer was an enemy. He wasn’t collateral damage.

  “You can’t pull that gun out on the street.” We’d stepped into the elevator and were heading back to street level. “I’m not going to fight you. We do need to go back to the apartment so I can show you something and tell you what happens next.”

  I hadn’t been wrong. She did think she was in charge even though I was armed and she wasn’t. Still, she was right. I put the gun under my shirt in my waist. It would be harder for her to grab it than it had been for me.

  She stared straight ahead. “Everly, I think you will find that you and I have more in common than we don’t. You can forgive me. You’re pragmatic enough to do so. When you see what is happening next, you’ll get on board. Just like your father did.” She turned to wink at me. “The Marrs family is smart and creative. You’ll get through this.”

  I hated her with a fury I’d have thought I saved solely for Ben. But then again, she was Ben’s creation and the mold he’d had to shape her with hadn’t been wonderful before that.

  She was a nightmare who’d been given shape to become a monster.

  I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t let my guys turn into the shells that were her men.

  The car we’d come in pulled up as we stepped outside like a scene from a movie while the sounds of Manhattan struck my ears. Taxis beeped their horns and somewhere in the distance sirens blared loudly. People walked and ran everywhere. A dog barked. Lights flashed to add to the extreme nature of the place. There was just enough sensory information in Manhattan to dull all my senses entirely. I couldn’t pick out all the details so my brain decided to focus on just one: Alyssa.

  She got in the car, and I was fast on her heels. I waited for her to give an address to the driver, but she didn’t. He must have known where we were going.

  “Try anything and I won’t kill you, I’ll injure you in a way you won’t recover from. Do you think you can lead the Alliance if you can’t walk? Or with one ear? They’re not real kind to people needing assistance, are they?”

  She looked out the window. “There’s no need to be dramatic, sweetheart. I’m giving you just what you wanted.”

  That was what was making me so nervous. Still, I kept my facial features neutral and said nothing. In silence, she might spill what was going on in her head.

  The sounds of sirens seemed to be getting louder and ahead I saw flashing lights. Where were we? I really didn’t know New York, and I looked for a street sign. I couldn’t see one because the street was blocked ahead by fire trucks with flashing lights.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t get through.” The man driving the car finally spoke. He had a British accent, which I might have found interesting if I didn’t want to know so desperately what was happening ahead.

  She nodded. “I know. Come along Everly. You’re going to want to see this.”

  “You know what this is?”

  Alyssa nodded. “That building that’s burning up ahead? That was Mercer’s home. I set it ablaze. Well, Bryce, the man driving the car, he did that for me. I’m afraid sometimes you have to cut your losses and move on.”

  I ran after her. “What?”

  “You’re in shock, understandable.” The car we’d just gotten out of blew up. The sound hit me as hard as the heat, which knocked me into Alyssa. She held me close like we were friends and she had every right to do so.

  My mouth fell open as my ears rang. People rushed onto the street. This had to look like terrorism and it was… in its own, different way. “I don’t understand,” I hollered at her.

  “We don’t need them at all, Everly. The Alliance doesn’t need another man or one female behind the scenes. It needs me. It needs you. I killed them. My brother. My husband. My lovers. Your lovers. They’re all gone. Set to blow up and then I killed the man who made that happen. There is no one now but you and me. It can be just me, but I don’t want that. Be my sister, Everly. We can rule. It’s a dawn in the Alliance. Or I can kill you and you can join those five pathetic souls you opted to waste so much time with.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and I stared at the blaze in the building ahead. I didn’t have to listen. She was a huge liar. And yet I did… she’d blown this up. I’d let her into my father’s locker, and she’d killed all of them.

  I cried out, a sob wracking my body.

  This woman who had killed my loves had hurt them so many ways. It wasn’t enough that I hit her in the eye, but I did it, consciously and with thought. She’d given Derrick a black eye. It mattered that she get one, too. Alyssa stepped back, taking two steps like she was stunned I’d just decked her. My hand ached. I’d never really learned how to properly throw a punch.

  They were dead.

  Red descended over my vision.

  I didn’t remember firing the gun right into her head. But that was what I did. Time seemed to still and then catch up to me.

  The truth was… you couldn’t fire a gun on the Upper East Side into a woman’s head with a million cameras watching. Not without someone seeing.

  Not without Kade alive to fix it.

  I didn’t even care. Tears streamed down my face, and I stood there waiting for someone to come do something about the woman dead on the street. The woman I hadn’t even considered not killing.

  She’d taken what was mine.

  I dropped the gun on the ground, and I waited. For whatever was coming next. There was no life left for me. They’d all burned to death while I’d foolishly thought I could get us out of this mess.

  I’d never been equipped. I was just a foolish girl who’d led five men to their deaths. When the rain pelted down on my head it felt appropriate, but that was all I could feel.

  20

  I went through the steps of being arrested fairly silently. Having dropped the gun to my side, I wasn’t a threat to anyone, and I’d let them put the handcuffs on me without giving anyone a hard time. The question was what I was going to do now, and in the end, what I decided to do hadn’t even really been a choice.

  Everyone I loved was dead. Alyssa could have been lying. I wasn’t stupid. I’d not seen bodies. Warden hadn’t been hauled out, his body black and charred on a stretcher. I hadn’t watched them trying to revive Trace from smoke inhalation. She might have been lying. But she wasn’t. She’d killed all of them. Her brother. Her husband. All of the men she’d been sleeping with. All of my loves. They were all dead.

  Well… almost all of them. I stared at the face of the detective speaking to me, fairly certain he was Alliance, and what was more, he was one of Alyssa’s men. The worst kept secret in the world must have been that Judson’s sister was alive. Or maybe not. Alliance men were great at secrets.

  I waited for others to come in, to join the interrogation. As far as I could tell there weren’t any cameras on me or a two-way
mirror, although I couldn’t be sure since those things were meant to be hidden by design.

  This man who gave me no name glared at me across the table. His hand tapped on it hard. “I didn’t blow up the car or burn down that building.”

  “I know you didn’t. He shook his head. “But you did… you are a killer.”

  “I am.” And just like that I was sure my hunch had been right. He was Alliance, and he was Alyssa’s. If I lived another day, I might see Alyssa everywhere I looked, but I strongly suspected this was my last day on the planet.

  Feeling that way, it was freeing in a disastrous, monstrous, miserable way that left me to feel like I would never not know the pit of despair that meant the Letters had left this world. “I’ve killed a lot of people actually.” I tapped the table. “Write this down. I’m confessing. That’s something that will be helpful to you, right? A confession.”

  I wasn’t thinking clearly and yet this felt like absolutely the right track. They were dead. There had to be accounting for what happened—for all the things that happened—and I had to be punished for them. The Letters were dead because I hadn’t been able to outthink Alyssa, because I’d left them alone, and thought I could manage a psycho woman who had been out for death. They’d tried to warn me, and I’d discounted them.

  At what point had I decided that I knew better than everyone else?

  At what point had my decision making become so poor?

  I wiped the lone tear rolling down my cheek, and after a second, I tapped the table again. “Get a recording device or write this down. I’m making this easy on you.”

  He tilted his head to the side. “What was it that they even liked about you?”

  I leaned forward. “I give a fantastic blow job. That’s what Alyssa did right?” I held up my hand. “Never mind. Just write this down. You need this to go away, and you want to get rid of me. So listen up or write it down.”

  He set his phone down in front of me. I highly doubted this was protocol but then nothing about this would be. When this was over, it wouldn’t be the police or the FBI or anyone in law enforcement who took me down. It would be the Alliance, and before that happened I had to confess. I had to say aloud my truths so the universe could hear them… and if that didn’t make a hill of a difference, then so be it I would still hear the words with my own voice. I would acknowledge my truth.

  “I’ve killed a lot of people.” Alliance man wasn’t stopping me so no one else could be listening. “My first time was in a surgery center in San Diego. I took out two of your Alliance assassins.” My throat threatened to close up, and my eyes burned. These were hard words to say. “They came when Derrick Norris was waking up from surgery. That was just the first time.”

  * * *

  I’d confessed all my truths to a man who should have turned around and used them against me. Instead, I sat alone in a cell with someone bringing me three meals a day and otherwise leaving me alone. This was strange, disconcerting, and didn’t make any sense to me. I rubbed my eyes. Maybe he was setting me up to be killed in a terrible way.

  I pulled my knees to my chest and held back the tears that threatened. Ever since I’d said the words, told him and the universe what I’d done, I’d been on the verge of hysteria. One sharp remark, one badly spoken word, and I was going to lose my shit.

  I missed the Letters so acutely I could hardly breathe through it. The other times we’d been apart from each other had been different. The obvious change being they’d not been dead. I rubbed my eyes, a headache forming. But even beyond that huge fact, the first time I’d doubted them and thought they harmed me. The second was that it had been my choice to leave.

  Now, I was responsible for them being completely gone from the universe. There would never be a chance to hear them breathe at night. I hadn’t realized how much I loved that, how differently they all slept, how it felt to be alone with one or in a bed with two or more of them.

  I’d been privileged to have so much love and was shattered that it was done.

  I really wished the Alliance would be done with me. Get it over with. Maybe if there was an afterlife, good or bad, I could join them there. And if there wasn’t, that was fine too. I’d prefer nothing to…

  The door opened to this small room where I’d spent the last two days, and I got off the cot. It wasn’t the man I’d been speaking to. I didn’t even know his name although he’d told it to me. To me, he was Mister Alliance. This new person was… wearing a cheap brown suit and a tie that was halfway down his chest.

  I swallowed. He looked different from any other Alliance man I’d seen. They were always flawlessly put together in expensive clothing. Even my father lived that way.

  “Ms. Marrs, come with me.”

  I took a deep breath. So here it was. The next step of whatever would be. My hands shook, and I put them in the pockets of my jeans. I didn’t know how many days I’d been in these clothes with all of the air travel. Four days? Five? I had to stink to high hell, but it didn’t matter.

  I followed the man from the room. My limbs didn’t want to work. Every step I took seemed harder than the one before it. This wasn’t terror, this was grief. The knowledge struck me hard. I’d mourned my father but my feelings had been mixed up in a bowl filled with anger and betrayal. This was different. I’d stepped out of the room into a world where five people I loved more than I did anything else were no longer breathing.

  He motioned toward the front of the building, and I stopped walking. The man in the brown suit pointed at the door. Crowds of people wandered around us, living their lives, doing whatever they did at this jail. I didn’t even know where I was.

  They couldn’t possibly be letting me go. I’d confessed to murder. A lot. I’d told them all the things I did. Mr. Alliance had loved Alyssa and…

  I stared at Brown Suit. “What’s going to happen to me when I go out there? Couldn’t you just… put something in my coffee? Will it hurt?”

  He lifted his eyebrows slowly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re being released. You’re free to go.”

  Brown Suit wasn’t Alliance. He really didn’t know. I rubbed my arms. “Okay. Thanks. Have a… nice day.”

  That was a ridiculous thing to say but I did tend to fall back onto manners when I didn’t know what else to do. The sun shone in the clouds, a stark contrast to my mood as I stepped out onto the Manhattan street. I had no phone—they’d not given it back to me—or money. All of that seemed out of the ordinary. I should have gotten all of that back, but it was more like they were acting like I’d never been in there at all.

  I looked around. I could go back to Destin if I could figure out how to get there. That was my home. Kade had bought it for me. And…

  I saw Mister Alliance striding down the street toward me. It shouldn’t be possible to be shot outside a jail in the middle of the day in Manhattan, but I knew even before he lifted his arm that was about to happen. I had no way to defend myself, no weapon, and nowhere to go.

  I just had to hope that no one else got hurt.

  It was the explosion of red on the man’s head as he fell backward into the street that alerted me he’d been shot and not me. I whirled around. A car screeched to a stop next to me, and the door flung open on the side of the backseat, facing me.

  “Evy, get in.”

  * * *

  Trace

  Forty-eight hours earlier

  “We are seriously fucked.” I looked at the five guys I’d somehow agreed to share Everly with. We all loved her, and I’d never ask her to choose. Why would I do that when it was taking all five of us to keep this woman we adored alive and well? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Judson held out his hand. “Let’s not get crazy. She’s in the police station. They caught her… shooting my sister.” He shook his head. “That’s not important right now. We need to focus. She’s with the cops. We have easily gotten people out of the hands of the police before. Kade changed the video. Our people do what they do. She’s home
to us in twelve hours. We’ll feed her, and Warden will get some great wine and the whole thing can feel like it never happened.”

  He wasn’t wrong. That’s how we could have done this five years ago—hell, five months ago. Five weeks ago, maybe. But now? “We don’t have any power. We don’t have people, and we can’t get her out without either of those things. Besides, I could be wrong, but the police here have always been filled with Alliance. Maybe some of them are your sister’s goons. I don’t accept that they all just blew up in that apartment.”

  By the end of my little speech, I shouted. I wasn’t particularly angry with Judson, although I’d have loved it if he could suddenly get back into his sharp, lethal, leadership mindset and out of the holy-shit-my-life-has-been-a-lie version of him that had been present the last days. Not that I could blame him. If my dead father appeared here right now, it would throw me for a loop. He had never turned from Everly, and for that, I was grateful.

  We’d gotten out after killing everyone in that apartment. I had to give Derrick credit, he really did know how to disarm people, and I’d taken out three of them myself just using the chair I’d been sitting in. Almost as soon as we were out, the whole building had gone up in flames. I’d never doubt Kade’s intuition again.

  He was quiet. Our resident tech expert had ended up hand to hand in a death struggle with Mercer. I was glad for him that was over. Warden wasn’t saying much either. In fact, they’d all gone silent.

  This was such a screwed up situation. We’d run to the vault to grab Everly, only to find she wasn’t there. Coming back in time to see her loaded into a police car put a period on this day.

  “There’s a solution.” If the others couldn’t see it, then I would.

  Derrick ran a hand through his hair. “Does it include me having to go into that police station and kill all the Alliance members? I ask because I am recognizable, and I imagine there is even a limit to what Kade can cover. I’m not saying I won’t do it. I will.”