The Temptation of Silence

by V. J. Chambers

Dawson did.

  Quickly, Destiny snipped her zip ties. “Lock him up,” Destiny breathed. She dropped the shears on the bed next to Dawson.

  Dawson rolled back over.

  Destiny was going out of the door.

  “Wait!” Dawson called after her.

  Destiny didn’t wait. She walked out the door without even glancing over her shoulder.

  Dawson looked down at Slater in a ball on the ground and then into Destiny’s wake. “Damn it.” She snatched up the shears and went for Slater. She put her knee into his back, forcing him to roll over, face into the carpet.

  Slater screamed in pain.

  She put the tip of the shears against his neck. “Stay where you are, Mr. Slater. You have the right to remain silent.”

  “Tiger,” said Slater. “Get the shears. Finish me.”

  Liam let out a laugh. “I’m still zip-tied here, Finn.”

  “Please,” said Slater. “If you ever cared about me, even a little. Kill me. I can’t go back to jail.”

  “Oh, you’re going back to jail, Mr. Slater,” said Dawson. She reached down and snatched up a handful of his shirt. “On your feet.”

  Slater groaned. “I can’t stand up.”

  “Stand up,” she said, “or I’ll stab you.”

  “He’s begging to be stabbed,” said Liam.

  “He’s begging for you to stab him,” said Dawson. “I bet he doesn’t want it to be me.”

  “Fuck,” said Slater, and he stood up.

  She fitted the tip of the shears to his jaw. “Okay, we’re going to go find a phone to call this in and some more zip ties to subdue you. Then I’ll come back and cut Liam free.” She nodded at him. “Sit tight.”

  “I knew you didn’t have a tracking device,” said Slater in a low voice.

  “Yes,” said Dawson. “You’re very smart.” She considered. “Well, except for in the way that you can’t stop killing people. That’s not very smart.”

  “Fuck you, Haysle,” said Slater.

  She only chuckled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Liam considered doing it anyway.

  Stabbing Finn, that is.

  After Finn was zip-tied, hand and feet, and bandaged, they all sat upstairs waiting for the police to come. Finn had kept them downstairs, in a bedroom with its own entrance. But they were more comfortable up here in the living room, where there were couches instead of beds to sit on.

  Liam sat there and thought about getting the shears and sticking them in Finn’s neck, about hot blood spurting over his hands and wrists and all over his shirt, about Finn gurgling and twitching and grunting, and then the light going out in Finn’s eyes.

  Finn gone.

  No more Finn.

  Or maybe Liam could shoot him. Finn’d had a gun up here, and Dawson had found it. She let it sit out on the coffee table, within her reach, but not in her grasp.

  Liam figured that he could get it and shoot Finn.

  Not because he was brainwashed and would do anything Finn wanted him to, but because Finn deserved it, and because Liam didn’t want there to be any chance that Finn would ever escape prison again.

  Well.

  He thought that was why.

  But there was a niggling doubt at the back of his brain that maybe he was brainwashed to do Finn’s bidding.

  Maybe that was why, in the end, he didn’t do it.

  The police came, and they took Finn into custody. He needed medical attention for his wounds, and Liam was terrified that he was going to escape from the hospital where perhaps the security wasn’t as good.

  But it didn’t happen. Finn was locked up in Delaware, because that was where he’d been apprehended. They had been in the house near Bethany Beach. He stayed in the local prison there for nearly a week before being transferred back to Virginia. It seemed that everyone was eager for Finn to be tried in Virginia instead, because Virginia had the death penalty, whereas Delaware did not.

  During the transfer, Liam was nervous as well. In the movies, serial killers always escaped during transfers from one prison to the other.

  But Finn made it to Virginia, and he was locked up in a different facility from the one where he’d been kept before. This one was an hour south of Cape Christopher. It had higher security, and no one who worked there had ever known Finn in any capacity other than as an inmate.

  Belinda and Madison moved back home. They no longer had police camped out outside their house or escorts to school or work.

  Liam spent an afternoon pouring out all the bottles of bourbon in his house. He filled a trash bag with glass bottles and took them to the dumpster—belatedly thinking he was probably killing the planet and should have recycled them.

  The point was, he had stopped drinking.

  At night, when he needed to fall asleep, he didn’t think of the dog crate where he’d been kept or of Finn or even of Destiny. He drifted off easily and gently. As if something inside himself, broken for all these years, had healed.

  And when Dawson said that Finn wanted to talk, but only if Liam was there, Liam turned it all down. No, he never wanted to speak to that man again in his life.

  * * *

  “He said no,” said Dawson, crossing her legs underneath the navy blue skirt she wore. She was sitting inside an interrogation room with Phineas Slater. And she wasn’t sure why she’d worn the skirt. She didn’t know what made her want to feel feminine in this room with him, what made her want to show him her smooth legs. She had shaved for him, for Slater, and put on this skirt suit. And his eyes on her… well, some part of her liked it.

  “No?” Slater repeated this. “He can’t have said no.”

  She shrugged, smiling at him. She’d put on lipstick, too. Why was that? “And yet he did.”

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “I assure you, Mr. Slater, I am not,” she said. “If you have something to say, you’ll have to say it to me.”

  Slater bowed his head. He had lost weight since coming back to prison. His handsome face had a gaunt appearance, and he seemed subdued in a way he’d never been before. His natural charisma was muted, but it wasn’t completely gone.

  “Do you have anything to say?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Slater muttered.

  “What was that?’

  Slater lifted his head, a defiant look on his face. “Destiny did it. Destiny did all of it, and she’s still out there, with her little group of sycophants, all waiting to be sacrificed for her pleasure.”

  Attempts to find Destiny Worth hadn’t gone too well, admittedly. Quentin, her brother, claimed he hadn’t seen her since 2004, though Dawson didn’t believe him. They were looking through that list of properties, but they were getting nowhere with it.

  “I could help you find her, Haysle.”

  “You can call me Detective Dawson,” she said sweetly.

  “I want a deal,” said Slater.

  “A deal?”

  “Take the death penalty off the table, and I’ll help you find Destiny Worth,” he said.

  She tilted her head to one side. “I thought you wanted to die, Mr. Slater. I thought you couldn’t handle being in prison.”

  “Make the deal happen, Haysle.” He gave her a nasty smile. “Don’t act as though you don’t want to find Destiny. I know you do.”

  She didn’t let anything show on her face, but she thought about the fact that she had gotten an email back in response to her inquiries about the self-help course. The email hadn’t answered any of her questions, however.

  It had said, simply, Take care of my boys. -D

  “And get him back here,” said Slater. “I need to see Liam.”

  She smoothed a hand over her knee. “I’ll see what I can do, Mr. Slater.”

  * * *

  Thanks for reading!

  The Phineas and Liam series will have two more books. For information on book three, click here.

  Finn and Liam first appear in book seven of the Wren Delacroix series. You can find that
book here, or the first book of that series here.

  By the way, I love to get reviews! I read each and every one.