It had been nearly twenty minutes since Cole had called—surely he wouldn’t be much longer. “Rob—” She opened her mouth to keep the conversation going, but he interrupted her with a scream that was so filled with rage and insanity that it turned her blood ice-cold in an instant.
“Sorry doesn’t work, Genevieve! Nothing will ever work again.” And then he was reaching for one of the candles he’d lit and set by the bed. Holding it over her stomach and tilting it, so that the searing-hot wax splashed onto her skin.
She couldn’t stop the whimper from escaping, her body jerking wildly against the restraints as agony razed her nerve endings.
“Tsk, tsk. I expected better from the Ice Queen. But you’re just like the others—nothing but a weak little whore.” Chastian’s voice was back to that insane singsong, the one that made her blood run completely cold. When he was rational—or at least as rational as he could get—it wasn’t so bad. At least she could keep him talking, could distract him.
But when he was like this … she shuddered. When he was like this, all she could do was pray to survive whatever he had planned.
Just a little longer, she told herself. Hold out a little longer, and they will find me. And Chastian would be dead—if not by her hand, then by the hand of one of her friends.
That thought was the only thing that kept her sane.
But when Chastian unbuttoned his pants and climbed onto the bed next to her, her brain shut down. Disconnected. All the warnings that she’d given herself just disappeared as panic, deep and overwhelming, set in.
She could handle the pain—both emotional and physical. She could deal with the fact that her boss was actually a psychopath bent on her destruction. She could accept all of that. But she could not, would not, die with him inside of her, in a macabre mockery of what she and Cole had shared.
She would rather he kill her now—right now—than live through him killing her as he raped her. She looked into his eyes and knew that this was it; he wasn’t going to wait much longer. He was as aware of the clock ticking down as she was, knew that it was now or never.
She was determined that it would be never.
* * *
Fear, urgent and uncontrollable, rocketed through Cole as he sat in the police car next to Roberto Torres. They hadn’t been able to find Shawn, didn’t know if he was lying injured somewhere or if he was dead.
But Genevieve’s phone was department-issued, and as such was equipped with a GPS chip that let them find her anywhere. According to Roberto, she was still in the house on Burgundy where he’d left her—or at least her phone was.
Hurry up, he urged the cop silently. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. It had already been almost half an hour since that psychopath had answered her phone. Genevieve couldn’t last much longer—he didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. No matter how hard he tried to tell himself it was just fear talking, he knew it was the truth. It was almost like he could feel her spirit weakening despite the fight he knew she was putting up.
“Can’t you go faster?” he demanded.
“Not without running over a damn pedestrian!” Torres answered grimly. They were going in quiet, sirens silent. They hadn’t called for backup, not yet. Roberto had wanted to see if there was anything to Cole’s wild accusations.
“Open the glove compartment.” Roberto’s voice was clipped. “There’s a gun in there. Do you know how to shoot?”
He grabbed the gun, relieved by its comfortable familiarity in his hand. But all he said was, “Yeah.”
“Don’t use it unless you have to.”
He nodded, though he knew he would do whatever it took to keep Genevieve safe. If that meant killing this bastard in cold blood, he would do it, and to hell with the consequences. His woman was more than worth it.
Roberto pulled up to the curb, and Cole was out of the car before it even stopped, running toward the house as fast as he could. All he could think of was getting to Genevieve, of holding her in his arms, of never letting her go again.
“Stop!” Roberto yelled, but he didn’t listen. He couldn’t. He was too far gone, images of Samantha dancing in his head, Genevieve’s face superimposed over her mutilated body.
He couldn’t lose Genevieve, he just couldn’t.
Suddenly, he was flying through the air, taken down by a running tackle from Roberto. He rolled, pulled back a fist and prepared to land it in the other man’s face.
“You’re going to get her killed! You just can’t go running in there like—”
Suddenly, a high-pitched scream, in a voice he recognized immediately as Genevieve’s, rent the air. The cop must have drawn the same conclusion, because he stopped fighting him and started moving—silently and low to the ground—around the house.
The side door was open and they slipped inside, more quietly than Cole would have dreamed possible. Roberto gestured for Cole to follow him and he did, even though everything inside of him strained to get to Genevieve as quickly as possible.
Another scream ripped through the house, had him clenching his teeth and shuddering. “Where is she?” he demanded between clenched teeth, his voice almost silent despite the torment ripping him apart with needle-thin claws.Torres pointed at the hallway and they crept down it, keeping as low as possible. Horror was a sickness inside of him, twisting his stomach into knots as the need to get to Genevieve ripped into him. Only the knowledge that she was still alive kept him sane.
“Just go ahead and kill me, then!” Her voice came loud and clear down the narrow hallway, had him and Roberto freezing in their tracks. “Do it! I’d rather die than spend one second of the life I have left with you inside me!”
For one long second, time stood still. He and Roberto stared at each other in terror, the long hallway looming in front of them as they both wondered if there was any way they could get to her in time.
And then they were running full-out, desperate to reach Genevieve before it was too late. A low scream of insane rage echoed down the hallway, chilled his blood. Nearly stopped his heart.
They all but flew into the room, guns drawn.
“Freeze!” Roberto shouted, but he was too late. Genevieve’s lieutenant was on the bed, hovering over her naked, spread-eagled form, a long knife clutched in one hand as he hung, poised, over her heart.
Cole took aim without being aware that he did so, squeezed the trigger one, two, three times. Watched as the bastard’s body jerked from the impact of the bullets before falling, lifeless, on top of Genevieve.
For long seconds nobody moved, and then she shouted, “Get him off, get him off! Oh, God, Cole, get him off!”
Chapter Twenty-five
Genevieve shut down her computer with a sigh. It was well past nine o’clock, and she was exhausted—she and Roberto and Luc had been tying up loose ends for nearly twenty-four hours. And not once, in all that time, had she heard from Cole.
Roberto had brought him into the station after the shooting, had let Luc take his statement to keep things as clean as possible. But with both her and Shawn at the hospital, the questioning had been a mere formality. Cole had saved both of their lives, and the entire department knew it. As it was, Shawn was still in the hospital with a concussion, and the doctor had let her go only after it became apparent that keeping her was making her more upset. She was injured, but not so severely that she it demanded a hospital stay.
Besides, she’d needed to see this thing through, had needed to help finish the investigation that had nearly cost her her life.
By the time she’d gotten to the station, Cole was gone—and no matter how many times she called him, she couldn’t get him on the phone.
She knew he was shaken up, knew that seeing her strapped down like that had put an image in his head of his sister in the same position. Still, she’d expected him to call her or to answer the hundred and one phone calls she’d given him. But he hadn’t; had, in fact, sent each of her calls directly to voice mail.
He was brooding, trying to come to terms with the idea that he’d done all this and still hadn’t found Samantha’s killer. Roberto and Torres had called him right after they had gotten back from Chastian’s house, had told him that there was no evidence Chastian had murdered his sister. They’d also told him that they weren’t giving up, that—with Genevieve—they would work the case again, from the ground up.
He’d seemed to accept that, but then her still-shaken friends had blown it. They’d told him of the pictures of him they’d found in Chastian’s apartment, of the plans Chastian had had to murder Genevieve and frame Cole for her murder, and the other ones as well. With his bloody history, he’d seemed the perfect fall guy.
According to Roberto, Cole hadn’t said a word when they’d told him. He’d simply hung up the phone without a fuss. But no one had heard from him since.
She’d started out being understanding—after all, he’d done everything imaginable to find his sister’s killer and his single-minded attention had ended up attracting another psychopath, one with an agenda that had threatened his current lover. That had to be hard to swallow—that all the time he thought he’d been in control, someone else had been pulling the strings.
But after a few hours had gone by, she’d progressed to worried and had now hit downright pissed. He had no right to ignore her like this, not after he’d rushed to her rescue and saved her life in such a dramatic fashion. And from such a monster.
When Roberto and Luc had raided Chastian’s house, they’d found every sick and twisted thing imaginable. Photos of the each of his victims as he was torturing them, mementos from each of his murders—and there had been a lot of them. In Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Nearly seventy-five girls through the years, and he’d kept pictures and personal items from each of them.
They’d been so shocked at what they’d found that they’d barely been able to get through the evidence, let alone censor their thoughts. Luc had let it spill that there had also been a slew of pictures of Genevieve, along with a few things she’d thought she’d lost through the years—a gold earring, a scarf, a couple of books, including a collection of Tennessee Williams plays.
The whole place—walls, ceilings, every available space—had been plastered with pictures of women being hurt. Roberto had sworn he’d never seen anything as disturbing in his entire life. Luc kept muttering that he didn’t see how it was possible that they’d worked for Chastian for so long—for years—without ever figuring out what a sick bastard he really was.
The entire squad room—hell, the whole precinct—was in shock. Chastian had received numerous commendations through the years, and the idea that he had come to work every day, had talked and laughed and joked with them when he was torturing and killing women on the side, seemed too much for many of the cops to accept.
Genevieve was having the easiest time believing it, but then, she’d gotten a chance to meet his psychoses up close and personal. She couldn’t stop the shudder that ripped through her. And she prayed that she would never have to live through something like that again.
But looking on the bright side—if there was one—at least it was finally over. Case closed. Chastian was dead, the paperwork was finished and she was dying to get to her lover. Only now she wasn’t so sure that he felt the same way about her.
Genevieve slowly gathered up her belongings as she pondered what to do—how to shake Cole out of whatever self-imposed funk he’d descended into. How to show him that losing control wasn’t always the terrible thing he thought it was.
Somewhere between her desk and the front door, the solution finally hit her.
* * *
Cole woke from a fitful sleep—one filled with nightmares and what-could-have-beens—to find his arms stretched above his head. With a groan, he started to roll over, only to find that he couldn’t move.