Page 88 of Z For Butterfly Man
“Save me.”
“How? Insert a tracking chip in the back of your neck to know where you are when he abducts you?” I mock.
“That’s not a bad idea. It’s a very good one. Actually… I looked into covert body trackers and found the perfect way. We can hide it in a birth control implant. He won’t figure it out. The implant casing reads as a standard contraceptive on any scan.” She explains with the conviction of someone who has spent months researching it, and I stand in my living room listening to her and feeling something move through me that is equal parts awe and terror and the specific helpless fury of loving someone who is always three steps ahead of everyone including you.
“Reagan…” I throw my hands in the air in exasperation. “You said he was ex-military, and he has an upscale security company. That means he’s wealthy. A man like this, military background, surveillance training, he will have equipment you can’t anticipate. He could have tech and high-grade blockers even we don’t have. There are jammers that block cell service and tracking devices and—”
“I know.”
“Then the whole plan falls apart the second he—”
“I know.” She gets up and moves toward me. Her palm touches my cheek gently. “It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.”
“I’m not.” The words come out before I’ve decided to say them, and they come out with more in them than I intend, morevolume, more rawness. “I can’t. I’m not gonna stand somewhere on an island waiting for a tracker that might not work while a killer with military training and eight years of obsession does whatever he wants to you.”
“You think I don’t know what he’d do to me? Believe me, I do, but whatever it is, I’ve seen worse. Way worse. But I’ve survived.” Her voice is quiet and absolute. “I’ve survived things that would have ended most people, and I am still standing, right here in your living room, writing my own story with the ending I need to survive again because that’s what I do.
“I need Blake gone. The stalker wants to be my hero. I’ll give him the opportunity,” she says unapologetically. “I just need you to be on Martha’s Vineyard, on the force there. Because when it escalates, and it will, I need someone on the inside who can move the investigation the way it’s needed. Give him room to operate. He’ll kill Blake, and then you can take him legally. Two birds.
“As for the kidnapping part, if the signal is blocked, you can follow him. He’ll lead you to me. Like I said, men like Blake, like Zacarías, are very predictable. How do you think I write them so easily?”
Before I say anything, she goes to her purse again and gives me a thumb drive. “I’ve run all possible scenarios, written every plotline I can think of. Every move the stalker makes, I’ve countered it but only with your help.”
“Reagan, please, I want to help you, but what you’re proposing isn’t a solution.”
“Do you have a better one?”
“Yes. Stay. Stay here with me. Let me protect you. Let me build a case against Blake through proper—”
“There are no proper channels for men like Blake.” Something darkens her expression, something older and harder than anger and pain and betrayal. She picks up her purse. Hershoes are already on. “They both need to die,” she says as a matter of fact. “Blake and Zacarías. It is the only ending where I get to live. You know it and I know it, and the only question is whether you’re going to help me or not.”
CHAPTER 40
Tristan
“He said no. That’s how good he was. An honorable man with a moral compass that always pointed north. But eventually he came. He broke his own rules and showed up. When I saw him that day at Sweet Home, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I even doubted him. I thought he worked for Blake because I didn’t believe there was still good in men. Even when I was on that horrible table, when I knew it was you holding me, I doubted him again, suspected he had a secret agenda of his own. But RJ did no such thing. He was there for me. He helped me all the way just because he loved me.”
All this time, I’ve been a pawn in her game. A character that is never meant to survive.
“And now he’s dead because of me. Because I told him to follow you to save me.” She’s crying again. For him. Her real tears are only for him. “I should have never dragged him into my life. I didn’t deserve him.”
I lunge at her, squeezing the scream in her throat. “You don’t deserve him? You don’t deserve ME!”
Her eyes bulge as her free hand scratches at mine.
“Abel wasn’t lying. Everything he said about you, how you use men, how you twist them around your fingers until they’re willing to destroy themselves for you. And then you discard them when you’re done. Abel knew exactly what you were capable of. I didn’t want to believe him, but here we are. Before he died, he told me that Shane was your brother. He told meabout Mason, how he died, how he killed him for you in prison, just like I killed Shane. Abel took his last breath laughing at me because he knew I was next.”
“Take your hands off my throat,” she rasps.
“Eight years,” I spit. “Eight fucking years I’ve devoted to you. Every choice I made was for you. Do you understand that? Even my father… I only summoned the courage to end him because of you. I wanted to be a man who wasn’t afraid anymore, for you. I killed West to show you I could be strong enough to protect you, and when that didn’t work, when you married Abel anyway, I joined the military to be stronger, made something out of my life to be richer, to be someone worthy of you, and all this time, you were writing me as the villain who was bound to die to make room for your happily ever after with the hero.”
“You’re…going…to kill me,” she chokes, her arms flailing. “Stop.”
Her face turns blue, and it plays in my head in high definition, the ending I’ve been pushing away. Reagan’s last breath. Her vacant eyes. Her cold, limp body. The things I’d do to her even after death.
You don’t deserve peace, either. No. I’m not done with you, yet.I release her throat.
A wild gasp bursts out of her. “Tristan—”
