Page 125 of Temptation
He was still holding her when the Feds arrived. When the other deputies arrived…
When Sloane whispered what Adam had confessed into Preston’s ear, when she told him that Adam had been his brother, Preston was still holding her.
In fact, he just held her tighter.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mud dripped onto the coffin. Into it as he clawed at the wood, fighting desperately to pry those slabs off the top. To get inside. His fingernails ripped. His hands bled.
He broke the wood. Tossed it aside.
The rain fell down. The mud fell down…into the coffin.
Onto her.
Sloane was in the coffin. Still. Pale. Dead.
Because he’d been too late. He’d lost her.
“Sloane!” Preston jerked upright in bed, his heart racing. That stupid vision—that tormenting, fucking nightmare still vivid in his head.
“I’m here.” She sat up beside him. Her arms wrapped around him. Her sweet strawberry scent filled his nose as her soft skin pressed to him. “We’re both here. We’re safe. It’s over.”
A shudder ripped through his body.
Her lips brushed against his shoulder. A tender kiss. “Were you back there?” she whispered, voice careful. “Were you back in the coffin?”
His head turned toward her. A soft glow came from the lamp in the corner. They were in his house. In his bedroom. Five days had passed since he’d killed Adam East in the woods. Not that Adam East had even been his real name.
Adam East and Eugene Calvin had both died that day. Sloane had survived, but the image of her death tormented him. He hadn’t told her that, not yet. He didn’t tell her that each time he closed his eyes, she died and that he lived in hell.
“You aren’t going back.” Another brush of her lips against him. “Not ever. It’s over.”
It was. Adam’s body was cold at the coroner’s office. So was Eugene’s. Both shoved in the storage drawers where Debra had once been trapped. Debra, meanwhile, was better. Home from the hospital. Furious that one of her own deputies had been involved in the crimes that had rattled her town.
There were more dead victims. So many more. Not in North Carolina but spread throughout the country.
Sloane’s friend Josie had found the online chat room used by both Adam and Eugene on the dark web. She’d been able to dig up their messages. Able to see the pictures that Adam had shared. From those pictures, she was trying to use background images—images from the woods, details embedded in the pictures themselves—in order to search for the other victims.
Two additional victims had already been found in California. And those victims? Adam had carved their initials into trees near their graves. His calling card, of sorts.
He’d done the same thing for Bridget Russell. Once the storm finally cleared completely and the roads dried up, the FBI had found a tree with BR carved roughly into the wood. That tree had been about fifteen feet from Bridget’s grave.
The FBI believed that Adam East had been copying the work of the Last Breath Killer for a very, very long time. He’d murdered far more people than the original monster.
And he was my brother.
“Preston?” Her fingers swept lightly over his arm. “It is over.”
He wasn’t sure about that. Evil was in him. Surging through his veins. Like father, like son. She knew about his demons, and yet she was still with him. Still in his bed. The covers were tangled around his feet. The air feeling too tight and too hot in that room.
“You’re not trapped,” Sloane told him. She pulled her hands from his body, as if she feared that just the pressure of her touch against him might be setting him off. Making him feel like the walls were closing in.
His hand flew out and caught hers. Her touch never made him panic. Her touch was the one thing in the world that soothed him. “The nightmares aren’t about me.” Finally, a confession to her. Because it was time for him to confess. “They’re about you.”
“Me?”
He had to get them out of there. Naked, Preston rose from the bed. She’d put on one of his white t-shirts, and it swallowed her. His hands reached out as she sat in the middle of the bed, and he scooped her into his arms.
