Page 15 of Billionaire Bodyguard Summer

The cacophony of noise in my head filters its way down to three little words:

Youkilled him.

I run from room to room. In the kitchen, the walls are painted in blood. It isn’t all his,please, I want to beg God, but ever since Nicole’s body turned up on a gorgeous day in September all those years ago I can’t believe that God answers prayers. My eyes settle on the pieces of the broken tequila bottle he’d cleaned up, and I imagine Armin holding his own, slicing up Harvey’s loser henchmen with ease.

But I pick out the image of his handprint trailing down the wall. I know it’s his; my mind conjures up the memory of that hand on me, and my eyes prick with tears. The needle is gone, some part of my mind trumpets, the FBI training in crime-scene minutia. The one I used to pick the glass out of his foot.

I can only hope he palmed it, and is sticking it in Harvey’s eye right now.

I call everybody: Johnson, Stiggy, the team lead, even Rochelle back at the office in Syracuse. I pretend to be calm, collected. Routine call. Just wrapping up the latest facts for the legal package. But nobody’s got a hit on where Harvey might be now.

Or maybe they’ve decided Armin is the sacrificial lamb to wrap up this investigation, to tie it in a blood-covered bow for the prosecutors. Why not offer an ex-sheriff as the last charge on the list?

This last thought blots out all the others, and I hang up on Rochelle in the middle of her irrelevant chit-chat, screaming inside my own mind, and I call Sunbreak Security.

eleven

. . .

Armin

I reach for Mia again,but she’s just outside my grasp. As usual.

She clubs me hard in the ribs, a blunt and crushing blow that knocks me breathless.

I’m surprised. She could get fierce, especially during sex, but this is over the top, even for her.

I snap my eyes open. Only one does the trick. A white hot spark fires off in the other eye.

Swollen shut. I reach to touch it, but the reaching was only an unconscious illusion.

So was Mia.

My arms are restrained behind me. I pivot my head around in the direction of the blow. It’s not easy, nothing is. I see the shadow of a man way in my periphery, like he’s hiding. There’s a backroom chatter, too, from somewhere behind me.

Is Mia here, though? Have they hurt her? Panic floods me, and I swivel my head in all directions to find her despite the pain tearing through my neck and head.

I’m tied to a chair in the middle of a warehouse, dark and rusted, surrounded by the smell of saltwater rotting metal for years and years.

My lacerations from the initial attack in Mia’s apartment have mostly clotted up, except for the mean gash down my leg, still oozing and raw. The cheap tequila bottle damaged the other guy more than me.

You should see the other guy, I imagine telling her.

And then I remember my original thought: is she here? Where is she? Is she safe?

I hadn’t managed to get a warning out to her or to the office before they laid me out in the kitchen.

“Who you looking for, Sheriff?”

Another voice from the shadows. This one I recognize.Harvey.

“His girlfriend.”

I scan the darkness.

“Oh. He doesn’t know.” Harvey steps forward, into the light. He’s unscathed, of course. No, Harvey Blagas wouldn’t be on the front lines of his own crimes. No sign of whoever I cut up in Mia’s kitchen.

I lunge forward in the chair before I can stop myself. “Knowwhat, you bastard?” My voice is choked, suffocated, but I don’t care. If he’s killed her, I’ll kill him. I’ll find a way.