Page 96 of Ravaged Devotion

“No,” the lie came easily enough. Rue was capable of anything if it meant protecting Ryker. “I didn’t have enough time to really look through it. The monster came after me and I had to hide.”

“Holy shit, seriously?” Lenore grabbed onto his shoulder, but Rue eased her off.

“Ryker found me. Nothing happened. And Uriel and Ellery are planning on killing it. We just have to wait it out. This place is big, but not that big. They’ll encounter it eventually.”

“That’ll take care of the one inside,” she agreed, “but what about the ones out there? This is crazy, Rue. To think that someone put this whole thing together? To what end?”

“I don’t know.”

The speaker idea wasn’t a bad one though. Ryker and the other Black Harts must have discussed it while they’d been in the pool house and come up with that theory. It could still be correct. Someone in here could easily program a speaker placed on those monsters, the same way Ellery’s multi-slate had connected with the speaker they’d tossed outside.

Then it was just a matter of them having recorded their voices and taken the time to mess with the audio files. Whoever it was wouldn’t even need to be around.

Or, if they were around, they would only have to hit a single button on their multi-slates, or whatever other device they were using to send the files, and then act shocked right along with the rest of them when the familiar voices came through the window.

“Everyone was chatting on the drive here,” Rue recalled. “It would have been the perfect time to record us and capture our voices for later use.”

From there, it was relatively easy to figure out.

Everyone had known Ryker was on final guard duty that first night, so all the culprit had to do was program Uriel’s voice. Making him call his name added a dash of reality and personalization to it. If Ryker had opened that door, the creature would have eaten him and broken in, causing more mayhem a lot sooner.

The situation in the kitchen was no different. Despite the way Ishleen kept flirting with his man, everyone knew what was between Rue and the Black Hart. It would be impossible to ignore after the way Ryker had carried him off as soon as his mom had died.

The thing Rue didn’t know was what voice had been used to convince Jesse to let that thing inside. Maybe there hadn’t been one at all. Perhaps he’d originally been in on it but had lost control of the situation. The details there didn’t really matter. It still fit within his hypothesis.

“A program that can copy us that effectively only after a few stolen voice snippets would be expensive. All of this would have taken money. Lots of it. And influence.” Lenore stared at him pointedly. “We both know what that means.”

“You think it was Rhys.” Rue couldn’t say he hadn’t considered that himself, more than once.

“The Harts are the most powerful family on the planet. If it wasn’t Rhys, it might have been….” Her sentence trailed off, but she made a big show of looking over to where Ryker was.

The Black Hart was rounding the bar, a bag of snacks in his hand. His eyes found Rue’s, and in that split second of distraction, chaos exploded.

Ishleen let out a shrill cry and suddenly lunged at Bowie. Her hands wrapped around his neck, and she slammed him back against the wall, squeezing with all of her might. Her nails dug into him, tearing skin when Ryker grabbed onto her and pulled her away, but she fought back.

Lenore raced to Bowie’s side, putting herself between them. “What happened?!”

“I don’t know!” Bowie said. “She just went crazy!”

Ryker dragged the struggling woman further away, but then took an elbow beneath the chin and another in the solar plexus. His hold loosened just enough for Ishleen to slip free.

She shot forward, her arm snapping up.

Rue processed that she’d somehow gotten a hold of Ryker’s blaster just as she pulled the trigger. With horror, he watched as a bullet shot through Lenore’s chest, going clean through before embedding into the wall behind her.

The whole room seemed to freeze, time stilling as she swayed on her feet. Her head turned slowly, finding Rue, and then her eyes rolled back and she tumbled like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Lenore!” He ran toward her, but she was already on the ground.

Bowie stood there completely shocked, pale and staring.

Meanwhile, Ryker managed to wrestle the gun out of Ishleen’s hand, tossing it onto the bar out of reach as he subdued her.

Rue had only just made it to Lenore’s side, was in the process of reaching down for her, when the door burst open, the hinges shattering, wood flinging in every which direction. He dropped over her, protecting her and his face, but that also brought him close enough to see that her eyes were open once more, staring sightlessly forward.

Dead.

She was dead.