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“A ballpoint pen.” She stood straighter. “I’m not a great artist or anything, but I can draw a basic likeness.”
“Did you tell the police this?”
Everly shrugged again, aware that it was a sharp gesture, her shoulders entirely too defensive. “The police weren’t interested.”
Blue rubbed a hand over his jaw. “So two goons are staring at you. Your roommate is maybe bloody and probably dead on the floor. What did you do?” He was sitting there so casually, as if it weren’t the middle of the night, no matter how deep blue the sky was above them at this hour. As if this were an easy conversation about whatever men like him talked about when they weren’t off saving the world. “You walked away unharmed. How did that happen?”
“I didn’t walk. I ran.” She realized she was trembling. She just hoped that Blue couldn’t see it—even though she was sure that those dark, shrewd eyes of his missed nothing, especially with that lantern next to him. “I threw myself back in my room and slammed the door. And I threw the bolt.”
“To slow them down?”
“I think I was hiding,” she said slowly, trying to parse those tense, terrible seconds that were like a storm in her memory, wild and disjointed. “I don’t know that I really thought any of it through. Maybe I figured if I locked the door, that would keep them out?”
“But you didn’t stay there.”
“They started pounding on the door. And I knew— I just knew—that they would kick it down. And then I would be in that same broken heap on the ground—” Her stomach heaved at that. Everly clamped her lips shut and waited for the sudden spike of nausea to pass. And she thought Blue knew exactly what was happening to her, because he only waited. “So I did the only thingI could do. I went out on the fire escape, and I climbed down to the street.”
“And for some reason they didn’t follow you.”
“I expected them to shoot me. Or tackle me. Chase me.” She shook her head. “I don’t know if they did or didn’t. I just ran. Until I made it to the police station.”
“What were you wearing?”
“Pajama bottoms. Tank top. No shoes.” She tried to smile at him, but it hurt her face. “Apparently, that made me seem more insane. Running around Chicago in the middle of the night with no shoes on.”
“But they didn’t think you were crazy at first. They thought you were a victim.”
She nodded, but then considered. “I don’t know what they thought. They put me in a room. I sat there for a long time. Hours, maybe. And when they came back in, it wasn’t the regular cops I’d spoken to when I’d run into the station. It was two detectives, a man and a woman, and they were not friendly.”
“Unfriendly, sure, but they didn’t charge you with anything.”
“My apartment was empty, apparently. No dead roommate. Not even any signs of a struggle, they said. They suggested that maybe I suffered from night terrors. They also suggested that I should know better than to waste police time.”
“Did you think it was a nightmare?”
“I wanted to,” Everly whispered. “I really, really wanted to. But then Rebecca never came home. And a few days later, someone started following me.” Blue tilted his head slightly to one side, and she knew what he was going to ask, so she answered it. “It’s possible theywere already watching me, but it was a few days later that I noticed. Or they let me see them.”
“Them?”
“Two men. Different men than the ones who’d been in my apartment.”
“Did you draw them, too?”
“Yes.” She didn’t offer to show him the pad she kept in her bag. She figured he’d ask if he wanted to see her sketches, and anyway, she wasn’t sure she knew where her bag was. “Did I pass my latest interrogation?”
Blue’s mouth curved again. “An interrogation isn’t pass-fail.”
“Tell that to the Chicago police.”
That curve deepened, and Everly’s pulse racketed around inside her veins in a way that spelled nothing but trouble. For a moment she thought it might be visible.
But if it was, he didn’t say anything about it. He pushed to his feet and then he was towering over her. And Everly was suddenly starkly aware of the fact that there was nothing and no one around save the towering mountains. The moody sea and the brooding indigo sky above. It was just the two of them here, alone in the summer night.
Blue was huge and obviously lethal. He could do anything he wanted with her and no one would ever know. No one knew she was in the state of Alaska, much less on this little island.
But Blue didn’t scare her. Not like that.
“Okay,” he said after a while, as if he’d reached a decision.