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“Rebecca didn’t know her place. You don’t seem to know yours, either. I despair of your generation.”
“Millennials,” Everly commiserated. “We’re the worst.”
Annabeth tilted her head slightly to one side, as if Everly didn’t make sense. And as if she was as curious as she might be about a fly that had gotten into the house in the moments before she squashed it.
“I want to know why,” Everly said before any squashing could take place. “Don’t you think you owe me that?”
“I don’t owe you anything, you egregious little bitch,” Annabeth said, conversationally and sounding something like merry. And then she smiled. “You were supposed to be working late that night. Didn’t you have some presentation or something? You certainly shouldn’t have been running through the streets of Chicago, telling stories to nosy policemen.” She giggled at that, as if she’d told a joke. Everly supposed it would have been a chilling sound, but she was already chilled straight through. And that was without allowing herself to think too much about the fact that this awful woman knew her schedule. Her whole life. “Rebecca knew better. That’s the beginning and the end of it. I raised her here, not that she appreciated it. I sent her to the finest schools. She knew better than to ask for more than what she was given. But she went ahead and did it anyway.”
Everly was kneeling there on the cold floor. Annabeth’s henchman was standing beside her, his arms crossed but his gun still visible in his hand, as if he were just waiting for the order to shoot. She looked past them, through the French doors someone had pulled wide, out toward the yard.
And the pool she refused to let herself think about too closely.
She could see the summer sky. She could see the branches of the trees, full of green, dancing in the breeze. She could see Lake Michigan, stretching out toward forever.
It was so hard to accept that this was the last time she would see any of those things. Or anything at all.
“Does that answer your question?” Annabeth asked. “Because I have a Pilates instructor coming in an hour. I need to move this along.”
Everly reached up to feel her swollen cheek where the gorilla had hit her. Her skin was hot and puffy, like a blush gone wrong. But the burst of pain when she touched it was good. It reminded her not to surrender too easily.
No matter how tired of all this she was, she didn’t want to make iteasy.
“I wouldn’t want to interrupt your schedule,” she heard herself say. “I don’t know why you brought me in here in the first place.”
Annabeth’s carefully plucked eyebrow rose, or looked as if it might have moved in an upward direction if it hadn’t been frozen into that smoothness.
“You said you knew everything. I want to know what that means.” She reached over for her teacup and cradled it in her soft hands, her silver-tipped fingernails glinting in the light. “What do you think you know?”
Everly looked away from that empty, evil stare, trying to wrestle together something she could throw out there in place of any actual knowledge. Anything to buy a few more minutes.
Out on the terrace, a man eased into view. One moment she was staring at the tops of potted plants and the sky beyond, and the next, he was there.
Everly assumed she was hallucinating. Seeing exactly what she wanted to see to distract her from the grim reality unfolding in front of her. She blinked. Once, then again.
But he was still there. Sopping wet, no sunglasses, and, better still, no bloodstains on his T-shirt. No gaping wounds. Just what looked like an ugly cut on one arm.
She figured that was what a man like Blue would calla graze. And he was a SEAL, after all. She could come up with all kinds of scenarios where he simply... held his breath until Annabeth’s goons made the mistake of thinking they’d handled him.
But what mattered was that he was alive.
Alive.
His dark eyes met hers. And blazed so hot she couldfeelit, like the touch of his hands. Like his mouth over hers.
Blue was alive.
Everly looked down to conceal her face, because she didn’t think she could control the tidal wave of emotion cascading over her. Her heart flipped over inside her, threatening to expose her. She wanted to cry. She was afraid she was already crying. She waited for shouts from the man outside, but when none came, it occurred to her that Blue must have handled that, too.
When she raised her head, his gaze dropped to her cheek. And she knew he saw that it was puffy. She wouldn’t be surprised if there was a handprint.
And then she knew there was, because when Blue lifted his eyes to meet hers again, there was nothing in them but murder.
He nodded at her, slow and steady, and she understood.
She didn’t know how she understood, only that she did. Only seconds had gone by, but she felt as if she’d aged a decade. She could feel everything she’d shoved aside, and a lot of it hurt, but she didn’t care, because he wasalive.
But it still wasn’t over. She had to keep going.