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Everly focused her attention back on Rebecca’s psychotic mother.
“I knew Rebecca,” she made herself say, and she was sure her voice gave it away. That Annabeth and her goon would turn and see Blue and she would have to watch him die all over again, and for good this time. But Annabeth only stared down at Everly, as if she were a very boring experiment. And the man beside her looked like he could stand there like a statue for days. “What did Rebecca do to you?”
Annabeth took a sip of her tea. “Nothing in this house comes free,” she said, in that same easy, conversational tone. Everly fought back a shudder. “I live here thanks to the kindness of a certain... friend. This friend has no interest in children, of course. He has his own.” She shrugged. “He didn’t care if I had one as long as I kept it out of his sight and it in no way changed our arrangement.”
“Your arrangement,” Everly echoed.
Annabeth’s gaze turned condescending. “My friend has a very demanding position, a frail and needy wife,and four grown children, who can’t seem to stop giving him grandchildren. I’m his escape. When he can get away, this house is his oasis. And the rest of the time, it’s mine.”
“And Rebecca’s,” Everly supplied. “Since she lived here, growing up.”
Behind them, Blue moved soundlessly. He came in through the French doors like a shadow, his face set and that intent, murderous gaze of his trained on the goon with the gun.
Everly had to force herself to look away from him before she gave the whole thing away.
“Rebecca was an experiment,” Annabeth was saying, fiddling with her plate of berries. “But I quickly learned I have no capacity for motherhood. Luckily, that’s what boarding schools are for. And I didn’t want her to come back, so I gave her access to her trust early.”
“There was no sign of a trust. We looked.”
Everly saidwe. She ordered herself not to look directly at Blue.
She just had to keep Rebecca’s mother talking a few more minutes.
“I cut her off two years ago when I learned she was going behind my back.” Annabeth popped a raspberry into her mouth. “Rebecca had maudlin fantasies about reuniting with her long-lost father. She was a regrettably emotional thing. I’m not entirely sure where that came from.”
“Didn’t her father want to know her?”
“If my friend wanted to know she existed, I would have used her as a bargaining chip a long time ago. He had less interest in her than I did.”
Poor Rebecca,Everly thought. Something like grief moved through her, but sharper, as if there was guilt mixed in.
Maybe Rebecca had needed a friend, not just a roommate. How had Everly failed to notice that during all those nights tucked up on the couch watching bad television?
She would never know the answer. And she would have to carry that.
You can live with anything,Blue had told her.That’s the price of surviving.
Everly hadn’t known then how much that price would hurt.
“She should have accepted the truth,” Annabeth was saying crossly. “Not everyone gets a family, and there’s no point crying over it almost thirty years on. But instead, Rebecca blackmailed him. And that was something I couldn’t allow.”
“Because you’d lose all this, wouldn’t you?” Everly asked quietly, meeting Annabeth’s frigid gaze. “You said it was yours, but it’s not, is it? Nothing here is yours. All of it can be taken away in a heartbeat, can’t it?”
The look on Annabeth’s face turned ugly, because there was no amount ofsmoothingthat could change the fact that the woman had no soul. Or anything else in there.
“I told him I would handle it. I did.” Annabeth bared her teeth at Everly. “And I want you handled, too. You have no idea how much your stupidity has cost me.”
“My stupidity?”
“You should have stayed in that apartment and taken what was coming to you. This was a waste of everyone’s time,” Annabeth complained.
“I’d hate to waste your time,” Everly murmured.
Annabeth lifted her fingers, and beside her, her minion shifted position. He lifted his gun, seemingly unaware that there was a pissed-off ex–Navy SEAL only an inch or so behind him.
Blue’s dark eyes met Everly’s.
And when he surged forward and chopped the gun out of the thug’s hand with a blisteringly fast strike, Everly rolled up onto her feet, too.