Page 104 of The Forbidden Note

My heart skips a beat.

Zane holds my eyes and rakes his thumb roughly over the corner of my lips. Lust screams through me at the tiny touch. He pulls back his thumb and there’s a red streak on it. My lipstick must have smudged when Hall put his hand over my mouth.

The reminder of what happened tonight sends an icy shudder down my back.

“What are you going to do if Hall goes to the cops?” I whisper.

“Let him. I’d love an excuse to set my lawyers on his tail.”

“Lawyers?”

His grin turns cruel. “We’re Jarod Cross’s sons. You think we stay out of the press because they care that much about our privacy?”

The words rip through the tension.

Zane is right.

He’s not just a student at Redwood.

He’s the son of Jarod Cross, musical legend and media darling.

If any hint of our night together gets out, it’s not just Jinx and Redwood Prep that I have to worry about.

The entire world will shun me.

Feeling cold, I get up and set the drumsticks on the snare.

Zane straightens too and watches me.

“It’s been a long day. Thanks for the lesson,” I turn and meet his eyes, “but I think I should go home.”

CHAPTERTWENTY-FIVE

GREY

I can’t sleep so I pull my whiteboard out of the closet, set it on an easel and work on Sloane’s case beneath the strained light of my lamp.

Over the last eight months, I’ve been collecting data and piecing scraps of related information together.

The night Sloane was murdered, she got a call from Harris.

She left my place in a hurry.

By the end of the night, she was found in pieces in a bodybag.

I’m trying to pin together what happened after Sloane left my place. It makes no sense that a sixteen year old would disappear without a trace and then suddenly turn up dead at the hands of a psycho. A crime of passion? Since when? Sloane never told me about having a boyfriend and she talked to me about everything.

Well, everything except why Harris was calling her that night.

All the journalists and reporters were happy to swallow the story the police fed them. Despite telling the cops about Harris’s call, no mention of it was reported in the news.

Whatwasmentioned was Sloane’s ‘problematic’ history. The media blasted the fact that her mother was a stripper. One particular comment said Sloane was ‘known to be promiscuous’. It was as if she’d earned what happened to her.

Thinking about it infuriates me and I stare harder at the whiteboard, wishing the pieces would snap together on their own.

“What am I missing, Sloane?” I whisper, tapping my pen against a picture of Redwood.

My last big break in the case was ages ago. I made friends with the officers responsible for Sloane’s case and took them out for drinks. Once they were drunk enough, I started questioning them about Sloane.