Page 23 of Royal

I shot up, my heart racing, and quietly walked over to it. Every alarm in my mind went off.

Who’d stop by so late? And of course, the only answer I could come up with was the psycho who’d killed Beth.

Holding my breath, terrified that the person on the other side would hear me, I looked out the peep-hole.

And exhaled when I recognized the man on my doorstep.

I opened the door. “Shit. What are you doing here so late, Grayson? I thought you were a murderer.”

He cocked his head, amused, but then a grim expression took its place. “Can I come in?”

“That depends,” I said as I returned to my senses. It might not be a psycho at my door, but it was a detective—the other thing I’d been worried about. To make matters worse, he was a detective who just so happened to be my asshole ex-boyfriend. “Are you here to arrest me?”

“If I were here to arrest you, you’d know it,” he said before looking around. He was on edge about something. “There’s been…well, I don’t want to talk about it out here. Can I come in or not?”

I opened the door to let him inside before closing and locking it.

“What do you want?” I asked, standing behind the couch and resting my hands on the back cushion. He hadn’t sat down, so I wouldn’t either.

“Do you have anything to drink?” Grayson asked, sweeping a hand through his brown hair. “Preferably something strong.”

“Are you allowed to drink on the job?”

“I’m not on the job right now,” he said before sinking down into the armchair. I didn’t notice until then how tired he looked. “I just came to talk.”

“All I have is beer.” I moved toward the kitchen and called back to him, “Brysen drank all my good stuff.”

“Brysen? Oh, right. You said that’s your friend’s name.”

After grabbing two beers from the fridge, I popped the caps and handed him one.

“Thanks.”

I nodded and sat on the couch. We took drinks at the same time as the silence of the house settled around us. Grayson and I hadn’t been alone together—truly alone—in eight years. The interview with him at the station didn’t count because his partner had been listening on the other side of the glass.

“Another body was found today,” he whispered, staring at the bottle in his hands.

I felt the blood wash from my face. “You don’t think I—”

“No,” he interjected as his eyes flashed to me. “I don’t think it was you. The others don’t think so, either. We ran a background on the vic, and as far as we can tell, you have no connection to him.”

“Him? Who was it?”

“A model named Jeffrey Holland.” Grayson took another swig of his beer. “He was passing through Addersfield on his way to a photoshoot up north. His body was found this morning.”

“Same place as Beth?”

He shook his head. “No, this time it was at a public swimming pool. The manager saw the body when she got there to open. Pretty ballsy of the perp to do it in a public area. We spent the afternoon interviewing people who lived nearby. None of them saw anything.”

“How do you know it’s the same guy who killed Beth?” I asked, setting my beer aside. My stomach was in knots. I felt like I was living in a crime novel. “Maybe the Jeffrey guy partied too hard, found his way into the pool area, and drowned.”

“It’s the same guy.” Grayson’s grave expression was unsettling. “The body was cut up like the last, with a fatal blow to the abdomen. And there were white flowers scattered around him.”

“What the actual fuck?” Chills spread along my arms. “I don’t understand who could do this. What’s the point of it? Why leave flowers?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

Another silence passed. The antique clock my mom had bought me was in the kitchen, ticking the seconds away. Minutes.