Page 28 of The Woman at the Funeral (Costa Family #11)

Blair

We wouldn’t have come up for air if not for Nico’s burner phone screaming from the living room.

“Brio,” Nico said.

At the same time, I gasped, “Goya!”

“You stay here just like this. I’ll go get him,” Nico said, moving from under the blankets.

Nico was slow-moving as he slipped back into his clothes.

I won’t lie.

I took a bit of pleasure in knowing I’d been the one to sap all that energy out of him.

“I’ll pick up dinner,” he called just before the door slammed.

Alone, I starfished across the bed, beaming at the ceiling where a baby started to fuss, then cry.

My hand slid to my belly, wondering if or when I could feel my own there, growing, kicking, getting ready to come out into my arms. While I sat nestled in Nico’s strong ones.

This time, the warmth didn’t just spread across my chest, but through my whole body.

I let myself lie there and enjoy it for a few long moments. Then, finally, I climbed out of bed to take a quick shower, washing off all the sweat. I wanted to be fresh for the next round.

I slipped into panties, then one of Nico’s shirts. It was comically oversized on me, but I loved the feel of it as I moved around the kitchen, preparing Goya’s dinner, then setting out place settings for Nico and me at the table.

I even found the emergency candles in the supply closet and set them up for a bit of ambiance.

When I heard the knock, I didn’t think anything of it. I figured Nico had his hands full with Goya and the bags for dinner.

There wasn’t really any time to regret that decision, either. Because as soon as the locks disengaged, the door flew open, knocking into me so hard I stumbled backward.

Disoriented from the slam to my forehead, I tripped over my own shoes and went flying.

I couldn’t even cry out before I collided with the wall before falling to the floor.

Pain exploded through my hip and head.

But before the shock could even wear off, hands were grabbing me and flipping me over onto my stomach.

I started to cry out, but a hand grabbed the back of my head, slamming me into the floor.

My vision swam as a strangled sound escaped me.

“Stab her already!” a voice snarled as a knee pressed hard into my back.

There was a pinch in my arm.

Then I was swimming, drowning.

But right before unconsciousness claimed me, I had one final thought.

I knew that voice.

__

Pain ice-picked behind my eyes as a drum band played through my skull.

I tried to lift my hands to press the pain away.

But my limbs felt rubbery, detached. They were useless weights at my side.

A whimper escaped me when I forced my eyes open. A choice I immediately regretted, as the brightness had the pain in my head intensifying.

I fought through it, trying to focus.

But the lights blurred into long streaks, too bright, like the world was smearing right before my eyes.

I blinked. Once. Twice. But everything went distorted—pulsing, breathing, bending inward at the corners.

Panic gripped my system. It was a tight pressure on my chest, a strangling sensation in my throat.

My heart hammered against my ribs—so fast I was sure it would give out at any second.

What was wrong with me?

I tried to sit up.

But gravity had changed the rules.

Up didn’t exist anymore.

In fact, the ground seemed to be trying to pull me down, deeper, into it.

The room around me felt stifling, the humidity making the air soupy.

But somehow, there was a cold sweat clammy on my skin, making my shirt cling to my chest and stomach.

No.

No, it wasn’t my shirt.

My gaze flew down, seeing the white shirt that wasn’t mine. Its sleeves were too long, its chest too wide.

As I looked, the buttons shifted, widened, grew irises that stared back at me.

With a startled cry, I squeezed my eyes shut.

When I opened them again, the buttons were just buttons again.

What was wrong with me?

Memories came back in fragments, little shards of clarity amidst the pain and confusion. But it felt like each time I reached for one, it sliced me enough to yank my hand back.

The weird coldness I was feeling seemed to be sinking deeper, making shivers rack my system.

I focused on forcing some life into my limbs until I rolled myself onto my side.

The sharp pain in my upper arm was what finally shocked a full memory loose.

Stab her already.

Then complete unconsciousness.

Someone had stabbed me with a needle, injected me with something that was messing with my mind.

My stomach rolled, making me heave. But there was nothing in my stomach to throw up.

Tears pricked my eyes, then flooded and spilled before I could blink them away.

But I wasn’t even sure why I was crying.

Was it the pain? The fear?

Or was it the drugs?

It certainly felt like it was out of my control, making me lean on the latter as I pulled my arms up and buried my face as the sobs racked my body.

I don’t know how long I cried. Time felt weird. Slow and expanding, like I was sucked inside it instead of experiencing it.

All I knew was I didn’t actively stop crying. They dried up. I sobbed myself dry.

I pressed my heels into my eyes, trying to ease the stabbing sensation behind them from the light in the room.

The light.

I lowered my hands, staring up at the windows that had light streaming through them not long before.

Except, it had to have been longer than I realized.

Because the bright yellow sun was now the pinks and purples of sunset.

How long had I been out of it? Hours?

How was that possible?

Hours, gone in a blink.

I had to focus.

I needed to get up, find an exit.

My gaze slid around the steadily darkening room. But the moment had my head spinning and my stomach lurching again.

“Damnit,” I hissed, pushing up until my back met a cold, hard wall.

I fought through the dizziness, the swimming vision, and the lurching stomach, just sucking in big, gasping breaths until I felt like I could think again.

When I could, little things came into focus.

The windows were abundant, but way up high—just under the ceiling.

Nowhere had windows like that.

Except warehouses, right?

I was somewhere industrial.

Even as I thought that, I could see several large, darkened shapes way on the other side of the cavernous building.

What were those?

Boats?

No.

Cars.

They were cars.

Cars.

It was all sharpening into focus.

Stab her already.

Right before I’d passed out, I’d realized I remembered that voice.

Oh, I knew that voice alright.

And that also meant that I knew exactly where I was.

But just as it dawned on me, footsteps approached somewhere to my side, making me jerk hard.

A flashlight sliced through the darkness before the torch illuminated my face. The pain ratcheted up, making me squeeze my eyes shut to try to ease it.

“Good. You’re not blabbering anymore.”

My blood turned to ice in my veins as the voice washed over me again. The same way it had in the not-so-safe house. When they’d been pinning me to the ground, their knee shoved in my back, holding me still as someone else injected me with something to knock me out.

Ronny .

Of course.

There wasn’t a single thing the Ferraros did alone. There was no way Matthew was involved with something serious and his family wasn’t in on it.

Ronny had been the one to help him haul those boxes of baseball cards into my apartment while praising him up and down, telling him what a genius he was, and how he was going to be so rich. And how he was such a good person because he would share his wealth .

She’d said that last part with a pointed look in my direction.

She’d also been the one to go with him on garage sales every weekend, grabbing more useless crap that would fill up my closets until I finally made him get a storage unit.

There was no way he’d been working on something—possibly for months or years—without his mom knowing.

Actually, with a little thought, there was no way he’d even come up with the plan by himself.

Or came up with it at all.

Matthew, for all his superficial charms and inflated ego, was not the brightest guy. His schemes were always simple: selling baseball cards, revamping curbside furniture, doing a graphic t-shirt business.

I didn’t think it was possible for him to come up with the idea to collect sensitive information about the Costa family, let alone figure out how to try to sell it to the highest bidder.

But Ronny?

Ronny was that smart.

And cruel.

And ruthless.

She wasn’t working alone.

It certainly hadn’t been Ronny to break into my home. Or chase me through the woods. Or inject me with the needle.

But it could have been Danny.

He was Ronny’s other son, who immediately, and without question, was eager to do his mother’s bidding.

As for the place I was being held, though, that was all Tom Ferraro. Though I didn’t know if he was aware he was involved or not.

He was the Ferraro I knew the least about. And, (perhaps a bit ungenerously), I just concluded that he simply didn’t have much to him. He was a man who drank cheap beer, yelled at the TV during all the sports games, and worked long hours.

At the cruise terminal.

Where I was being held.

At the indoor parking garage.

The second floor, if the windows were anything to go by.

It gave me a lot of room to run, to escape.

If only I could get up .

But it felt like a Herculean task just to turn my head to look over at Ronny. I didn’t seem capable of getting up, let alone running.

I rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, trying to get it wet enough to speak.

“Always knew you were a bitch,” I said, words slurring and slow, but clear enough for her to hear. I hoped.

“And I always knew you weren’t anywhere near as smart as you liked to think you were.” She flashed the light down my body, making me painfully aware that Nico’s shirt had ridden up to expose the slash of color that was my panties. “Or as classy. I know a common whore when I see one.”