Page 51 of XOXO, Little Butterfly (The Storyteller’s Bodyguard #2)

Birdie

I should have seen it coming. I should have read the signs. The clues that are now staring me in the eye, sticking their tongue out at me. The mask didn’t hide a stranger. It was a man I once loved.

Too many noises, too many scenes, jam my brain as I put the pieces together. The conversation I’ve had with Tristan comes first, when he questioned my sanity after Butterfly Man’s little night visit .

Give me something to work with here. Any detail that can lead me to find him.

He’s tall, strong, unhinged. But in a way, he’s…gentle, even familiar.

Familiar? Do you recognize anything about him?

I laugh hysterically. How the fuck could I not recognize him?

Then Gia’s voice rings in my ear, and I burst into tears.

Butterfly Man’s actions are driving you to push away the only people who care about you. He wants you isolated, Birdie, and you’re letting him win.

The isolation, the control, the mindfucks… They have always been his game. I’ve lived through it for eight years. How could I be so oblivious? So fucking dumb?

Didn’t he come home rushing after you found the note? Didn’t he install the security system himself on the very same day? Didn’t he literally beg you to come home just so that he could protect you?

I’ve said it then, and I’ll say it now. The stalker situation was an opportunity to slither his way back into my life. To show me I still need him. To convince me that even after all these years, I’m nothing without his protection.

I’ve always known that blackmail is his backup plan to claim me; be mine or rot in prison.

Husband Dearest’s voice stabs my skull. This isn’t over, Birdie. I’m not letting you go. You’re mine, you hear me? Mine!

I scream my lungs out.

“Birdie!” Tristan is the only thing keeping me standing. If he lets go, I’m going to collapse. “Breathe. Just breathe.”

My chest feels crushed, like Blake’s hands are around my throat even now. “It’s him.” I lose control of my tears as if I haven’t been training myself to stifle them since I can remember. “It’s Blake. My husband is the one who’s been sending me the notes. Blake is Butterfly Man, Tristan.”

“I know, baby. I know. But he can’t hurt you anymore.”

“No wonder he couldn’t find anything in the hotel surveillance.

” I laugh at my silliness. “Did you know we had a fight the other day before that night at the hotel? I wanted to leave him. But then… The note happened. I wasn’t that scared, but he said things…

He convinced me the cameras were tampered on purpose.

He made sure that I’d feel scared, so I stayed because I knew he’d protect me. ”

Bile rises to my throat. “Come to think of it, every other note that came before coincided with one of our fights. Every time he felt I was going to leave him, he played the stalker game.”

“He was manipulating you into staying with him with fear,” the detective says. “Classic emotional abuse behavior.”

“How many times has he held me when I was terrified because of feeling watched, hunted? How many times has he whispered reassurances while orchestrating my torment? For what? All of this pain for what? Money?”

“It’s a big motive, Birdie.”

My mind reels backward through our marriage. Blake’s possessiveness disguised as protectiveness. His need to control every aspect of my life. The way he’s isolated me from everyone I’ve known, from the whole world on that island, claiming he was keeping me safe.

First from what happened here in Miami. Then from the stalker he invented. The stalker he is.

“The murders. Oh God, the murders.” Saldana, Gia. But neither Blake nor Shane were going to die. Butterfly Man was stalling, playing his sick game only to take what he wanted. Leverage to blackmail me, to rob me out of all my money.

Aaron… Blake killed him, too. His first kill in my name. “Blake’s reaction after Aaron’s death flashes in my head. How he’d held me while I cried, murmuring that at least one person who’d hurt me was gone. I’d thought he was trying to comfort me. He’d been gloating.”

Then he went back here, just around the same time he disappeared from the Vineyard, to finish the others. To cover his tracks.

“Aaron?” Reid asks. “Who’s Aaron?”

“None of your business,” Tristan says.

“If it’s another murder Abel committed, then it’s definitely my business.”

“The app.” The realization floods through me with nauseating force. “What if Aaron didn’t send that message? What if it was Blake who did it? What if after he killed Aaron, he planted the dead man’s switch on Aaron’s phone?”

“Birdie,” Tristan holds my shoulders, “you’re spiraling right now. Why would he do that?”

“To turn the whole world against me. To make me think I have nowhere to go. To seek his protection. To make me leave Miami with him. Oh God, Tristan. Remember the shiner he gave me, the one you saw me hiding in the school pantry?”

Tristan’s face contorts with rage. “Of course.”

“After he hit me, despite the ring on my finger, I wasn’t going to stay with him. I’ve had my share of wife beaters. I wasn’t going to repeat the same mistake.”

“So he did all that to convince you couldn’t stay in Miami. You had to disappear. Different name, different city.”

“He knew he couldn’t stay here after Aaron.

He knew he had to leave. But he couldn’t be a cop anymore so he needed another source of money.

He’d seen my writings. My first manuscript was getting offers.

He knew I’d be his golden goose. The girl he could control into doing anything he wanted.

Two birds with one stone. He gets the girl and gets away with murder.

“The new name, Martha’s Vineyard, he chose everything, and he made it look like he was looking after me, protecting me.” I let out a quivering moan. “All those years, he watched me fall apart. He made me fall apart.”

Tristan’s grip tightens on his gun, his knuckles white with fury. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to hunt him down and put a bullet between his eyes.”

“No, Morra,” Reid says firmly. “We need to do this right. Blake is already tied to two murders—Saldana’s and Connelly’s—and likely others. We have evidence now. Let the police handle this.”

“The police?” I wipe the tears from my cheeks.

“The same police who ignored my reports for years? The same system that let him get away with terrorizing me, with putting me in a hospital nearly dead, while they dismissed me as some hysterical woman? Blake has people on the inside that manipulate everything for him. He will walk and come back to hunt me.”

“Fuck the police,” Tristan snarls. “They had their chance. This bastard tortured her for years, just like my father did to my mother, to me, and they did nothing. I’m not letting bastards like Abel slip through the cracks again.”

“It’s different now,” Reid insists. “We have proof. The video, the timeline, the connections.” He holds my gaze. “And you have me.”

“With all due respect, Detective, you are one person. You’ve just told me your own partner was dirty, and you were taking the heat for it. The justice system doesn’t exactly work for people like us.”

“I can’t let you commit a crime, Birdie. You or your bodyguard.”

“Blake was here, Reid. He led me straight to this place, where you said you received a text from me to meet you. That means he was setting you up. A trap for Tristan to kill you. Is that the person you want to risk everything for?”

Reid’s confidence wavers for the first time.

He runs a hand through his hair, looking between Tristan’s murderous expression and my tear-stained face.

“Look, I get it. I do. The system failed you, and Blake manipulated it. But if we do this my way—if I can capture him legally—then it’s over. Really over.”

“Florida does have the death penalty,” I muse.

“But not Massachusetts,” Tristan reminds me.

“If we get him for Aaron’s murder…”

“Birdie, wake up. The only evidence the detective has is in the murders in the Vineyard, and they are circumstantial at best.”

“They’re not,” Reid confirms. “We questioned his therapist. She has records of their sessions, and they exhibit dangerous and violent behavior. She also said he was showing compulsive obsessive tendencies toward his wife, and the drugs she prescribed him made it worse. Then the tests proved the psychedelic amphetamines we found in Saldana’s blood came from the same source that Abel used. ”

Tristan scoffs. “Great, you build your whole case based on a dealer’s testimony.”

“It wasn’t just any dealer. It was Gia Connelly.”

My head jerks toward Reid. “What?”

“She was spotted multiple times securing drugs, although we didn’t find any traces of illegal substances in her blood.

After reviewing CCTV cameras, we can confirm she was delivering them to Abel.

I’m sorry to add this to the list of betrayals, but Abel and Connelly were having an affair. His semen was found inside her.”

“Another girl that would do anything for him. She gave him the drugs, thinking they were for him, but he used them to kill Saldana.” I put two and two together.

“The gun.” I gasp. “Gia saw Blake’s gun in my room.

She’d asked about it. She must have taken it back to him as a favor.

She was the only one who could go in my room without permission or raising suspicion. ”

Tristan rubs his chin pensively. “But then you told her the truth about him, how he beat you, and she wanted out. That’s why he killed her.”

“With the gun she stole for him.” Pain squeezes my chest. “Oh, Gia.”

“What was Abel’s gun doing in your room, Birdie?” Reid stares at Tristan. “Is that the same gun you confiscated from Abel but said you’d returned back to him?”

No one answers.

Reid’s jaw flexes. “Do you still have it?”

“No,” Tristan lies.

“If we run ballistics on that gun and it’s a match to the one that killed Connelly, it’s a done deal,” Reid insists.

I stare at the detective warily. “Hypothetically speaking, if that gun was sent to your precinct, anonymously, would it be admitted without tracing back to any of us?”

He matches my gaze. “Hypothetically speaking, I’ll make sure it doesn’t.”

“Tristan?” I whisper.

“We don’t know anything about a murderer’s gun. I gave it back to Abel myself.”

“Listen, Morra, give me one chance,” Reid continues. “Let me bring Abel in the right way first. If it doesn’t work—if I can’t make it stick—”

“Or if he gets off on a technicality or decides to enter an insanity plea and his therapist’s sessions backfires,” Tristan adds.

“If he slips through the system again in any way, then… Everyone’s gotta do what they gotta do.” The detective shrugs and backs away. “Just don’t let me catch you.”

“I don’t trust him,” Tristan mumbles as soon as the detective leaves to put out an APB on my husband. “Are you really gonna let him handle Abel?”

The idea is entertaining. A dirty cop captured by his friends, left to rot in prison with enemies he put away.

The irony is poetic and cathartic. Except the second Blake is captured, he will talk about the past, all the secrets we’ve shared.

Prison is one step closer to Shane. Together they will try to bring me down with them.

I can’t allow it.

“I’ve been a fool once. I won’t be ever again.” I secure the gun in the back of my pants. “The detective can’t take Blake down, but we will.”

“Good girl.”

“What did you just say?”

“You heard me,” he whispers in my ear, “but I can say it again, when I take you hard and fast on the corpse of Blake Abel.”

My pulse pounds, bleeding with hunger, not fear. The intoxicating darkness sends pools of heat between my thighs. “The Enzio to my Bianca.”

“I prefer the Mad Dog to your Vixen.”

A smile slowly creeps on my lips. Blake wanted to play games with his little bird? The butterfly he’s trapped in a jar on display? Time to show him what happens when butterflies develop a taste for blood. “I think I know where to find him.”

“Where?”

“The last place I’d want to be. The place we first met.”

Tristan’s face is puzzled for a second before recognition hits him. “Of course. Your old apartment.”

“Where he answered the domestic disturbance call.”

“Won’t it be rented to someone else by now?”

“A couple of years ago, I bought it.” So I won’t forget what happened there.

A reminder of what should have never happened again.

“It pissed him off. That’s how I know he’ll be there, hiding in plain sight.

The last place I’d think he’d want to be.

” I chuckle. “It wasn’t very smart of him to clue me in, though. The place where we first met. ”

“He never thought you’d outsmart him and figure out it was really him.

That works in our favor. The element of surprise.

” Tristan rallies his men and gives them orders.

One will go with me back to the hotel. The other will create a diversion in case the detective decides to follow, and Tristan will find Blake.

“No. I need to be there. I need to see him dead,” I say.

“I’ll call you to come when it’s safe. You’ll get your closure, Birdie,” Tristan promises. “Here’s your phone. I retrieved it from the school. Don’t ever pull a stunt like that on me ever again.”

I nod, and we all move to our destinations. In the hotel, I place my phone on the table and wait.

Butterfly Man has no idea that his perfect prey has finally learned the truth about her perfect predator.

And she’d do anything to be freed.