Chapter 18

I’m a right bitch until I have my coffee.

-True Story

Lennox

Four weeks later

“They found a paper trail?” I asked Michael.

He’d found me in the maze of a hospital where I was eating lunch in the break room that nobody used.

Michael nodded. “Yep. The judge’s already put in her resignation, effective immediately. All cases that the judge has heard in the past eighteen months have been put on review.”

I took a deep breath.

“Thank God,” I whispered shakily. “I’ve been racking my brain for the last four weeks. I’ve had my dad using his resources and his PI to help. He had nothing, though.”

I picked at my salad, still unable to eat.

I’d lost fifteen pounds that I really shouldn’t have lost in the four weeks since Bennett had literally dropped off the face of the earth.

I’d had to change phones again, just yesterday. Now I didn’t even bother calling him.

Michael nodded. “Yeah, he’s been delivering information to us. All of it useless, but efficient nonetheless.”

I nodded. “Good.”

“You don’t look good,” he said softly.

I shrugged, avoiding his eye.

“I have to go back to work,” I said, standing and throwing my untouched salad in the trash.

I could see Michael frown as he watched my movements out of the corner of my eye.

“I tried to come by and see you yesterday, but your house was empty,” Michael said.

I grimaced.

“I had a few…people show up. They were looking for me and I felt it prudent to move before it got worse,” I told him.

“What kind of people?” He asked, standing now too.

I shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

Michael frowned.

“Did you file a report?” He asked me as my hand met the doorknob to the break room.

How had he found me, anyway? I ate back here so nobody could find me.

Somebody would’ve had to tell him where I was.

Fucking Paxton and Melissa.

Nosy fuckers.

“Nope. What would be the point?” I remarked sadly, letting the door shut softly behind me as I left.

Not looking back, because if I did, he’d see.

He’d know my heart was broken.

***

Using the brand new key I’d just picked up from my landlord, I opened the door to the apartment I’d rented a few days ago, looking at Cola and smiling for the first time since I’d left for work.

She had three balls in her mouth, and she was shaking her big booty to the tune of the commercial playing on the TV.

“Hey baby,” I said, running my fingers through her long fur as I shut the door firmly behind me.

She whined low in her throat at the attention I was giving her, leaning on me enough that I stumbled.

“Oy,” I said laughingly. “Get your butt off me and let’s go outside.”

At the mention of outside, she started to turn around in circles, losing one of the balls from her mouth, and trying frantically to pick it up once again.

Laughing, I walked into the bedroom and slipped my clothes off as I went.

Changing into a pair of short shorts and a tank top, I walked to my closet, slipped my feet into my tennis shoes, sockless, and went back out to the living room.

I didn’t bother walking anywhere else.

Had I, I would’ve seen that I wasn’t alone.

I would’ve seen Corrinne sitting at the table with a gun in her hands.

I’d nearly made it to my front door when the first bullet tore through my belly.

It played out about like the movies.

I instantly placed my hands over my belly.

And blood started to slip between my fingers.

I looked down and moved my hand up to my face, looking at the blood on my hands like it was a delusion.

I’d felt blood before.

Lots of times.

Never my own blood, though.

It felt like warm syrup.

Sticky like it, too.

Then the pain hit me, dropping me to my knees.

Then further to my back.

That’s when I saw Corrinne standing over me, a proverbial smoking gun in her hand.

“Why?” I rasped.

She didn’t answer, instead bending down with a packet of something in her hand, and pouring it over my wound.

“Don’t want you to die on me too fast. That wouldn’t work out well for either of us. I’m gonna need you,” she said cheerfully.

I blinked. Then blinked again.

“What?” I rasped, belly stinging from whatever she’d poured on it.

Then I was unceremoniously kicked to my belly where the same burning sensation started on my back.

What was she pouring on my wound, salt?

It wouldn’t surprise me if she had.

Cola whined, licking my face, and the tears I hadn’t been aware I was shedding.

I turned my face to see her pace away from me, only able to see the bottom half of her body as she made what I assumed was a phone call.

I was proven right in the next moment when she started to frantically speak into the phone about ‘gunshots’ and ‘a crazy lady shooting.’

She dropped the phone, which I distantly realized was my house phone, and went down on one knee beside my head.

She looked down at me with hate-filled eyes.

“Why?” I asked tiredly.

My mind was sluggish from what I guessed was blood loss, but I wanted to know. No, needed to know.

She smiled savagely.

“You nearly talked him out of it,” she said. “You had him telling me he was leaving me. Had I not convinced him otherwise, you would’ve ruined my life.”

I shook my head in denial. “How is it ruining your life to help someone get away from a psycho like you? You’d have just found another poor soul to do your bidding.”

“Because I was on the fast track to jail. He had money to pay the people off, and I needed it quick. I’d nearly gotten him to propose when you showed up with your high and mighty self. Lucky for me that you weren’t as good as a convincer as you thought you were,” she sneered.

I didn’t say anything, deciding that maybe it’d be best if I just didn’t say anything at all.

“And what are you going to do now? You’ve lost. I just heard that this afternoon,” I said weakly.

Corrinne moved down, placing her face close to mine.

“Yeah, I just heard that, too. From Buck, when he told me he was leaving, and taking all my money with him,” she hissed. “Which is why I’m at plan B.”

Plan B.

Wonderful. Shooting me was Plan B.

“And what now? What’s the play now?” I asked, coughing slightly.

My stomach screamed in protest, only making me cough all the harder.

Which was when I tasted blood.

The coppery taste made my stomach roil, and I knew that I only had an hour, at most, to live.

Coughing blood up was a bad thing.

“Now I just take you both out. Hostage situation means he’ll come. You’ll live long enough for him to get here, then I’ll take you both out. Then there’ll be no one left for Reagan but me,” she declared.

Was this woman insane?

She really had to be.

No sane person would think that something like this would work.

Bennett wasn’t stupid, and anyway, he’d proven just how much I meant to him in the past couple of weeks.

“It won’t work,” I promised.

She was bonkers.

She sneered, and I heard the first siren.

“Watch and learn,” she said, standing up and going to the table.

“What are you doing?” I asked when she went for my phone.

She grinned manically as she came over to me, snapped a picture, and then said, “I’m sending this to your boyfriend. I think the blood pooling around you adds a nice effect.”

I tried to sit up and grab the phone from her, but the minute I put pressure on my belly pain bloomed like an out of control fire, centering in my belly and radiating out so that I felt it in the tips of my toes.

My God, who knew that being shot hurt so fucking much?

“Trouble in paradise? I don’t see him in your phone!” She jeered.