Deadly Sins (32 page)

Hoping Crowe’s grandfather, or any of their grandfathers for that matter, wasn’t involved.

“Yeah, so were we,” Rafer admitted.

“If you are finished threatening us, Sheriff, my jet is waiting at the Carstanza airfield in Aspen. We must be going,” Ivan said.

Aspen wasn’t exactly where the plane had been left. Actually, it was in the opposite direction.

Archer nodded before moving back. “You take care. Of both of you.” He nodded to Rafer and Cami before turning and stalking back to the car.

Watching Archer, Skye was careful not to glance at the deputy leaning casually against his official car, the frown on his face as he watched the vehicles pull out a sure sign that no one from the bureau would have wanted Resnova involved.

She’d have to figure out exactly how to cover that one, she thought. Considering the bureau was well aware of her past with him, there really wasn’t much she could do.

Making certain she avoided Caine’s gaze, feeling it on her, knowing, just as she had known for days now, that he and his partner wanted to talk to her, Skye turned back to Logan.

He was watching her carefully, his gaze narrowed on her.

“Everything okay?” she asked as she moved close to him and felt his arm curl around her waist.

“Everything’s fine,” he promised. “Let’s get back into the house; we have our own plans to make.”

Plans that didn’t include Archer or Deputy Caine.

Logan didn’t glance back, but he wasn’t a stupid man. He’d seen Caine attempt to get her attention, and his suspicion that Caine was likely to be an agent was too strong to ignore.

The escalation of violence against them also seemed to be drawing in more hands to help than Logan had ever expected.

No, it wasn’t the escalating violence, he admitted. It was his Skye.

She had drawn the townspeople to her first, then drew him to her. Now, it seemed, she was determined to draw them all together.

“I’m ready to sleep,” she sighed as they entered the house.

“Crowe will keep the world out, baby,” Logan promised as he led her to her bedroom suite. “You can sleep all you like now.”

Because he had no doubt, once she awoke, the battle would only heat up more than ever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“There are monsters in the dark, baby girl. Always remember that monsters love the dark. Don’t sleep. Don’t drop your guard. Don’t ever let another know where you close your eyes. The monsters will always search for you. The monsters will always watch for you. Monsters are beautiful and their nice eyes are caring and their smiles are bright. Their teeth are jagged and their souls are black and they want nothing more than to destroy my bright and wonderful little girl.

Her mother’s voice was a whisper in her ear, penetrating the serenity Skye had found in the darkness of sleep. Penetrating the warmth of Logan’s embrace and bringing a frightened whimper to her lips.

Because she knew what came with the warning. She knew what lived in the darkness, what would seek her out if she dared to sleep—

But it hadn’t been dark when she had gone to sleep.

“The monsters will love you, Skye. They will feed you and they will warm you. They will care for you and they will clothe you. They will hold you when you cry, and laugh when you laugh. And when you close your eyes, they’ll rip your heart from your chest. You can’t love anyone, Skye. Because the monsters are everyone. Only Mommy and Daddy love you. Only Mommy and Daddy are not monsters. You can only love Mommy and Daddy—”

She hadn’t remembered the order. She’d forgotten how her mother used to have the doctor put her to sleep and in that cold, white, sterile little room. And while she slept, her mother had whispered the words to her, and showed her with words and the horrific images that filled her young, sleeping mind, what the monsters were like.

But she remembered now—

Moving through the darkness, she wasn’t a little girl any longer, though. She wasn’t a child desperate to please her parents or to ensure that the monsters never found any of them.

“The monsters will kill Mommy and Daddy if you trust them, baby girl—”

And they had.

The monsters had come for them while Skye had slept, too young, her body too immature to keep up with the demands of remaining awake as darkness covered the ocean-front home they had lived in that summer.

Skye had lived in a lot of homes in her young life.

In a lot of countries.

And she was no longer a little girl to be scared of the dark, she told herself.

Yet it wasn’t the darkness of reality she feared. It was the darkness that wrapped around her as she slept, that weighed heavily on her mind, and once again danger visited in the form of monsters.

Because her mother was right. Monsters loved to hide in the darkness. That way people never saw their true faces, never saw the evil that was so much a part of them.

She moved through the darkness, pushing aside barely discernible shrubs, pushing past shadowed bodies and moving toward the light she could see growing ahead.

She had to reach the light—

As she moved around something lying in front of her, Skye came to stop, a broken, muffled cry passing the hand that covered her lips.

Looking down at her feet, she saw what she had stepped in, what had stopped her. Her bare feet were immersed in the sticky, wet, scarlet-red puddle of warm blood.

Crouching on her heels, she pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and drew them on slowly before pushing the body to its back and staring into the dark, recriminating eyes of the first victim she had tried to save.

Blond hair was red from the blood that soaked it. Blue eyes stared back at her in painful blame.

“Why didn’t you help me?”
The look seemed to scream. “
Why didn’t you save me?
”

“I was too late,” she whispered.

“You were too slow,”
the victim cried out in frustration.
“You forgot about the monsters.”

She had concentrated on the suspects she’d been given by her team commander rather than remembering her mother’s words and focusing on the shy, scholarly old man who lived beside the girl. The one who swore he hadn’t heard her screams.

“Hearing’s not what it used to be.” He would tug at his ear and gaze back in apology.

“You can’t trust the monsters, Skye, you can only trust Mommy and Daddy,” her mother whispered at her ear again.

Turning, Skye looked desperately for her mother, wondering why she refused to allow Skye to see her in her nightmares.

“Just love Mommy and Daddy, baby girl. Just Mommy and Daddy,” her mother’s voice became a hard, brutal snap.

“Trust me, Skye.” Standing before her was her daddy’s brother, Uncle Liam. With his bright, bright green eyes, his card tricks, and his laughter.

He winked at her and blew her a kiss.

Skye felt the smile that trembled on her lips though she knew what was coming.

“You can trust me, baby girl.” Uncle Liam held out his hand to her as he turned to her father. “Tell her, Douglas, she can trust Uncle Liam.”

Her father smiled gently and said the code words. “Skye baby, you can trust Uncle Liam with Daddy’s life. Yes?”

That yes had to be in there. It was there. And it was her daddy with his smile and his warm arms holding her close.

But suddenly, he wasn’t holding her close any longer. And Uncle Liam was a monster as he stood beside her parents’ broken bodies, bathing in their blood.

“No. No,” she whimpered, her arms wrapping around her stomach. Had it been her fault? Had she been the reason her parents had died?

“Love no one, Skye,” her mother was screaming at her, though her lips didn’t move. Her corpse only bled. “Love no one. I warned you not to trust the monsters, Skye. Never. If you love, then you love a monster. Or you love an innocent that a monster will kill. Because monsters will always follow you.”

And suddenly, it wasn’t her parents’ blood dripping on the floor. It wasn’t a victim’s broken body lying in the dirt.

It wasn’t Skye dying as she had always dreamed before.

It was Logan.

Suspended above the ground, his emerald-green eyes sightless, his arms hanging toward the ground as Skye began screaming.

Someone had to hear her screaming.

She went to her knees, only to feel his blood, warm and wet. She covered her face with her hands, but his blood was there, too.

She was screaming, screaming, begging him to wake up, begging him to live—

“I said fucking wake up!”

Her eyes jerked open as her body was suddenly hauled upright, a grip on her upper arms shaking her ruthlessly, forcing her from the nightmare.

Logan’s face was white, his expression savage with whatever fury was building inside him as Skye stared up at him.

Her face was wet. Her hands were shaking.

She could feel the perspiration dripping down her body and the panic that still thundered through her senses.

“I’m sorry.” her voice was hoarse, a sure sign that the nightmare had been a bad one.

“What the fuck was that, baby?” Smoothing her hair back from her face, his hands shaking, Logan stared down at her, his face still retaining a bit of a pale cast.

“Nightmare.” A nervous laugh was all she could force past the tightness in her throat. “Just a really bad nightmare.”

She wanted out of the bed. She wanted to get away from the sweat-dampened sheets and the reminder that sometimes she wasn’t even safe to sleep in the daylight.

It was a sure sign that her senses were picking up something that her brain hadn’t yet processed. Something that it would return to in a much more deadly, dangerous form if she didn’t figure it out.

“Just a nightmare? Baby, that was nothing so simple as a nightmare.”

She shook her head. “I need to shower.”

She needed to get the feel of blood, thick and wet, sliding down her body, out of her senses.

Logan released her as she moved to the edge of the bed, forcing herself to stand up and not reveal the unsteadiness of her legs.

“How often do they happen?”

“The nightmares?” She breathed in roughly and headed to the closet for clothes.

“Yes, Skye, the nightmares.” He followed behind her. “How often?”

“Not too often.”

“Just if you go to sleep in the dark? Or if your senses are on such high alert that you know whatever’s going on could strike soon?”

She stopped at the section that held her more casual tops and turned back to him slowly. “How do you know?”

“I’ve had them,” he admitted. “When Jaymi died. I still have nightmares.”

Rafer’s lover from twelve years past, the one the Slasher had tried to have them framed with.

Jaymi and her husband Tye Kramer, before Tye’s death, had been close to the Callahan cousins. After Tye had died in the military, Jaymi and Rafer had become lovers until her death.

She nodded slowly. “I couldn’t save the last victim that the D.C. Vigilante kidnapped and tortured,” she admitted as she pushed her fingers through her hair. “He didn’t strike out at the criminals.” Her voice became hoarse again. “He struck out at their wives, their nieces—” She swallowed tightly. “Their daughters.”

Ivan’s daughter had been luck. Skye and her partner had been close, they had already identified Martin Trinson as a suspect and were watching him closely for an attempt to take another victim.

They had been only seconds late.

Only seconds.

He’d managed to lose them just long enough to snatch the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a major crime lord and what he did to her—

She gave her head a hard shake, a shudder racing through her as she swallowed back the bile rising in her throat.

Grabbing jeans, a cotton knit shirt, and underclothes, she turned and hurried to the shower.

Logan watched her go. Watched the fall of riotous curls as they flowed down her back, and despite his concern for her, felt his dick twitching in renewed interest at the memory of those curls caressing his thighs hours before.

Raking his fingers through his hair, he followed her, almost terrified to leave her alone with those memories, despite the fact that the case had ended and the D.C. Vigilante was dead.

Martin Trinson had been particularly brutal. Taking his crazed rage for his father’s death and the rape of his mother by a drug lord, he had begun by first striking out at known and convicted drug dealers. Then, he had begun striking out at suspected criminals of varying crimes by targeting their families. Their mothers, sisters, nieces. All female. All maimed in ways that if they survived, the proof of their relations’ crimes would always show on their bodies, not to mention their minds.

Waiting until he heard the shower running, Logan stepped into the large bathroom, stripped the cotton pants he wore, and then stepped into the large, multihead shower with her.

She turned away from him quickly, but not before he could see the tears running from her eyes.

She had been screaming his name when he brought her awake. Screaming it as though her soul were being ripped from her body. As though she were standing in his blood.

“Hey, hiding doesn’t make it go away,” he said softly as he wrapped his arms around her and drew her against his chest. “When I have one of mine and wake up screaming as though the hounds of hell were after me, I send Bella squalling and hiding under the couch while it takes hours for me to stop seeing blood staining my hands.” She shuddered at the words. “Will you let me run then?”

She shook her head.

“I won’t let you run now.”

Her breathing hitched. “My parents always taught me about the monsters in the dark,” she whispered. “To only trust them. To only love them. When my father hired his brother, Liam, as his head bodyguard. Liam was unaware my parents were agents. Dad’s cover was that of a diamond broker, his illegal activities involved moving drugs, weapons, and people as well. My father trusted Liam with his life. One night, after a large delivery of diamonds, Liam and his lover, my nanny, forced Father to give him the diamonds, then he killed them both as I watched on the monitors in the safe room. There were monsters in the dark, and my parents let one in.”