Page 8 of Shadow Secrets
But the car drove on without slowing.
Bang, bang, bang. Her knuckles stung from hitting the door so hard. She heard footsteps—quick, deliberate. A light came on behind the door, and she heard the distinctive sound of a firearm being cocked.
She stumbled back as the door opened.
Sebastian stood in the doorway in a white T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, a handgun held low along his right side. His eyes swept her face, dropped to her shaking hands, her muddy shoes, and returned to her face. Confusion made his brows furrow. “Ms. Crenshaw?”
“Ginger Galbraith is dead.” Sutton’s voice came out raw and wrecked, scraped clean of everything but the truth. Her gasps were too loud in her ears. “She was gunned down outside the parlor. And whoever killed her saw me. I think…” A glance over her shoulder confirmed no one was there, but the sensation of being followed lingered. “I think they’re after me.”
Sebastian didn’t hesitate. He reached out, took her arm, and pulled her inside.
The door closed behind her, the deadbolt turned, and for the second time that day, she was standing in a room with the man who’d killed her brother.
This time, the space between them wasn’t filled with anger and the sharp edges of shared grief. This time, it was filled with something worse.
Sutton needed him.
CHAPTER THREE
Sebastian
He had her inside and the door locked in under three seconds. The deadbolt, then the chain.
He moved to the front window and turned off the lamp on the side table, placing the room into darkness except for the light from the kitchen behind them. He checked the road and scanned the tree line at the edge of the property. Nothing moved. No headlights on Miller Road.
Sutton stood in the middle of his living room like a woman who’d been dropped there from a great height. Her arms were wrapped around herself, hands gripping her elbows, and shaking hard enough that she might lose her balance any moment.
“Let’s go into the kitchen,” he said, leading her there. He pulled a chair away from the table and angled it so her back was to an interior wall, away from any window. “Sit down and tell me what happened.”
She didn’t seem to register the chair as a choice—her legs folded and the chair caught her. Her eyes were wide and glassy in the low light, and he recognized the look of shock. The body’s emergency shutdown after sustained adrenaline. She had maybe five minutes before she crashed, and he needed information before that happened.
He looked her over. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “Just freaked.”
He switched to the voice he’d used with Ginger on the bad days, when she was sixteen and scared and pretending she wasn’t. “You’re safe now. Take a breath.”
She inhaled shakily. “I’m okay, really.”
He doubted that. “The car—what kind of vehicle was it?”
“A sedan.” Her voice was thin, scraped raw. “Dark. Black or dark blue, I couldn’t—it didn’t have its headlights on.”
“How many people?”
“One. One that I saw. He fired three shots, but they were muffled. She just…” She stared at nothing, shaking harder. “Fell.”
He grabbed a blanket from the couch and returned to wrap it around her. “What happened next, Sutton?”
At the sound of her name, she blinked and met his eyes. Then she swallowed hard and pulled the blanket closer. “He, uh, got out and checked the body.” Her breath hitched on the word, and she pressed a fist against her mouth. “He was calm…so calm. Like it was nothing, like he was checking a parking meter.”
A suppressed weapon, no headlights, a post-engagement verification of the kill. Not a random act of violence. Not a mugging gone wrong. An operation. “Did you see his face?”
“It was dark, and the streetlight just made shadows of him. He was—” Her eyes squinted as if she were recalling the scene. “He wore dark clothes. Average build, maybe. I don’t know. I wasn’t studying him, I was—” Her voice broke. She swallowed it back and tried again. “I was watching Ginger die.”
Ginger. The name landed in his chest like a stone. Ginger Galbraith, who’d been sixteen, angry at the world, and terrible at following protocol. She’d called him Bastian because she knew it annoyed him and did it anyway with that grin that dared him to be mad about it.
Ginger, who’d been on the floor behind him at the fundraiser, his blood on her dress, screaming his name while he put two rounds into a man’s chest.
