Page 5 of Cruel Kiss

That slimy ripple of dread I'm becoming way too familiar with snakes its way through my stomach once again. "He wasn't here to kill me, was he?"

"No," Ronan confirms in a tight voice. "He wasn't."

As sick as this sounds, a murder would almost be more merciful. This wasn't that, though. When I look at everything in that burlap sack and add it all up—zip ties for the wrists, tape for the mouth, a blanket to wrap a body that's still moving, thrashing, fighting, screaming—it can only lead me to one conclusion.

Somebody wanted me alive.

I think I might throw up. My stomach lurches, but I press the back of my hand to my mouth and wait it out. Ronan's hand comes to rest on my hip for reassurance. I don't want it there; he doesn't have the right to comfort me anymore; but I don't have the energy to move it away.

"Calista," he says. "I think you need to sit down."

"No."

"Your knees are bleeding."

"Funny enough, I'm actually aware of that. They're my knees."

He sighs but doesn't press the issue. He just keeps his hand where it is until the nausea passes. When it does—though it takes its sweet time in doing so—I straighten up and step out of reach.

Navi comes back up the stairs. He's got his phone in his hand and a look on his face I don't like, careful and closed, the look of a man deciding how much to say in front of me.

"Street's clear," he informs Ronan. "Van's loaded. We're rolling in two." He glances at me, then back to Ronan, and lowers his voice like I can't hear him from three feet away. "You want me to have someone look at her?"

"No," I interject before Ronan can answer on my behalf. "Nobody's touching me and I don't need a babysitter. I want all of you out of my house."

Navi's eyebrows go up.

"Except him." I point at Ronan without looking at him. "He stays, because he has some explaining to do. Everybody else, get the hell out."

Navi looks at Ronan. Ronan looks at me.

"You heard her," Ronan says at last. "Didn't sound like she was on the fence about it, did she?"

Navi nods and tromps back down. Within a minute, they're gone, all of them, as quickly and quietly as they came. I could almost forget that they were here at all, except the front door is in pieces on my hallway floor and there's a wet patch on the wall where the plaster cracked and the smell of the spray bottle they used is pungent in the air, a chemical, lemony tang oozing over the top of something far worse underneath.

It's only then that I feel the full weight of what just happened.

I just let a criminal organization carry a dead man out of my house wrapped in a tarp. I let them scrub the would-be killer's blood off my wall. I let them take the body and the knife andthe whole nightmare and fold it up neat and drive it away in an unmarked van, and not once did I think to intervene. I have phones—I know how to dial a nine and a one and a one.

But I didn't.

What does that make me?

There's a line. Always has been. I could feel it, all this time, like a chalk mark on the floor. The line between what I am and what Ronan is. I kept telling myself I hadn't crossed it, not really, because I was just gathering data, just running the experiment, just being clever.

Well, I damn sure crossed it tonight. I didn't even think twice before I skip-da-dee-doo-da'd right over it.

I sense Ronan's attention shift toward me. "Calista, you should?—"

"Sit your ass down right there." I point at the top step of the stairs. "I'm the one issuing orders for the next little while, not you. And order number one is that you're going to park yourself where I'm pointing and you're going to tell me every last little detail. Order number two is that you had better notdareto use that patient, tired voice of yours when you do. I'm sick of being micromanaged. I've had enough of that voice for one lifetime."

There's a second where I'm sure he's going to refuse. I bet I could count on one finger the number of times Ronan has ever followed commands like this in his whole dang life.

But then, to my surprise, he nods and lowers himself down. Right on the same spot where I cried myself into a tizzy not too long ago. Funny how times have changed.

He dangles his hands on his knees, hunched forward, and looks at me. "Where would you like to begin?"

My legs are weak and trembly, but I don't join him on the stairs. I want to retain this power position for as long as humanly possible. For the first and maybe the last time ever,I'mthe one looking down athim.