If you didn’t believe in the devil, you couldn’t believe in true evil.
But I saw it in that man’s eyes that night.
Evil.
Just a black void.
Nothing even remotely human there.
A body crumbled on the ground, an entire life gone in one brutal, heartless act, and a man standing over it like it was the most amusing thing he had seen all week.
I hadn’t been able to sleep for a week after.
Not even after I went to the cops.
Not even after I had picked him out of a lineup.
Not even after I knew he was in jail.
I would just barely drift off, and the gunshot would sound off in my head, blood and brain matter would make me wake up retching.
Then, it went without saying, when he got out on bail, things only got worse. It had been set at half a million. I never thought he would be out before things went to trial. But then he was. And I knew. I knew it right down into my marrow.
He was coming for me.
And he wouldn’t make it short and mostly-painless like he had done to the man in the alley. Oh, no. Because, first, I thought I could take him down. And second, well, because I was a woman.
The detectives hadn’t exactly been shy in telling me all the evils he had done when I went to report him. I think their goal was to make me so outraged that I was committed to putting him behind bars.
When you heard the brutal, ugly details about the wildly sadistic rapes they had suspected him of, but never pinned on him, always attacking the wives and daughters of the men who wronged him – or even just the ones he thought might wrong him – yeah, it did solidify your civic duty to get him off the streets.
But when you knew he was free on them again… and coming for you? To do those awful, sickening, brutal things to you? Yeah, it made you jump at shadows, at knocks on your office door.
The next morning was when I had sat in my office, oddly thankful for the glass walls, knowing I could see him coming from where I was situated in the back of the building, I opened up a new tab. And I did a search. For the city’s most well-respected bodyguards and private security firms.
These men, when I had interviewed them, these hardened, rough, well-trained men, looked almost pale when I told them who was after me. It had been real before then, but somehow it felt vitally so then, with these very capable men looking at me like I was maybe a goner, even with their help.
I hadn’t understood the grasp Rodrigo Cortez had on the drug trade until then. The detectives had told me he was into selling meth. But I knew nothing about that. I knew about cocaine, and the men in suits who discreetly handed it off to the models and designers and investors at lavish private parties. I knew about the guy who sold pot out of his trailer in the park I grew up in, goofy and braindead.
That was all I had been exposed to in the drug world.
I didn’t understand the reach a drug lord could have.
I didn’t know until he got into my apartment and stabbed me that he had friends in the police department. Who handed him my file with my name and address.
And if I wasn’t safe at home, I damn sure wasn’t safe at work. Or anywhere.
That was why I was here, in this cabin, with this man, talking about who I was going to be, what paperwork I was going to have, where I was going to live, what I was going to do as soon as I moved in there.
Because me, Sloane Blythe-Meuller, was never going to be safe. Ever. For the rest of my life.
So I could no longer be me.
I had to be someone else.
Sloane Livingston.
Who wasn’t on the brutal-rape-and-murder list of a vicious drug lord.
“You look sick,” Gunner commented, shocking me back into the moment. “I know it is all…”
“It’s not that,” I said, shaking my head.
“What is it then?”
“I was thinking about Rodrigo Cortez,” I admitted, swallowing back what felt like bile rising up my throat.
“What about him?” he asked, calm, expectant.
“Everything,” I told him. “The night I saw him kill a man. What the detectives told me he did to women… to punish the men they were connected to.” Ugh, even saying that made my stomach twist and slosh around ominously.
“Stop,” he said, reaching across the bed, putting a hand on my ankle, giving it a squeeze. “Don’t do that. Don’t imagine that shit. Does no good. Just makes your mind an ugly place to be.”
“You sound like you know from experience.”
“I do,” he admitted, but didn’t elaborate.