A Beautiful Lie (Playing with Fire #1)(93)

“Were Cole and Austin able to find anything when they canvassed the area?” Garrett asked him.

“Negative. But there’s something else we need to discuss first,” Brady told them.

“I don’t care about anything else right now but finding the bastard who did this,” Garrett said angrily. “Just give me the status of the sweep.”

Brady seemed a little irritated but he covered it up quickly. “Whoever it was covered their tracks extremely well. I did some surveillance of the palace while they cleared the area. There wasn’t any unusual activity there through the night. No questionable vehicles coming or going or anything like that. I made an anonymous call to the local police to see if by some chance it was just a random shooting, maybe they had reports of shots being fired or other victims in the area, but there was nothing,” Brady explained. “But we need to discuss―”

Garrett cut him off with a slice of his hand through the air. “Okay, keep checking with them just in case the reports come in late and have the guys do another sweep of the area as soon as the sun is up. They might find something in the daytime they missed in the dark,” Garrett told him as he grabbed Parker’s hand. They started to make their way towards their villa once again.

After only a few few feet, Brady hurried to get in front of them, stopping them abruptly.

“There’s something else you need to know before you get to your villa,” Brady said.

“Whatever it is, can it wait a few hours?” Parker pleaded as she tugged on Garrett’s hand and they began walking again. “I’m dead on my feet and just want to close my eyes and not think about anything right now.”

They walked away from Brady, but once again, he caught up with them, this time keeping pace beside them instead of trying to stop them.

“It definitely can’t wait. There’s something that happened a few minutes before you got here.”

Garrett and Parker continued walking while Brady attempted to stop them again by getting directly in their path.

They easily stepped off of the path and onto the grass to go around him.

Brady turned and spoke to their backs. “You need to be prepared for―”

Brady was cut off by the sound of Parker shrieking and the smack of her hand across her mouth as they rounded the corner to their villa and stopped in their tracks.

Garrett had been focused on getting Parker to the room and making sure she didn’t fall down from exhaustion. After Brady gave him the status report, he tuned out whatever else he had been trying to say. Brady’s insistence on stopping them bordered on annoying, and Garrett had been a few deep breaths away from turning around and hitting him.

It made sense now - Brady trying to prepare them for what they were about to see, the fact that Fernandez never would have got his hands dirty and most likely had someone working for him, the conversation he had with Parker right before they left the hospital, and the doubts that had been floating around in his brain for days that he kept from her.

Even with all of these facts piling up, he still had to blink several times and shake his head to make sure what he was seeing was real and not just a figment of his imagination or the product of too little sleep and too much excitement in the past forty-eight hours.

He knew he didn’t imagine Parker’s scream. She had seen the same thing he did.

A ghost, who sat in the chair by the door to their villa, was now rising to his feet slowly, with his hands up in the air, mirroring the same position Joe had just a few hours earlier when he’d shown up in the same spot.

“It’s okay, Park. It’s okay, baby.”

Parker had to swallow back the bile that rose in her throat and another scream that was threatening to let loose. She blinked back tears in an effort to make the vision in front of her clearer. She used to think about this possibility in the quiet of the night right before sleep overcame her. She would even dream about something like this happening and wake up thinking about how likely it could or couldn’t be.

It was altogether different to have the product of those moments standing in front of you as real and as alive as the last time you saw him.

Parker let her hand fall from away from her mouth and finally found her voice.

“Milo?”





Chapter Twenty



The air was thick with humidity and rife with shock. Parker couldn’t tell if the sweat dripping down her back was from the temperature or her nerves. The man standing a few feet in front of her looked exactly like the man who had been her best friend during a time in her life when she desperately needed friends. He was the same man she had been prepared to love and cherish for the rest of her life. He was the same man who made her laugh, took care of her, and let her be her own person.

He looked the same, aside from the facial hair, but he was vastly different from the man she used to know. You couldn’t tell by looking at him, but Parker had first-hand knowledge of all the things that were different. She had proof he was a liar and so far removed from the man she thought she knew, she could almost pretend like they were two different people.

But they weren’t.

Her best friend and the disgusting man she discovered as they delved deeper and deeper into the mission were one in the same.

Frozen, just like she had been when she stood in the casket room of the funeral home and spent three hours trying to decide between solid mahogany wood with jewel-tone accessories and sienna bronze with European-style hardware until she finally curled up in the corner of the room and told Garrett she couldn’t do it because she wasn’t ready to say goodbye. She remembered the sickly sweet smell of the flowers surrounding the closed casket. Garrett had chosen the twenty-four by thirty-six black and white photograph of Milo propped up on an easel in the corner. The military report she was given showed, with ninety-nine point nine percent accuracy, the man sent home in a box was her fiancé.