Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(113)

Another chair; now both panes are broken. Then Vero is back, standing in the opening of jagged glass. She is bleeding. Her hands, her feet, her face.

She doesn’t care.

The smell of smoke. The heat of fire.

As she raises her arms above her head. Closes her eyes. Lifts her face to the night sky.

Vero wants to fly.

I scream once.

She makes no sound at all.

As she launches herself into the air. Away from the heat. Away from the flames.

Her dark hair ripples behind her. Her flowery nightgown sprouts like wings.

Vero wants to fly.

Another shout. Thomas, running up behind me. But it’s too late. Nothing either of us can do.

It’s the landing that’s the hard part.

As Vero comes down, down, down. Plowing into the earth. A pale, crumpled heap that moves no more.

“By the time I returned, it was too late. I didn’t know a house could go up like that,” Thomas murmurs. “I didn’t . . . We were just kids, Nicky. There were so many things we didn’t know.”

I can’t look at him. My heart is breaking. Like it broke that day. Because he’s right. It was all our fault. It wasn’t our fault at all. We were just trying to survive what we never should’ve had to survive in the first place.

Thomas took me away that day. He loaded me in his mother’s personal car, where I curled into a wet, shivering ball in the passenger’s seat. The house burned. Vero died. Thomas drove us to New Orleans.

In the days and weeks that followed, I could barely function. If I slept, I woke up screaming. If I was awake, I spent it crying.

Thomas found a place. Thomas purchased food. Thomas got a job on a movie set during the day, then held me in his arms at night. As I tried to put myself back together, but failed over and over again.

Until, four weeks later, attempting to do laundry, I found a picture in Thomas’s pocket. One he must’ve taken when no one was looking. Of a ten-year-old girl in a flowered dress. Of me.

And I broke. I know of no other way of saying it. I looked at myself, I saw Vero. I remembered Vero, I saw myself, and I couldn’t . . . I just couldn’t.

Thomas came home. I greeted him with the news that I was gone, leaving, out of there. I had died, and now it was time to be dead. No more Chelsea. No more Vero. I would move, new name, new town, new experience. It was the only way for me.

And he said yes.

I didn’t even understand at first. Then he walked to the dresser, tossed his few items of clothing in a bag, and declared he was ready. If I needed to leave, then we would go. If I needed a new name, he’d get one, too. If I needed a fresh start, he’d take it with me.

He loved me. He would go wherever, do whatever, be whomever, as long as he was with me.

And that’s what we did. Have been doing for twenty-two years.

“How did you do it?” I ask him now. Because this is what I don’t understand. How that night could break me completely, while making my husband so strong.

“You were what I wanted, Nicky. I’d been watching you, waiting for you, I don’t even know for how long. I failed Vero. I know that. I failed all of us by not acting sooner, by not turning on my own mother. Trust me, in the beginning I replayed it in my mind over and over again. All the coulda, woulda, shouldas. But in the end, I couldn’t go back. So I resolved to move forward. I vowed to make you happy if it took the rest of my life. And that’s what I’ve been doing. Loving you. If only for you, that was enough.”

“I miss her.”

“I know.”

“I should’ve gotten us both out,” I exclaim in a rush. “I should’ve been smarter. She was lost by then, so sad. She wouldn’t even tell her stories anymore. But maybe, if I could’ve gotten her out. Returned her to the secret realm, the magical queen. She was just a little girl who missed her mother.”

“It wouldn’t have worked.”

“It might have—”

“No. It wouldn’t have. Nicky, turn around.”

The tone of his voice is sharp. It catches me off guard, like a slap to the face.

The wind is not blowing anymore, I realize. The night has gone totally still. Totally quiet.

I turn. Very slowly. To discover Marlene Bilek standing in the beam of Thomas’s flashlight.

Her hard-worn face is stamped with a grim expression I’ve never seen before. And she is holding a gun.





Chapter 41




WE GOT A problem.” It was Kevin, reaching them via the radio as they bounced up the steep, rutted drive.

“What kind of problem?” Wyatt shouted over the noise of the SUV’s engine straining.

“Marlene Bilek has disappeared. Sent a uniform to pick her up, per your request. House is dark, vehicle not in the drive. She’s gone off the range.”

Wyatt turned to Tessa. “Maybe wanting a private chat with the last person who saw her daughter alive.”

“Circled back to the hotel, spotted Nicky with Thomas and decided to follow?” Tessa frowned at him. “But why? She already knows Nicky isn’t Vero.”

“No, Nicky is something more powerful. She’s Vero’s memory, a walking legacy of Vero’s young life.”

“You think Marlene’s worried that Nicky might know about the money she received after Vero’s kidnapping? But why not pry a little more earlier in the evening?”