Love You More (Tessa Leoni, #1)(65)

But first, we both had to be brave.

Brian had to die. That’s what the man had told me, Saturday morning in my kitchen. Brian had been a very bad boy and he had to die. But Sophie and I might live. I just had to do as I was told.

They had Sophie. To get her back, I would take the blame for killing my husband. They even had a few ideas on the subject. I could set things up, argue self-defense. Brian would still be dead, but I’d get off and Sophie would be miraculously found and returned to me. I’d probably have to quit the force, but hey, I’d have my daughter.

Standing in the middle of the kitchen, my ears ringing from gunfire, my nostrils still flared with the scent of gunpowder and blood, this had seemed a good deal. I’d said yes, to anything, to everything.

I’d just wanted Sophie.

“Please,” I’d begged, begged in my own home. “Don’t hurt my daughter. I’ll do it. Just keep her safe.”

Now, of course, I was starting to realize how foolish I’d been. Brian had to die and someone else take the blame for his death? If Brian had to die, why not tamper with his brakes, or cause an “accident” next time he went skiing? Brian was alone most of the time, plenty of things the man in black could’ve done other than shoot Brian and order his wife to take the blame. Why that? Why me?

Sophie would be miraculously found? How? Wandering in a major department store, or maybe waking up at a highway rest stop? Obviously the police would question her, and children were notoriously unreliable witnesses. Maybe the man could scare her into saying nothing, but why take that risk?

Not to mention once my daughter was returned to me, what incentive did I have to stay quiet? Maybe I’d go to the police then. Why take that risk?

I was thinking more and more that the kind of person who could shoot a man three times in cold blood probably didn’t take unnecessary risks.

I was thinking more and more that the kind of person who could shoot a man three times in cold blood had a lot more going on than he was admitting.

What had Brian done? Why did he need to die?

And did he realize, in the last second of his life, that he’d almost certainly doomed me and Sophie, as well?

I felt the metal bars press against either side of my hand, not round as I’d assumed, but fashioned in a shape similar to the slats in vertical blinds.

The man wanted me in prison, I realized now. He, and the people he no doubt worked for, wanted me out of the way.

For the first time in three days, I smiled.

Turned out, they had a little surprise coming. Because in the bloody aftermath, my ears still ringing, my eyes wide with horror, I’d latched onto one thought. I needed to buy time, I needed to slow things down.

Fifty thousand dollars, I’d offered the man who’d just killed my husband. Fifty thousand dollars if he’d give me twenty-four hours to “get my affairs in order.” If I was going to take the blame for my husband’s death, end up in jail, I had to make arrangements for my daughter. That’s what I’d told him.

And maybe he didn’t trust me, and maybe he had been suspicious, but fifty grand was fifty grand, and once I explained to him that I could put Brian’s body on ice …

He’d been impressed. Not shocked. Impressed. A woman who could preserve her husband’s body with snow was apparently his kind of gal.

So the nameless hit man had accepted fifty grand, and in return I had twenty-four hours to “get my story straight.”

Turns out, there’s a lot you can do in twenty-four hours. Especially when you’re the kind of woman who can dispassionately shovel snow over the man who’d once promised to love her, to take care of her, to never leave her.

I didn’t think of Brian now. I wasn’t ready, couldn’t afford to go to that place. So I focused on what mattered most.

Who do you love?

The hit man was right. That’s what life comes down to in the end. Who do you love?

Sophie. Somewhere out there in that same darkness, my daughter. Six years old, heart-shaped face, big blue eyes, and a toothless smile that could power the sun. Sophie.

Brian had died for her. Now I would survive for her.

Anything to get my daughter back.

“I’m coming,” I whispered. “Be brave, sweetheart. Be brave.”

“What?” Erica said, from the top bunk where she was mindlessly flipping cards.

“Nothing.”

“Window won’t break,” she stated. “No escaping that way!” Erica cackled as if she’d told a great joke.

I turned toward my roommate. “Erica, the pay phone in the commons area—can I use that to make a call?”

She stopped playing her cards.

“Who you gonna call?” she asked with interest.

“Ghostbusters,” I said, straight-faced.

Erica cackled again. Then she told me what I needed to know.





24



Bobby wanted to stop for dinner. D.D. did not.

“You need to take better care of yourself,” Bobby informed her.

“And you need to stop fussing over me!” she snapped back, as they drove through the streets of Boston. “I never liked it before and I don’t like it now.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said no. And you can’t make me.”