Love Kills (Lilah Love 4)
“You—”
“Love you. I love you so fucking much that, yes, I would kill for you. Yes, I will bury a million bodies for you. And yes, I will bleed for you, but I’m doing it all right here with you.” He lowers his mouth to mine and brushes his lips over mine. “We do this, all of it, together. Say it.”
“Kane—”
“Say it, Lilah.”
“Together. But you better remember that and not get killed. You better—”
He brushes his lips over mine and smiles against my mouth. “You can never just agree, can you?”
“I’m never going to be that girl.”
“Good. I bet if I asked you to marry me again, you’d say ‘yes, but’ to that, too.”
My chest tightens, damn these emotions. “Kane,” I whisper.
“Lilah,” he whispers, and then he’s kissing me again, and at some point, my hands are free, and I’m free with him. What I feel is no longer desperate but something softer, and I am never soft. Except with him. With Kane, perhaps, I’m human because he allows me to be all the things that I am. And when we’re lying together, in the darkness, listening to the rain, I flashback to that night on the beach. I flashback to me in that shower covered in blood. I flashback to him being there. We’re bonded in the very blood that once separated us.
“What was all of this about?” he asks, rolling us to our sides to face each other.
I sit up and curl my knees to my chest, withdrawing, but that withdrawal is about me, not him. He grabs his shirt and wraps it around me before he tugs on his pants. Somehow, he knew I needed boundaries, and he’s confident enough in himself and us, to not find that intimidating. He settles back on the mattress, and his hand rests on my knees.
I tell him everything I’ve discovered, my reasons for keeping the toxin secret, and finally, those cigarette burns that lead to a threat against Roger. “I told him to leave town. He won’t.”
His eyes narrow. “And?”
I press my hands to my face and then scoot off the bed to stand up, pacing the room. Kane moves to sit on my side of the mattress. I pace some more and turn to face him. “A lot of times, I don’t feel what I should feel, Kane. You know that, right?”
“What does that mean?” he asks cautiously.
“Roger is being stupid. He’s going to die. I actually thought—okay, you want to be a fool. Die a fool. I felt no remorse. I don’t feel those things. I’ve always had that in me, but after my attack—”
He’s suddenly standing in front of me, his hands on my shoulders. “You sent Beth away. You worried for Beth. You put her in the damn Ritz to protect her. You held back the toxin to protect her. You fight every day for people who died because you care. Stop making yourself the monster, Lilah. You are not the monster.”
“But—”
“You are not the monster. You’ve got your Otherworld for a reason. It’s your way of shutting off your emotions. It’s sanity.”
“And you? Is that what you do?”
His expression tightens. “I’m not you.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t need an Otherworld to shut things out, beautiful. You know that, even if you try to pretend it’s not true.” He cups my face. “A badge wouldn’t shut me down. The badge on you shuts me down. Stop fighting who you are.”
“Roger—”
“You don’t feel nothing. That’s not what this is.” He releases me and folds his arms in front of his chest, studying me. “You’re blocking out what you feel, just like you do when you go to a crime scene and mentally step into your Otherworld. What are you blocking out?”
My brows furrow. “I don’t—I’m not.”
“You are,” he says as if it’s just simply a fact. “I know you. You absolutely are.” He kisses me, a tender act that, in itself, defies his declared coldness. The warmth I feel with it defies mine. “I’m going to throw on some jeans and order us a pizza,” he says. “That’s your preferred thinking food.”
“Hell’s Kitchen,” I murmur, as he walks into the bathroom to get to the closet.
I stand there a minute, processing what he’s just said. I’m suppressing emotion rather than not feeling it at all. Am I? I dress, replaying that encounter with Roger and Melanie, looking for answers. I’ve just finished dressing when one of the phones in that envelope, the one that is still somehow on the bed, rings. Ghost is calling. Good. He and I need to have another little chat.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Hello, Ghost,” I answer.
“Lilah,” he says, and he doesn’t sound surprised. “Always a pleasure. Do you have a name for me?”
“I told you, if I had a name, I’d kill him myself. Do you have a name?”
“No, but he’s a sick fuck. I told you. I’ll kill him for free.”
“He’s a sick fuck?”
“He does it for pleasure. For you and me, it’s business.”
“I do it to protect people. You do it for money.”
“You need to justify it. One day, you’ll get over that.”
Kane appears in the doorway in black jeans and a black long sleeve T-shirt, looking so damn arrogantly Kane Mendez, that I know I haven’t gotten through to him. “If you kill Kane,” I say to Ghost, “it’ll be all kinds of personal for me, and you will no longer be the best assassin on the planet. I will be, and you’ll be dead. And I’ll enjoy killing you.”
Kane is in front of me now, taking the phone. I let him. I’ve said what I needed to say. “Ghost,” he greets, and then eyes me, amusement in his stare, in the quirk of his lips. “Yes. Yes, she is.” He listens a moment and says, “Time-sensitive.” Another pause. “When?” And then. “Yes.” He disconnects.
“What was that?” I demand.
“We do these things in person, Lilah.”
“You can’t meet him. He’ll kill you.”
“He’s not going to kill me.”
“I will shoot you in the damn leg before you go meet him.”
He catches my hip and walks me to him. “I love you, too.”
“Kane—”
“I know what I’m doing. You want transparency, Lilah. This is it. I could have pretended that was someone else. I would have pretended that was someone else in the past.”
I inhale on that and turn away from him, before facing him again. He’s right. I asked for this. If I fight his every move, he’ll stop telling me the truth. “And yet, you didn’t want to tell me how you’re handling Pocher.”
“I thought a lot about that today,” he says. “You’re right. I promised you that I’d stop shutting you out. I’m not doing that now, but I hope like hell we both don’t regret that.”
I sit down on the bed, making sure he knows that I’m not running. “You’re going to have Ghost kill Pocher?” It’s obvious, of course, but I want confirmation.
He sits down next to me. “And make it look like Umbrella Man did it. It’s not a far reach after he delivered that pig to a Pocher-sponsored event.”
“He doesn’t kill men.”
“I know that, Lilah.”
My heart thunders in my ears. “Who else is he going to kill?”
“I need your cousin to connect him to one of the victims.”
This answer delivers relief. Kane isn’t going to kill someone just to cover up Pocher’s murder. I know him. I know this man, and suddenly, transparency isn’t going to prove me wrong. “It’s there already. Several of them donated to my father’s campaign. I can connect the dots to link Pocher. I just haven’t figured out how they’re picking who Umbrella Man kills.”
“Whoever is behind the murders can’t talk. We can’t let Umbrella Man tell his story. He can’t be arrested. He has to die.”
“Don’t expect me to object. I won’t.”
“You understand what knowing these things means for you, right? You understand the liability?”
“We can’t be us, and you live two lives, Kane.”
“If anything ever comes back on me, you
deny ever knowing anything. Promise me. Promise me that you’ll protect yourself.”
“Kane—”
“Promise me or I just told you the last thing I will ever tell you that crosses a line.”
“Damn it,” I curse, squeezing my eyes shut. “Fine. Yes. I promise.” I look at him. “I promise.”
He studies me a few beats and then says, “You’re going to kill Ghost and enjoy it?”
My lips curve. “What did he say about that?”
“That you’re a badass. I agreed.” His words are light, but there is something else there, something hesitant, something hard. “What aren’t you saying?”
“There’s more. There’s something I need to tell you, and you aren’t going to like it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I fight the urge to stand up and face him, but that’s confrontational, and we’re on new ground here. He’s talking to me. This is what I asked for. “I’m listening,” I say.
“I made some calls about the poison.”
My heart starts to thunder in my ears, and I blurt out, “Beth found out what the poison is.”