No Rep (Madd CrossFit 1)

I felt raw inside.

“She’ll come around,” Mavis promised. “Just give her another day. She has more to tell you. And I think that she’ll figure it out with herself rather quickly. Especially with the way she whined last night about how she’d pushed you away.”

That gave me a small smile to wear.

That small smile eventually fell off my face as I closed up the gym with Madden.

Sadly, despite my Gran’s attempt to cheer me up, the night went to complete shit about halfway through dinner, thanks to another murder.

Even worse, there were news reporters at the house, and frustrated, one of the other officers that was there controlling the police barricade let it slip that there’d been a witness to one of the murders.

Who had that witness been?

Fran.

Son of a bitch.

CHAPTER 18

If the bar ain’t bending, you’re just pretending.

-Text from Fran to Taos

FRAN

“I told Taos to give you one more day,” Mavis said as she spoon-fed Vlad some green baby food.

Peas, I thought.

“What?” I asked, sounding shocked. “Why?”

I practically all but thrust my entire face into hers to better witness her explanation.

“Because you looked like you needed to work up the courage to finish telling him everything,” she said simply.

I felt my stomach jolt.

“There’s not really much to tell,” I admitted. “I just… I’m scared to talk to him. I’m scared he’s going to look at me differently.”

She rolled her eyes, then cursed. “Dang it. I forgot to go get the paper. Can you take over for a second?”

I rolled my eyes as she took off for the front door, handing me the spoon as she passed.

Vlad shrieked in protest, but I picked up the jar—yep, I was right. Peas—and brought a spoonful to his lips.

He ate it hungrily.

I laughed at his exuberance—oh, I wished he would keep loving peas—and fed him the rest of the jar before Mavis returned with the paper open as she walked into the room.

“Anything?” I asked.

Vlad’s father, Bayne Green, was on the way into town with his band. She wanted to make sure that she wasn’t anywhere near him and his scheduled appearances this weekend, so she was double-checking everything.

I didn’t blame her. Bayne Green was a dick.

When he’d learned that he’d had a kid with Mavis, he’d told her to ‘get rid of it.’

Mavis went out of her way not to associate Vlad with Bayne, and the good thing was, when you looked at Vlad, all you could really see was Mavis and me.

Thankfully, Bayne’s good looks were nowhere to be found in Vlad.

Bayne whose hometown was good ol’ Paris, Texas. Which was now becoming a local presence in and of itself thanks to it being the hometown of the bad boy of rock and roll.

“Okay, we’re all set.” She heaved a sigh. “The article in the paper says that…”

My eyes went to the paper as she got closer, and my eyes took in the photo on the front page.

My stomach sank as I got a good close up of my freakin’ house.

It was a photo that had my house and the house featuring the dead woman thanks to the serial killer, side by side.

Both looked really gloomy and ugly, thanks to the recent rainstorms battering our area.

Even my dead flowers near the mailbox added to the effect.

At first, I didn’t realize what I was seeing.

Not until Mavis got close enough for me to read the headlines.

I felt my stomach bottom out at the fear that started to overtake me.

It was back.

The gnawing, clawing, living, twisting thing inside of me.

I’d felt this feeling before.

It was my old friend, fear.

I read the headlines, then the article in the paper again, feeling my insides start to scream.

One witness has come forward on the grisly murders of twelve women over the Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana tristate areas. Francine Pope, thirty years old, of Paris, Texas. She is a registered nurse, as well as a critical pillar in the community.

I stopped reading, praying and hoping that more didn’t come of the words that I read.

Hoping beyond hope that they didn’t find what I tried so hard to keep buried—a victim of another serial killer.

What was I, a serial killer magnet?

What were the freakin’ odds that I would become a victim of not one, but two serial killers?

I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew damn well and good that shit was going to happen from this. I knew that the killer of these women was going to read this article, and think that I’d actually been a part of witnessing these murders when, in fact, I hadn’t.

Now I had a rather large target painted on my back.

Now, I was scared to death, and I would have to tell Taos why.

I wasn’t ready.

That’s when another thought occurred to me.

Taos.

He would know about this and…

The doorbell rang, and I knew without a doubt that the person on the other side of that door was him.