SWNOVELS Paint It All Red: Chapter 1
We are rarely proud when we are alone.
—Voltaire
Hadley jumps when I sling open the door to her room. She jerks out her earbuds, clutching her chest with her free hand.
“Cheese and rice, you lunatic. Don’t scare someone like that when there’s a serial killer literally in our backyard.”
“Or living just a few cabins down, right?” I ask dryly, though there’s an edge to my tone that has her entire body stiffening.
She doesn’t even have to say the words, but I want to hear them.
“You knew?” I ask her quietly, my tone full of disbelief and heartbreak.
Everything hurts right now, even as I fight off the onslaught of emotions. In this unit, you train against showing emotion at all costs. I’ve never found that to be harder to do than today.
Her lips move for several seconds before words actually start coming out.
“Logan, I’m sorry, but—”
“You knew!” I shout with accusation, as my fist slams into the wall, and my entire body heaves for a breath of air that doesn’t feel lined with lead.
“Logan!” she yells, but I turn around and face her, slowly regaining my calm. “Listen. It was complicated, and she—”
“We’re done, Hadley. You and me. I’m fucking done with you,” I say on a broken promise.
Tears immediately spring from her eyes.
“Are you serious?” She has the nerve to ask that with incredulity in her tone.
“Yeah. I can’t be friends with someone who could watch me fall in love with someone like that and not tell me the truth.”
Her eyes narrow, and her lips tremble. “Someone like that? Someone who would kill or die to keep you safe? Someone who loved you so much that she almost gave up her revenge?”
“Her revenge?” I ask bitterly, shaking my head as I turn and stalk away. “It’s not her fucking revenge!”
I slam the door behind me, and stalk next door to where Leonard almost falls off the chair when I burst in. “Shit! Easy, man. I’m trying to find some more info on Ken—”
His words die when he sees my face. “Oh shit,” he says on an exhale.
“Yeah,” I say, dropping to a chair and grabbing the bottle of whiskey he has hanging out of his go-bag. “She admitted it.”
“She what?” he asks, shocked.
“She basically admitted it. I couldn’t stick around for a full confession.”
“Where the hell is she?”
I run my sleeve over my eyes, then turn up the bottle.
“Cuffed to my bed,” I say when I lower the bottle.
His eyes grow wider.
“I have no idea what to do right this second. She’s fucked my head up so much that I can’t bear turning her over to anyone in this town or the FBI. But I know I have to do something. Since I don’t know what, I cuffed her in place.”
It’s a terrible fucking way to stall, but it’s the only solution I currently have.
He scrubs his face before shoving a file at me.
“I can’t find anything at all in her history—besides drug use—that would make her willing to do anything like this. She’s been clean for years though, and I haven’t noticed any track marks. And she’s not delusional or suffering a psychotic—”
“Hence the fucking reason I don’t know what to do,” I growl. “She’s lucid, well aware of her surroundings, too fucking smart to be too stupid, and definitely not the type to be easily manipulated by anyone—not even Jacob Denver.”
I laugh humorlessly as a memory surfaces. She called him Jake, even fucking told me Jake was her bisexual business partner. I never pieced the shit together. Because I was too blinded by everything I felt for her to even consider such a possibility.
“Here’s the file,” he says quietly. “Have a look at it. Maybe it’ll help you figure it out.”
I jerk the file from the tabletop, and I flip it open. I’m immediately grimacing when I see the folder, because of the grizzly pictures. But there’s one thing that doesn’t make sense.
“What the hell?” I ask quietly.
Blue eyes. In the picture they have on file before the accident, Kennedy Carlyle looks nothing like Lana Myers. And her eye color was blue—no contacts.
I flip the pictures, finding the photos taken for the police report of Kennedy’s damage. I know Lana’s body too well, and the marks in the picture, though somewhat similar, aren’t exact.
A chilling sensation creeps up my spine as sickening possibilities start to unfold.
“Any chance you have the file on Victoria Evans?” I ask calmly, keeping my voice steady.
He hands it to me immediately.
“Why?”
I take a quick, steadying breath before I open the file, and a pair of haunted green eyes stare back at me with a face that doesn’t match Lana’s, but still carries some resemblance.
My heart sinks to my toes as I flip open the pictures, finding the ones they also sent to the police. Nausea almost overwhelms me when I see the marks aligning perfectly with the scars I know by heart.
“Oh shit,” I say on a hissed breath.
“What?” Leonard demands.
My eyes pop up as regret wells and explodes inside me, shaking me to the core.
“Lana Myers is not Kennedy Carlyle.”
He looks genuinely confused, and I hand him the same folder.
“Lana Myers is Victoria Evans.”
He drops the folder like it’s on fire as his eyes jerk up to meet mine, wide with shock.
Somehow, probably with some help from Jake, she went in as Victoria Evans, and left as Kennedy Carlyle. Considering I can barely stomach looking at either of their badly crushed faces in those photos, it’s not a surprise that he did it with such ease.
“That changes everything,” he says on weary breath.
He breaks out his laptop, and I lean back, my anger slowly fading as my mind starts to work. I stopped at that coffee shop by chance, because our usual spot was too crowded. I pursued her, wanted to earn her trust, even saw something in her I needed for myself.
Every smile before me was probably rare. Every smile with me was given freely with genuineness. Every touch was hungry and full of emotion she struggles to show.
She trusted me.
“You may very well be the damn reason she’s not suffered a break,” Leonard hisses, still typing away on his laptop.
I take another shot of liquid courage and stand, but Leonard catches my wrist.
“These images don’t match up on the computer.”
“What?”
He points to the files. “I got copies of their paper files. You know I’m old-school. But on the computer, the images are swapped.”
I look on the screen, and sure enough, Victoria Evans has the wounds of Kennedy Carlyle and vice versa. Green eyes meet mine from Kennedy’s file.
“Jake could change what they had in the computers, but not before they started a physical file,” I whisper to myself.
I’d have never known.
“What are you going to do?” Leonard asks me.
“Tell Hadley not to say anything. I can’t talk to her right now. And you don’t say anything either.”
He almost smiles, but stops himself. He’s been advocating for her from the sidelines, and I’ve been on the verge of removing him from this case.
All along, I was in love with the girl who wants this town dead.
I jog back to my cabin, swing open the door, and practically sprint to the bedroom. That’s when my heart sinks.
The handcuffs are tossed on the floor, along with the sheet. And everything Lana brought is gone.
I swallow against the knot in my throat, slowly lowering myself to the bed.
She saved my life.
I cast her aside.
It takes me a minute to realize I’ve been gone for over an hour, even though it feels like only minutes. I gave her too much time to disappear.
I grab my phone and dial Leonard as I walk outside.
“I need to know any ties to this town that they still have.”
Typing rattles in the background. I’m tempted to ask Hadley, but after what I just said to her, I doubt she’d be likely to help.
“Christopher Denver owns one of those hunting cabins in the woods. I’ll text you the location.”
I hang up and immediately change clothes and shoes. You can’t run through the woods too well in a suit.
I dart out of the house seconds later, reading the text with the location. More memories flit through my head as I run.
Lisa fucking taunted her, practically tried to provoke Lana. Lana could have destroyed her.
Or Victoria, rather.
She left the argument with Johnson and the sheriff earlier because they were pissing her off, and she was afraid of what’d she’d do, not what’d she say.
Seeing the sheriff had to be hard on her, and she asked for two fucking hours, as though she needed me. And I came back, fucked her, then unloaded mayhem, as if I was daring her to show her true colors.
I walked out when she simply cried. The cold-hearted killer who tortured and slaughtered the monsters from her past… I made her cry. She never even got angry.
There are so many unpredictable variables about her, and I have no idea what to do.
As soon as I reach the cabin, I pull my gun from my ankle holster, holding it at my side. After two quick breaths, I kick in the door, but stop moving, my gun still at my side and not aimed at anything.
Jacob Denver is sitting on a couch like he’s been waiting for me.
I cock my head, my eyes narrowing, and he sits comfortably, completely relaxed.
My eyes dart around, seeing the empty cabin and bare walls. He speaks as I clutch the gun with both hands, ready to aim it at him if he gives me a reason.
“I knew you were coming,” he drawls, leaning up. “So put your gun away. If I was a threat, you’d already be dead. Fortunately for you, I happen to enjoy breathing, and I’m not sure Lana would be okay with me retaining oxygen if I laid a hand on you.”
I cut my gaze toward him, releasing the gun with one hand, while holding it with the other.
“Where is she?”
He snorts derisively. “You came alone, which means you haven’t told your team yet. Well, other than the Leonard guy whose cabin you charged into then ran out a little while later.”
“You’re watching us. Big surprise. I already knew this. Where is Victoria?”
His eyes widen marginally. “Oh, so you’ve figured out the truth now instead of slamming her with accusations and silencing her. Little late, don’t you think?”
There’s a harsh bitterness to his tone, like he hates me and has been waiting to be proven right.
“Her name is Lana. Victoria Evans was killed by this town. She can’t be Victoria Evans. She had to reinvent herself just to find the will to go on. You called her sick, but you have no idea what you’re up against. You have no fucking idea what she survived.”
His words grow angrier with each new sentence, and he slowly stands.
I grip the gun tighter with one hand, watching him warily.
“Looks like your legs work just fine,” I quip, eyeing the man who has played the world.
He taps his legs. “They work better than your mind.”
“I thought she was Kennedy Carlyle, and had developed an unhealthy obsession with the Evans family due to the two coincidental times their paths crossed with death. And—”
“Kennedy Carlyle was a self-absorbed drug addict, who, quite frankly, was a motherfucking menace to society. It was only a matter of time before she got as high as her parents got drunk and killed someone. As fate would have it, she only killed a tree the night she also killed herself. Seemed like a waste of a perfectly good identity and funds for someone who needed to survive.”
“I assumed it was you,” I say calmly. “The one who changed her world.”
“Falsifying hospital records is actually easy, as long as you know where to start,” he says, once again tapping the sides of his legs that he fooled the world into believing were useless. “She needed a legitimate identity; she needed money; she needed a chance. If they’d found out she survived, they would have come. And back then? They would have killed her with almost no effort.”
He blows out a breath, trying to calm his anger. I continue staring, letting him speak, trying to figure all this out as he does.
“When she told me she was screwing around with a FBI agent, I almost had a fucking brain aneurism,” he says, looking away while laughing humorlessly. “I’d killed myself trying to make sure no one ever figured out who she was.”
His eyes meet mine again.
“Then we talked face-to-face, and she fucking smiled when she said your name. She smiled like there was hope.” He swallows a knot. “I forced her to separate the kills by a month, telling her it was more cautious, when really—”
“You worried when this was all over, she’d no longer have a purpose to stay alive.”
His eyes glisten, and he clears his throat, nodding stoically.
“I was stalling,” he says quietly. “But after she met you? I saw so much fucking hope. As of today, I saw an empty shell. I wanted to be wrong about you, SSA Bennett. I went along with all her changes to our plans. Do you know why she refused to let you hear the story from Lindy?”
I tilt my head before putting my gun in the back of my pants.
“She wanted us to hear the story when we got here. She wanted it to have maximum impact.”
He stares me hard in the eyes. “She wanted it to have the maximum impact on you. To hell with all the others. She may still want revenge, but everything else has been centered around you. She practically prayed the Boogeyman would come after her, just so she could kill him and end the threat he posed to your life. And you treat her like a monster. Why? Because she kills? Do you treat your military like monsters? Do you stare at your own reflection with such disdain? Because I’ve seen your file. You’ve shot and killed thirteen serial killers since your career began. Those were real monsters, just like all the men Lana has dispatched.”
I stagger on my feet, struggling with that thin line between madness and sanity.
“But she’s supposed to what? Just move on and forget it happened?” he goes on. “Because the law says it’s wrong to exact revenge on monsters unless you have a badge or a government decree?” He takes a step toward me, holding his finger in my direction. “This is a girl who spent years training, learning control to keep her mind sound. Something our military or law enforcement doesn’t even require. These men? They destroyed her entire family. They destroyed her. Two fucking kids!” His voice breaks, and he turns around, putting his back to me when his emotions get the better of him.
I don’t even know what to say. Anything but agreement would result in a possible violent outburst from him, and for some reason, I can’t bring myself to fully agree aloud either.
I’ve always been on one side of the law, working tirelessly for justice through all the proper channels.
But Lana tried. Jake tried. They were denied.
“I loved him,” he says as he turns back around, unshed tears battling to drop from his eyes. “I loved him and treated him like my dirty little secret in public, while loving him with all I had behind closed doors. Marcus accepted the scraps I offered, because he loved me so much he couldn’t let me go, even though he deserved better.”
Tears fall from his eyes, and he bats them away angrily.
“There wasn’t a time in all these years that I questioned what I’d do for him since failing him so terribly when he was still alive. I took him for granted. I took what we had for granted. I never realized how very fucking rare it all was or how quickly it could all be gone.”
He slowly drops to the couch again, his knees seeming to give out.
“Lana… I never thought she’d love anyone the way I loved Marcus. I thought they’d broken her. I thought they’d stolen every last shred of her heart. The only thing keeping her alive was the fire inside her that burned with pure, unadulterated hatred.”
He looks up, meeting my gaze once again. “She loved you. She had two visions of how this would all go. One ended with you loving her as much as she loves you, and you’d stand by her no matter what, feel her pain as if it was your own. Unfortunately, you chose option number two, proving me right, even though I desperately wanted you to prove me wrong.”
I still can’t find the right words, and he continues to have tears drop occasionally as he glares at me with nothing less than contempt.
“Real love? The kind Lana gave you? It’s the kind of love that looks beyond one’s offenses against others and only calls to the soul. Lana saved a child. Lana risked everything to save you. Lana saved countless women by killing Plemmons. Yet you still view her as a monster by not meeting your generalized populous version of morality. In your eyes, it’s better to forever be the victim than to ever feel peace again, because a real monster might die at the hands of someone who won’t show mercy.”
“Where’s Lana?” I ask softly, trying not to agitate him farther.
“If Lana wants to be found, she’ll let you find her. Knowing her identity won’t stop her. In his life as a selfless, loving, incredible person, Marcus only ever made one selfish request. I’ll go to the grave before I deny him that request, and so will Lana. Revenge, that’s all he wanted he wanted from her. And revenge he’ll have.”
“Where is she?” I ask again.
“She let the story fall into place, guiding you to the truth slowly, letting it sink in…all the torture she endured. All the pain her family faced. She changed absolutely everything to accommodate her hopes for you. Way to fuck it all up.”
“Where is she, Jacob?” I growl.
He eyes me, and a smirk crosses his lips. “I prefer Jake,” he quips. “And you’ve already lost. Lana and I worked tirelessly for a long time to profile this entire town, deciding each and every possible path the key players would take. We’ve prepared for every outcome, and we stay ten steps ahead. Knowing our identity won’t help you. In fact, tell them it’s Victoria back from the grave with my help? The entire town will erupt in panic.”
My jaw tics as I stare him down.
“Where. Is. She?”
“That’s no longer your concern,” he says dismissively. “I only came here to make sure her words were spoken, since you did the worst thing you could possibly do. You silenced her. You refused to listen. Now I have to pray I’m enough of a reason for her to want to live.”
I lift my gun, aiming it at him, even though I have no intention of actually pulling the trigger.
“Where is she? I won’t ask again.”
His eyes grow colder. “As I said, we’ve prepared for every possible outcome of every situation.”
He raises his hands slowly, like he’s going to put them behind his head, but instead, he puts something in his ears.
“I should mention, I even estimated the amount of time this conversation would take.”
Before I can even question that, a high-pitch, piercing noise attacks my ears, and I drop the gun to clutch my head that seems to be wobbling like a drum under attack. I’m forced to my knees as the sound grows excruciating to my ears, and my eyes screw shut as I fight to stand back up.
Just as suddenly as it began, the noise stops, and even though my hearing might take a few minutes to get right, I feel instant relief. My eyes fly open to see that Jake is already gone, and I look at the box on the wall that just brought me to my knees.
He really has fucking planned everything down to the last detail, just as Lana has. Only she had hoped for a different outcome.
My mind feels like it’s gone through a mind-fuck blender. Up is down. Right is left. Good is bad.
Before I can stop myself, I slam my fist into the wall, ignoring the searing pain that shoots up my arm when my knuckles strike the unforgiving wood.
I learned to control all my emotions long before I joined the FBI. I learned to hide the anger. Learned to be stoic. Learned to taper any sort of feeling that was too strong.
But not today.
I fall apart, tossing everything in the cabin as my heart gets yanked out of my chest, and I lash out for the first time in over fifteen years.