*
Iris blinked tearsout of her eyes. They ran down her face, and she couldn’t even lift her hand to wipe them away. She felt like she was a puppet whose strings had been cut.
She couldn’t believe what was happening. And she couldn’t understand.
Blake had poisoned them.Blake.
He was her brother-in-law. He had sat with her in the hospital and patiently gone over word lists with her as she got back some of her facial flexibility and sensitivity. She’d needed to practice talking, but she’d been too depressed to think of anything to say. Blake had been the one to get the word lists from her speech therapist and convince Iris to at least run throughthose.
“When you hear yourself start to sound better, you’ll start feeling better too,” he’d said. “Don’t give up, Iris. The lists are your ladder out of here. Climb your way up.”
And now he was killing her. Worse, he was killingKeith. Iris couldn’t stand it.
Paralysis followed by a loss of consciousness. Followed by arson.
She couldn’t wrap her mind around any of it. It was like her thoughts were as frozen as the rest of her.
Luckily, Blake was happy to give them time to think. The more she and Keith slumped and sagged, the more Blake relaxed.
“I’m not an expert on fire,” he said, almost like he was confiding in them. “I can’t be sure that it will get hot enough to destroy your bodies completely. If there’s anything left for the doctors to examine afterwards, I need them to be sure you died in the fire. It has to look like an accident.”
“You can’t do this,” Iris said. She hated how the words came out in a mush. It didn’t make her sound very convincing. “You can’t burn us alive.”
“I have no intention of doing that,” Blake said stiffly. “I won’t start it until you’re unconscious, and you’ll probably die of smoke inhalation long before the fire reaches you. I don’t know why you always have to jump to the most dramatic option.”
“Because you poisoned us!” Keith said.
Blake let out an exasperated huff. “I didn’t want to, but I have no choice. You don’t understand.”
Right now, the only thing Iris could think to do was stall. She was pressed close enough to Keith to be able to feel him trying to work his phone out of his pocket. All he would need was the speed-dial, and then Simon’s super-hearing would take care of the rest.
They just needed time, either for Keith’s team to come to the rescue or for the poison to wear off.
“Help us understand. Why are you doing this?”
“You killed Lady Marianne, didn’t you?” Keith said at almost the same time. “You used Seraphina to get us here, but you were lying. You’re the one responsible, and now you’re trying to cover it up.”
Blake’s mouth twisted in an ugly sneer.
“Don’t act like this hasn’t all been a game for you right from the start,” he snarled. “You’ve been lying to me all along. Maybe you’ve even been lying to Iris too.”
Iris didn’t even waste a second wondering whether that was true. She knew it wasn’t. If Keith had lied to Blake, he’d done it atherinstigation, to make sure they kept up appearances with her family: that was all. Blake couldn’t possibly be talking about that. How could that ever lead to murder?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Keith said.
“Don’t lie to me!” Blake shouted. “Lady Marianne asked you here as an investigator! Nothing else makes sense!”
To Iris’s horror, Blake grabbed Keith by the shoulders and shook him angrily ... and Keith’s phone, which he’d somehow snaked into his hand, flew out of his limp fingers and went skittering across the floor.
They’d been so close. Had he been able to dial?
She instantly knew that he hadn’t, because Blake picked up the phone, glanced at the screen, and let out a sigh of relief.
Dammit. Anything that’s good news for him is bad news for us.
Even worse news for them was the fact that Blake’s sense of victory and relief didn’t last long. A forked vein throbbed in his temple. Iris didn’t want him losing his temper and lashing out again. She couldn’t let him hurt Keith.
She wanted him the way he had been a second ago, arrogant and comfortable, secure in the knowledge that he had them right where he wanted them.
