The feet that were jutting out from the floor on the far side of the bed.
“Keilar?” I asked, hurrying around the side of the bed. What I was confronted with made my breath seize in my throat.
Agent Keilar was laying on the floor...with a knife sticking out of his chest.
“Shit!” The word ripped out of me and I knelt down next to him, pressing my fingers to where his pulse should have been and found that there wasn’t one. Agent Keilar was dead and I had a sneaking suspicion about who had killed him.
My next thoughts were of Tibby and Aria, they had no idea that they were in danger. Rising from where I was crouched next to Keilar, I hurried for the door. We needed to get out of the house and into one of the SUVs.
I had only stepped one foot into the hallway when something cracked across the back of my skull. The pain was blinding for a moment before everything went black.
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“Well, it looks likeeverything is in order.” Darian Bellis told Tibby, his face filling my laptop computer screen as he organized the papers on his desk. “I’ll call you in a couple of days and we can go over some potential questions that the defense might ask. Take care of yourselves, okay?” With that the screen went black.
“What do you think of him?” I asked from my seat next to her, rubbing a soothing hand in circles on her back. I’d been able to scent her rising anxiety as we spoke to Bellis, and I had to catch myself several times to keep from purring while on the skype call. Now that it was over, I let the soothing rumble come out of my throat, pleased when Tibby relaxed into me.
Tibby sighed, “He seems like he knows what he’s doing, but I don’t like that I’m going to be the only witness testimony for the trial.”
“You just need to be honest with them and tell your story.” I soothed and played with one of her red curls, wrapping it around my finger
“That’s just the problem though, isn’t it. Everyone is going to come in with their own ideas of what my story is.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but the smell of smoke quickly made me forget my next words. “Do you smell that?”
Tibby tipped her nose up and sniffed a few times, “Is that smoke?”
I nodded and hurried over to the door. “Maybe Matteo is burning something down in the kitchen...?” I threw the door open and was immediately greeted with a wall of smoke. “Oh shit.”
Tibby slipped her hand into mine and gripped it, hard, before whispering the scariest thing that I’d ever heard in my life: “He’s here.”
CHAPTER 42
