The single syllable tattooed a rhythm on my brain like my heart against my sternum.
She was going to kill me?
Shit, this was even worse than I thought.
Okay, I had to remain calm. I wasn’t of any use to myself if I let my emotions get the best of me. Closing my eyes, I ran through an abbreviated version of the breathing exercise I used when a panic attack loomed. When I opened them, I found Addie watching me in the mirror again.
“Aren’t you going to askwhy?”
“I know why. You’re obsessed with Lane.”
“I don’t like that word. It implies something…unhealthy. Like I have an illness.”
I snorted. “And you think falsely accusing me of attacking you then driving me somewhere to kill me all so you can have himisn’ta sign of a mental illness?”
“Of course not. Lane ismine, Sutton. He’s been mine for ten years. Ilovehim, and he loves me.”
I didn’t bother to correct her, to remind her he’d beenminefor a hell of a lot longer than that. To tell her he lovedme. This wasn’t a tit-for-tat situation, and it wouldn’t do any good. Fighting with crazy people never yielded the desired result.
And there were the texts to consider. Maybe Addie wasn’t entirely off base in thinking he wanted her. As badly as I triedto convince myself there was no way Lane would carry on a relationship with this woman behind my back, those messages were damning.
“If that was the case, he’d be with you and not me,” I said.
“He feels bad for you,” she replied pityingly. “You came to him with your damsel in distress bullshit, and you know he’s never been able to resist helping a woman down on her luck. I told him it was a bad idea. That you’d grow too attached, especially given your history, but he didn’t listen. So I had to resort to drastic measures.”
“So you beat yourself up and accused me of assault in hopes that, what, you’d have him all to yourself once I was out of the picture?”
What must it be like to live in that level of delusion? She couldn’t possibly think this would go the way she wanted.
“Exactly,” she said, “but it started long before your arrest.”
Iknewit. Still, I needed to keep her talking. She seemed at ease, and the longer she spoke with me, the more it prolonged my death.
“How long before?”
“You don’t get to my place in life and within the Bureau without being very good at reading people. I saw you in the hospital after he got shot. Hell, I was therewhenhe got shot, witnessing your reaction in real time. And I hate to break it to you, honey, but how you felt about him was glaringly obvious. Call it woman’s intuition, or a sixth sense about people I’d cultivated over the course of my career, but I justknew, after watching him almost die, you’d make a move on him. Plus, when Lane woke up from his coma, I could sense a shift in him. Like somehow, while he’d been unconscious, things had changed for him.”The coma dream, I thought, but kept my mouth shut. “It was a damn good thing I’d had the foresight to clone his phone before he tossed me to the side in favor of this shiny new toy.”
She caught my eye in the mirror, and I realizedIwas the toy.
But wait…cloned his phone?
Oh, shit.
The texts are fake.
My stomach lurched. I had only a vague idea of what “cloning” meant, but I could guess it had given her access to a lot—if not all—of Lane’s cell phone data. Meaning she’d been privy to every conversation we’d had over the last several months.
Had she been listening in on our phone calls?
We’d had phone sex a few times while I’d been staying in Boise, and the idea that she’d been eavesdropping unbeknownst to us made me want to claw my skin off.
I mentally slapped myself in the face. How could I have been so stupid to believe Lane would ever do that to me? Not that it made much difference now, but he was probably so confused. I’d go to my death with him thinking I was mad at him for something he didn’t understand. Something he hadn’t even done.
“And I couldn’t have that,” she continued, dragging me out of my thoughts.
“So what did you do?”
“Well first, I plotted. I’ve spent years studying and interacting with criminals. I know how they operate. So I called on my knowledge to devise a plan.
