“Oh, no.I’m not doing anything for you.Tell me, though.Why would you want a painting of your late wife, considering you’re the one who made her late, Mister Mayor?”
FORTY-FIVE
Free-Range Hearts
His smile dimmed.“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
Finding that hole in my mental walls, I listened to him pivot.He’d thought this would be easy.Some arty, woo-woo psychic wasn’t even a challenge.Now, though, he was pissed.He wanted the hunting knife he kept in a sheath inside the waistband of his pants.He wanted to drive it into my smug body over and over, until his arm tired.
“Right.So you’re here at closing, hoping to get me alone, so you can talk portraits?With your fake beard and your disguise glasses?Is that it?”Sarcasm dripped from my words.
Charming smile back in place, he moved closer.“You caught me.”His gaze ran over me.“You’re quite beautiful.”He’d planned to kill me quickly, but now that he was here, drawing it out and making it hurt had a certain appeal.
“It’s odd,” I told him.“Psychopaths are often better mimics of normal human behavior.You know how to look charming.You know the mannerism, the expressions, but you don’t feel them, and so it’s unsettling.”
He scratched his cheek on a laugh.“Are those your psychic skills at work?”Head tilted, he gave me a look that chilled me to the bone.“I can’t say I’m too impressed.”
“Do you remember when CGI was new and studios realized that if they rendered characters too close to human, it freaked out the audience?We innately recognize when something isn’t quite human.That’s you.You’re just off enough to send chills down my spine.”
He shook his head.“I suppose an overactive imagination is needed in an artist.”He turned partially away from me, ostensibly to study my artwork.Really, though, he was pulling the knife from its sheath, his body blocking my view.
Smiling again, he considered how he’d do it.Should he slit my throat?Stab me in the heart?Maybe plunge it through my eye?
I smiled.Declan was right outside the door with Carter.Osso was probably close.As much as I would have liked feeding him to a hungry ocean, I wanted him to stand trial and live out the rest of his life in prison.
I smiled, completely relaxed.“It’s cute how you think you’re the one who will be walking out of here alive.I’m not a little boy on an archery field or a teenaged girl you drugged and raped by a pond.”
There it was.His expression changed.The charming politician was gone.The psychopath wanted to play, preferably with my entrails.
“I’m not a recovering addict,” I continued.“How many were there?How many desperate people sought help at that shelter, only to run afoul of you?Had you gotten a real taste for it by then?”
I shook my head in disgust.“So many lives stolen for the crime of crossing paths with you.You’re a plague, one that needs to be eradicated.”
Declan had slipped silently through the front door, so when Mayor Monroe lunged at me, knife out, ready to plunge it in me, he instead had two huge hands grab him.Declan pinned Monroe’s arms to his side and picked him up off the ground, swinging him away from me.
“There are cameras,” I reminded him.
He shook his head, like he was trying to shake off the shift.Muscles bulging, he slammed the mayor down on my concrete floors.Something or somethingsbroke, because the sound of bones snapping in an empty gallery was quite loud.
Declan was suddenly there, his eyes bright gold.He picked me up, crushing me to him, as he carried me to the door.“I’m so sorry,” he murmured into my hair.“I couldn’t hold it together.”
Osso and a couple of uniformed cops ran past us into the gallery.
“I’d sprouted wolf ears and claws,” he said, his voice a confession.“I knew you had cameras going and we needed to use the footage to nail him.”
He held me so tight, I had trouble breathing.
“I put you in more danger.”
“No.”I kissed his cheek above his beard.“You arrived right on time.We needed proof he was planning to gut me.If you’d come in earlier, we wouldn’t have that.Your timing was perfect.”
He carried me to the end of the porch, away from more racing feet.“Carter wanted to go in and get him.I wouldn’t let him.”
He had me dangling off the ground, our faces close together.I put my hands on either side of his and stared into his blazing gold eyes.“You needed to be the one to protect me, and you did.Look at me.Am I shaking?Do I look scared to you?”
He took a moment to get out of his own guilt-ridden head to study me.“No.”
“No,” I echoed.“He was never going to hurt me.He may be a serial-killer, but he’s still a human one.I’m Arwyn Fricking Corey.I moved a car yesterday.You think I can’t take a fifty-year-old public servant?”I rolled my eyes at that.
