“Here, wait just a second. Hold on,” Dutch said.
As the sheriff’s voice faded into the background, Dutch blew past all three of us. With his knives holstered, he tore down the hallway and took a hard left, and for the life of me I had no idea where the fuck he was going.
“You got any clue?” I asked as I eyed Troop.
He simply shrugged. “Not a fucking clue.”
But, it didn’t take Dutch long to come back. And when he did, he was carrying a leopard-printed suitcase.
“My suitcase? Where did you--?”
Dutch dropped it at her feet. “You need any of your creature comforts right now?”
Naomi’s brow furrowed deeply as she crouched down. Her trembling fingers unzipped the bag, and its contents were revealed to all of us.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
I chuckled as I reached over and patted Dutch’s shoulder. “Good job, man.”
Naomi gasped as she pulled out a fuzzy robe. “Oh, my God. Where did you get this?”
Dutch crouched down and smoothed a bit of blood off her lips with his thumb. “I did a bit of recon on the house. Just to make sure there wasn’t anything else there that we could’ve used against Gordon. And I figured, since I was there, why not grab a few of your things?”
But, as she started pulling out clothes, she tossed them to the floor. She ripped them out, some of them so fucking quickly that tags ripped off of some pretty scandalous articles of clothing. I grinned as I thought about the many ways I’d tear those pieces of fabric from her body. I imagined her tied up for me, wiggling around in a pair of those--.
“Dutch, go get Gordon,” Naomi glowered.
I blinked. “Wait, what?”
Naomi shot to her feet, and her face was so red that the blood on her skin blended in. “Now, before the sheriff leaves.”
“Why?” Troop asked as he raced around to get in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
Dutch pointed to the suitcase. “Is it something I picked up?”
And when she grabbed a handful of that lingerie, she shook it in his face. “These aren’t mine, Dutch. I’ve never seen those fucking things in my life. Now, go get Gordon, or I will. I want him to look me in my fucking face when I make him tell me who he bought these for.”
His gaze simply dropped to the flimsy fabric in my hand. “The tags. That’s why they weren’t taken off. Because he hadn’t given them t—.”
“Now,” I commanded as I shot Dutch a look.
28
NAOMI
Everything started swirling. Like a vortex, threatening to swallow me whole. As I crouched there, staring at the handfuls of tagged lingerie I’d never once seen in my life, something overcame me. Not anger. Not fear. Not bloodlust. No. Peace came over me. A peace unlike anything I had ever experienced. A peace that settled my gut, focused my gaze, and breathed like back into my mind.
I was going to kill Gordon, and I had peace about it.
“What’s that?” Ranger asked.
I looked up and found the tip of his finger pointing toward the corner of the suitcase, and when I looked, I found something shiny. Something sharp. Something I’d never seen before. My hand navigated toward the item, smoothing along its rough exterior. The cold metal matched the chill of my heart as it pounded relentlessly against my chest, and as I gripped it with my stable hand, I pulled it out to study it.
And found that it was a lockbox with a six-digit combination.
“This should be easy enough,” I said breathlessly.
My gut reaction was to try my birthday, but that simply made me snicker. The old me would have tried that. The old me who had hope. Who thought Gordon was a stand-up citizen. Who thought that fighting alongside her man, despite the fact that he always fought her, was what I was supposed to do. The naïve little girl inside of me would have tried my birthday, but Gordon was clearly more selfish than that.
