Page 101 of Hard Heart

“Chill? What’s wrong with you?”

I tried to speak again, but the words wouldn’t come, and why was my chest still aching? Twice this had happened—once in Blackstone House and now here.

“Or maybe it’s a heart attack?” Greyson suggested. “Norm Billings was holding his chest like that in the House last year, and it was a heart attack.”

“Zach, get the first-aid kit from the car,” Jerry ordered, and when he hesitated, she snapped, “Now!”

Two minutes later, my mortification was complete. Not only had I been accused of plotting a murder and suffered a meltdown, but I was lying on the conference room floor with electrodes stuck to my chest and a collection of wealthy weirdos staring at my boobs as Raelene tried to cover me with her cardigan. Jerry Knight was on the phone.

“Doc? I have a subject hooked up to an ECG, and we’re going to play a fun game—it’s called ‘heart attack or panic attack?’ Serafina, do you have a history of heart problems?”

I shook my head.

“She doesn’t. … No, she just doesn’t handle pressure well.” Bitch. “Yeah, I’ll tell her. Thanks, Doc.” She hung up. “You’re fine. There’s nothing wrong with your heart.”

Phew. I mean, that was good news, but there was still a reasonable chance of me dying from embarrassment. I peeled the electrodes away, ignoring the frantic beeping of the ECG machine, then Zach and Nolan hoisted me back into my seat. Braxton poured me a glass of water.

“Here, drink this.”

“Did you poison it?”

“I’m a businessman, not a monster.”

I took a sip and coughed. Hell, I was a mess.

“Do you want to continue?” Raelene asked quietly.

What was the alternative? For me to admit defeat and spend the rest of my Saturdays getting foot rubs under a metal table? These people were all assholes, but we needed the evidence.

“I’m okay.”

“No more yelling,” Nolan muttered. “Please, no more yelling.”

Raelene fixed Jerry with a cold stare. “You’re overstepping. Serafina wasn’t alone at the cemetery that day. I was with her, and we also had two—for want of a better word—outriders accompanying us. Plus there were other visitors around. If you want an independent witness, try finding one of them. What did you mean by ‘a pentagram has five points, not six’?”

“Whoever killed Amie tried to make the body look like Ruby’s, but they messed up.”

“By cutting a six-pointed star on her instead of a pentagram?”

“Yes.”

“That’s…weird.”

“The whole…” I cleared my throat and tried again. “The whole pentagram thing is weird. The reports talked about Satanism, but the orientation was Wiccan or Christian. If Satanism was involved, the pentagram would have been inverted.”

I was shaking. Inside, I was shaking like an amphetamine-fuelled maraca, and I couldn’t stop.

“How do you know about the star on Amie?” Raelene asked. “Did you see the body?”

“We found the body.” What? “This was such an obvious setup that we just asked ourselves where someone would dump her if they wanted to make Justin look really guilty. We came up with a list of possible locations, and we looked in those places, and voila: there she was.”

“It was planned, but not very well planned,” Dawson added.

A wave of nausea rolled through me, and not for the first time, I wondered if I was wrong about everything. Could Levi be playing all of us? He was smart, so smart. But he was also kind. And he was supposed to be dead. Whoever stabbed him hadn’t been messing around—the doctors said so. If the neck wound had been half an inch to the left, I would have been putting flowers on his grave as well as Ruby’s.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I whispered.

“No, it doesn’t,” Ari said. “None of it does. Two women are dead, we have two barely plausible suspects, and we’re sitting here in a conference room sniping at each other. What if this is all planned?”