He told me not to move, but there’s no way I’m sitting here on the couch while my husband possibly is shot to death. I tear my feet out of the bowl of warm water and sprint after him, leaving a trail of puddles behind me.
Ethan reaches the door to the office a second before I do. His eyes bulge at whatever he sees in the room, and his fingers whiten on the handle of the knife. “Freeze,” I hear him say. “Hands up!”
I stare into the office over his shoulder. Even though I expected it on some level, I’m shocked to see a man standing in the middle of the room, his trembling hands raised in the air. He has scraggly dark hair, badly in need of a haircut, and several weeks’ growth of a beard on his face. He’s wearing a pair of worn blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a hole in the sleeve. He sort of looks like a bum, except he’s wearing eyeglasses, which seem oddly out of place.
“Who are you?” Ethan hisses.
“I…” The man’s voice cracks like he hasn’t spoken in a long time. “I…”
“Who are you?”
“I just needed a place to stay for the night,” he says in a gruff voice. “I don’t have a place to live, and I… I didn’t know anyone would be here.”
Ethan and the stranger regard each other with wary expressions on their faces. But I feel better. It’s what I had suspected. A drifter is squatting in the house because he thought it was empty. And he doesn’t seem to be armed or drunk or crazed. And while he’s taller than Ethan, he doesn’t seem particularly muscular or scary—he’s stick-thin, like he hasn’t had a decent meal in years.
But there’s something about his voice. Something strangely familiar.
“I’m sorry.” The man clears some nasty-sounding phlegm from his throat. “It was real cold out so I… Anyway, I’m sorry I busted in here. I… I’ll go.”
For a moment, I feel a surge of sympathy. It can’t be easy to be homeless in the middle of winter. Part of me wants to insist that he stay instead of casting him out into the cold. But another part of me feels like there’s something fishy about his story.
Ethan looks like he’s thinking the same thing. His grip on the carving knife hasn’t eased up at all. “What are you doing in this office then?”
He makes an excellent point. If this man were squatting here, why wouldn’t he stay hidden? Why was he lurking around a place where he could easily be found? And then I notice how close he is to the opening to the compartment on the floor, which is now thankfully closed. It hits me what the crash we heard was:
It was the sound of the compartment slamming shut.
“I… I wanted to see what all the commotion was about,” the man stammers.
Perhaps that could explain why he was in the office. But it doesn’t explain why the portrait of Adrienne Hale materialized back on the wall in the middle of the night last night. Only one thing explains that.
“You’re Luke,” I say. “You’re Adrienne Hale’s boyfriend.”
Chapter 41
ADRIENNE
Before
Luke has cooked us dinner tonight. It’s chicken marsala. Slices of chicken breast braised in Marsala wine sauce, butter, and garlic. It smells incredible, but I have not taken one bite. I have spent the last fifteen minutes pushing it around my plate, pretending to be eating even though I have no appetite.
“Is your chicken overcooked?” Luke cranes his neck to look at the little chunk that I sliced off. “Mine is perfect, but yours was a little thinner. Is it too dry?”
“Not at all.” I force a smile. “It’s delicious. Really.”
“Then how come you’ve barely eaten a bite of it?” He frowns. “Are you feeling sick? Is it a migraine?”
It has been two days since EJ told me what he wanted me to do. I wouldn’t let Luke come over again last night, complaining that my head was still bothering me. But I couldn’t put him off forever, so here he is.
I’m trying to put EJ out of my head, but I can’t. All I can think about is how EJ will destroy both of us if I don’t do what he wants. But how can I? The thought of letting that man touch me makes me physically ill. Not to mention the fact that I can’t even contemplate being with someone besides Luke. A few days ago, I had thought he might be the person I would spend the rest of my life with…
I have thought about nothing else besides my dilemma for the last two days. And I’ve concluded that there’s only one solution to this problem.