Deadly Truths: Kiss Her Goodbye #3 Read online

  Deadly Truths

  Kiss Her Goodbye #3

  Rebecca Royce

  Copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Royce

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Other books by Rebecca Royce…

  Foreword

  Dearest Reader,

  I asked you to take this trip with me and Everly. Thank you for doing it. I promised you a happy ending. Let’s get there… together.

  With love,

  RR

  Preface

  “These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die; like fire and powder,

  Which, as they kiss, consume:”

  ― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

  1

  I looked down at my burner phone, hoping it was time for me to get off work, and was utterly disappointed to see it was only five minutes since the last time I’d checked, which meant I had another three hours to go before my shift was over. Fortunately, we weren’t too busy tonight. It was officially off-season—not that Yodel’s was ever overly busy during the so-called on season, either. We were a local bar in a town of college oriented bars. Our clientele didn’t wane and wax with the comings and goings of coeds.

  I liked it that way. For now, it suited my needs. Gene Yodel paid me in cash and didn’t ask me questions. He liked that I showed up on time and made a mean old fashioned. I liked that he never inquired about anything personal and left me the fuck alone.

  I’d never frequented dive bars before I’d lost everything and had to figure out what to do with the time I had before some crazy assassin got a hard on for killing me. I used to think I was trendy and therefore had to seek out sex partners and expensive drinks in places where the girls laughed too loud for the sake of attention and the men didn’t have to try too hard to get into the women’s pants as long as they had a college degree heading their way in the near future. I’d put up with a lot of asshats coming into my bed because they had seemed like the right kind of guy.

  The illusion of pedigree. The illusion of safety. All of it was smoke and mirrors. Ants traipsing down sidewalks not knowing they were about to be squished. Eighteen months since I’d woken up in Judson’s Vermont-based hunting lodge, and I preferred the humming quiet of a dive bar now.

  In movies, they would have called this place rough. The director would have the cinematographer scan the room, focusing on the peeling wood and the stools with the worn material on the seats. Old would have equaled bad. I knew better now. Dive bars had the same clientele all the time. Regulars who came in night after night, drank their drinks, talked their truths, and got the fuck on with it. They didn’t like people coming in and messing with the bar staff since they actually wanted to see the same faces over and over.

  And the bar staff didn’t like to see outsiders coming in to screw with their regulars.

  That was how I knew the asshole who’d stumbled in off the street, talking too loud with his Midwestern accent and his wallet hanging out of the back pocket of his jeans, was about to get punched in the face for spending too much time trying to get in Molly Dane’s pants. She wasn’t interested.

  I watched the scene with only a modicum of interest. Scott and Joe Prentis, brothers who owned a local plumbing shop, were going to interfere any second. It was better they did it than me. They’d punch the asshole out. He’d wake up with a headache, maybe in a jail cell if Gene felt like calling the cops.

  If I interfered, I was going to take the screwdriver that was under the cash register for those times the register broke and I had to jam it open, and I was going to shove it straight into the Midwestern guy’s eye socket. He’d stumble forward before I’d haul him up onto the bar to let him bleed to death, watching as his brain took the last seconds of life to realize he was about to die. In this dive bar. Because the bartender stabbed him in the eye.

  That was why it was better that I not do one thing, not even utter a word.

  The world spun, but I wasn’t normal. Would never be that again. The days of my functioning on all cylinders, of going about my business without needing to constantly control myself from hurting someone, yeah…I’d kissed them goodbye.

  My sanity was spread out in multiple places, each location taking a little bit of me and giving nothing back. Vermont. St. Croix. Florida. New Orleans. Boston. Seattle. Montana. San Diego. Ben’s basement.

  Piece-by-piece, location-by-location, I’d slowly lost my mind. The Alliance took everything from me and didn’t even leave me myself in the end. All I had now was this contorted, forever altered, version of me.

  “You okay?” Gene asked me as he walked past, heading for the other side of the bar. His eyes were on the same scene I pretended to ignore.

  I smiled at him. “Sure. Never better.”

  I was such a good liar. It was really too bad I couldn’t fool myself.

  He nodded. “Good. Didn’t you graduate last week?”

  “I did.” The less said about this the better. I wasn’t even sure why I’d wasted my time or my money finishing that degree I’d never use. I’d had two requirements left and a paper to write for a class I’d never think about again. That was all I’d needed to be part of the pedigree people, to be part of the phony world. I’d finished it because when I’d come back home after killing my father and leaving the Letters standing in a hotel room filled with blood to clean up, I hadn’t known what the heck else to do.

  Finishing my college degree had at least seemed productive while I’d packed up my childhood home and sold it.

  It had given me something to do every day before I’d found this place and decided to set myself up to disappear. Small things occurred to me now that hadn’t then. Someone filed a death certificate on my father that allowed me to inherit the house, fast, so I could sell it. Things that normally took months and months of paperwork hadn’t for me. Plus, the death certificate itself hadn’t said “shot to death by daughter” as the cause of death. No, my father had a good old-fashioned heart attack as far as the authorities were concerned. A clean, no fuss no muss heart attack.

  No need for anyone to investigate my role in it. His body had come home to my house—in ashes—the day after the death certificate arrived by mail, tucked inside a nondescript black urn with his initials carved on the outside.

  I kept him now in the back of my closet, between my brown boots and a pair of sneakers I needed to replace. The fact my clothes arrived the day after told me that the Alliance boys… my Letters… were taking care of closing up my unfinished business with them. I’d told them to leave me alone and they were.

  No one arrived to beg me back. I wasn’t hiding. Not yet. They could have found me if they wanted me. No, they’d respected my wishes to leave me alone.
I only regretted that every fourth or fifth day and in the scheme of things, I still thought I’d been right.

  It was lonely to not have anyone I could tell the truth to, ever.

  “Everly, if you want to go full time while you look for work, I can do that for you.” Gene patted me on the back. “But you’ll have to go on the books. I can’t pay you that much in cash every week.”

  That was kind of him, which threw me for a loop. It took a beat, but I recovered my center. Why was he being nice to me? That wasn’t normal and therefore was suspect. My whole life was like that. Anyone could be Alliance, and I might encounter them anywhere. These people were the definition of scary. Gene absolutely could have been Alliance this whole time, just waiting for an order to kill me.

  I’d ended Ben, my father, several other Alliance members who’d come after me in the hotel and Derrick’s hospital room. There would be revenge for that. I was certain of it. Even if they served it to me cold.

  I might have to move up my plans and leave sooner. A change in behavior might have meant Gene was coming after me, lulling me into a sense of security to take me out.

  Or it might have meant he just wanted to fuck me.

  Or it might have meant nothing at all.

  That was the problem with life and why I had to get off the grid and simplify. If I didn’t see people, they couldn’t turn around and betray me.

  “Everly?” Gene still waited for my response.

  I smiled. I could fool them all with my grin; I could slaughter them all in my sleep and keep smiling about it. These were new truths for my life. “Let me think about it?”

  He nodded. “Sure. Tell me whenever. Bob wants another beer.”

  I poured Bob his beer. While we made the standard drinks here, the classic old fashioneds and martinis, this wasn’t a place to find an IPA. The beers were simple. I liked that about it. I didn’t have to think too hard to function here which left me time to consider the motives of every person around me, all the time.

  The TV blared in the corner and our local stock broker cried out, putting his head down on his hands. I didn’t have to look to know what the problem was. The financial markets were in chaos. Things were up and down from one second to another. Savings were made and lost before people could get their money out. I’d never seen anything like it and neither had the television commentators who were on twenty-four-seven talking about it.

  Our bar had been a little more filled than usual with everyone needing a drink. I had an account Warden managed, where I’d stuck the money from the sale of my house when it had closed. I never looked in there.

  It didn’t feel like mine. I hadn’t earned any of it, and the portion from the sale of my house constituted blood money as far as I was concerned. I’d killed my father to get that money. I rubbed my arms. There were certain images I could never get out of my head. My father, lying dead on the floor, sent there by me, that was one of them.

  The door to the bar opened and closed. No one called out greetings so I lifted my head to see who it was. The regulars tended to say hello to their crew of nightly visitors.

  My heart skipped a beat, and I tried to steel my face but likely failed considering how seeing the newest patron enter threw me into an internal tailspin.

  Warden White walked to the bar and sat at the end of it. He’d met my gaze the second I’d looked up and continued to hold it. He hadn’t said a word, no greeting of hello, he simply waited on the worn stool to be recognized by either me or Gene—whoever got to him first.

  I made myself breathe.

  The markets were crashing and Warden White wandered into my dive bar. That couldn’t be coincidence.

  I touched Gene’s arm. “The new guy is an old friend of mine. I’ll get him.”

  Gene nodded. “First one of those to come in here for you.”

  “I guess I don’t have that many friends.”

  I walked to Warden. “What can I get you?”

  He tilted his head slightly. “Jack Daniels. Neat.”

  I nodded. This was strange. Had we really just interacted like that? I poured his drink and tried to pretend that hearing the low cadence of his voice didn’t make me go mushy inside. I’d had some incredibly intimate, sexual experiences with that man. At first, I hadn’t thought him handsome but that was before I’d really started to look at him. There was nothing about Warden that wasn’t intense. His nose was slightly too big, his eyes were such dark brown they were nearly black, and his hair was the same color. He always had a beard. His clothes were expensive, always perfectly tailored, and his watch probably cost more than the gross national income of some small, developing nations.

  The world markets were in upheaval and Warden ordered whiskey in my dive bar.

  I handed him the glass and waited. He took a long pull and then another. I watched his lips on the glass. Fuck. He was so sexy.

  I’d always liked sex—needed it—since I’d discovered the joys of it as a teenager. Most of it was pretty mediocre, but the Letters had all been able to make me come. W once in tandem with K on W’s expensive couch in his mega mansion in San Diego.

  Warden took a second long sip of the amber liquid.

  It had been too long since I’d had sex. I’d not engaged in any since my time with Judson in Warden’s guestroom. I’d thought about going home with one of my classmates who’d propositioned me two months before. But when I’d come out of the bathroom, he’d been gone, and he’d never spoken to me again except to say he’d changed his mind and decided in that moment to get back with his ex. I’d actually been hugely relieved. The time it had taken me to pee had made me rethink the whole thing. I’d been coming out to tell him I needed to not have sex with him. I wasn’t over my exes either.

  Clearly, I should have looked for another partner if I was this obsessed.

  He finished his drink and slid it to me. “Another one, please.”

  I took the glass, giving him a generous pour, and placed it in front of him again. We hadn’t said a word that mattered yet and maybe he wasn’t going to. Maybe this was some kind of sick game where he’d come in, drink, and leave without doing anything other than throwing my equilibrium into a tailspin.

  I turned back to my other customers, making conversation with them and deliberately not looking at Warden. I left him alone for ten minutes. If he wanted my attention, he could ask for it.

  Finally, I returned to him and his empty glass. He pushed it forward again. “Another one.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Are you driving?”

  I didn’t ask my customers questions like that, not usually. I would sometimes order someone a cab or help them use their phones to get a rideshare. Most of the time, I existed in a mind-my-own-business mentality. Gene was always here. He could handle the patrons of his bar and their sobriety issues.

  Or not.

  Warden shook his head. “No.”

  I poured him another drink as my temper flared. Life was too short for this kind of crap. “What are you doing here, Warden?”

  His lips quirked like he might smile, and then he rethought the idea. “You graduated last week.”

  That explained nothing. “Yes. And?”

  He sipped his drink. “I watched four and a half hours of a feed of that graduation and you never walked across the stage.” Warden swallowed the rest of his whiskey and set the glass down on the bar with a loud clank. “Why didn’t you go to your graduation?”

  Was he serious? This was how he was going to answer me when I asked him what he was doing here? I didn’t have to answer. I walked away, serving others, counting the cash in the register and answering the phone for Gene once.

  My fingers tingled and my jaw clenched. He hadn’t moved, left, or done anything but sit there and wait. I finally stormed over to him, leaning onto the bar so that our faces were close. “I didn’t go because I don’t like the idea of being exposed, walking across a stage like that where anyone could take a shot at me, and because I don’t have a single person
in the world who would have been in the audience to watch me do that walk, so why bother? They mail you your diploma if you don’t go.”

  I poured him another drink. If he didn’t want it, I’d take it, and I never drank when I worked. “What are you doing here? And why were you watching my college graduation?”

  He sipped for a minute before he answered me. “I’m here because I wanted to know why you didn’t walk.” He slurred a little bit. The whiskey must have finally hit. Four drinks… maybe more like five considering how much I’d poured him… was his limit. I wasn’t going to pour him anymore. “And to congratulate you. And to give you your gift. I watched because I wanted to.”

  Damn him. I looked away. “Warden, you can’t give me a gift. You shouldn’t be here at all.”

  “Screw that.” He set a bill on the counter, much more than the drinks cost, before he pulled a small black box out of his pocket and placed it on the bar next to the hundred. “Throw it out if you don’t want it. I’ll leave.”

  He’d told me he wasn’t going to drive. “Where are you going and how are you getting there?”

  Warden didn’t answer me as he stumbled out the door.

  I sucked in a long breath. It physically pained me to see him, but it wrecked me to watch him leave. I grabbed the black box, still not sure what was inside, and swung around to Gene. “I have to go.”

  He waved his hand. “I can see that. Go. Make it up to me tomorrow.”

  I rushed after my W. That was what he was. I didn’t forgive him, could probably not get over all the things that had happened, but that didn’t make him any less mine. I couldn’t watch him stumble out the door to who knew where.