Amelia had known Crowe would show up. She’d known after she’d been dumped on his porch by Amory Wyatt two weeks before, naked, helpless—oh God.
She turned away from him, staring around the room, wondering what he saw to make him say such a thing. Trying to focus on anything, everything but the memory of him finding her like that.
God, he had changed. In the seven years since the last evening they’d spent in the county attorney’s office, he’d hardened. He was stronger, broader. He was colder.
But then, so was she, she thought. The difference was that she knew the chances of ever finding the warmth she had once known with this man were nil to never.
Amber-flecked brown eyes, emotionless, stared back at her from a face with a harsh, savage male beauty that still had the power to steal her breath.
He owned her heart. He owned the young girl she had once been and fought to forget until the second she’d whirled around to see him standing inside her room. The epitome of every dream she’d ever had—of every nightmare she never wanted to remember—staring around the room that once held so much more than it did now.
The full-size bed was neatly made. It hadn’t really been slept in for years.
She always dreamed of Crowe when she slept in it.
Once, there had been lace on what were now plain sheets. Decorative pillows and the big stuffed mouse he’d given her weeks before he’d disappeared forever.
The small chaise in the corner of the room held the single blanket and small pillow she used when she did sleep. On the table beside it sat a glass of water, half empty, her phone, and books.
That chaise once held lace scarves, magazines, a pile of books. The table had held pictures of herself with the few friends she’d believed she’d never lose.
There were no pictures now, not of herself or of any friends she might have once had. She had learned to never reveal a weakness. A picture was the same as an arrow pointing to a weak spot, someone or something she may love.
She followed Crowe’s gaze around the room.
It was nearly spartan, with few adornments or keepsakes. It resembled a hotel room more than it did someone’s home.
“Is it over?” she asked.
Had they finally found what they needed to prove her father was the heinous evil behind the identity of the Slasher?
The question hung in the air as she fought to distract him from the sterility of the room.
The sterility of her life.
“It’s over,” he stated, not bothering to hide the satisfaction in his tone. “All we have to do now is catch him.”
Amelia brushed the shoulder-length strands of hair back from her face and watched him carefully.
“Surely, he can’t hide for long,” she whispered, hating the trembling of her voice, the fear that wanted to rise sharp and painful inside her.
“I won’t let him hide for long,” he answered, his lips twisting into a sneer. “But he doesn’t want to hide, does he? He wants to destroy us.”
No, her father wouldn’t stay hidden for long. She knew Wayne, and she knew the demonic killer known as the Slasher. She’d spent most of her adult life trying to avoid both, only to learn they were one and the same.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t been certain of that until the night her father had forced her from her bedroom, rendered her unconscious, then transported her to the cabin where he had already raped and killed more than a dozen young women in the past fourteen years.
She was forced to shake her head slowly as she met his gaze once again.
“What now, then?” she asked. “How do you intend to make him show himself?”
She couldn’t shake that overwhelming fear that the shadows twisting and churning beyond the stark balcony outside her window held something far more sinister than just the darkness now.
“I intend to offer the perfect bait,” he stated, his tone icy, his expression hardening.
But what, Amelia wondered, confused, was the perfect bait?
Pure male arrogance tautened each plane and angle of his face. The sharp, high cheekbones, the aristocratic blade of his nose, the deliberate thinness of what she knew was a passionately full lower lip.
He was enraged though it was buried behind that veil of icy indifference. But she could sense the volcano beneath the ice, churning, ready to erupt—not with heat, but with frigid, remorseless fury.
Which way would the explosion radiate, though, without the object of his hatred to catch the fallout?
Wayne had disappeared, and Amory Wyatt, his partner in the bloodletting, had escaped without a trace. He was gone without so much as a follicle of hair to be found in the house he had lived in for more than four years.
Amory had become an indelible part of the county as director of social services. He had been seen as kind, compassionate, and generous. Yet, he was made of the same brutal cloth her father had been cut from.