He would kill her.
He had unfinished business. He should have stuck to his original plan.
His original victim.
By letting Lily go, by letting her live, everything had unraveled. She’d been chosen, she was the one who had to join him.
Or else she had to die.
He wasn’t going to lose all he’d built. The FBI was supposed to see how powerful he was. That was the point. He’d gone too many years with no one knowing, no one realizing all he’d done.
Time is running out. The world needed to know about him.
While others had their names splashed in papers. The Valentine Killer. The Bayou Butcher. Twisted freaks who didn’t understand the value of a perfect victim.
He understood. He was better than all the others. So different. He deserved the attention. The FBI—everyone—had to recognize just how great he was.
How weak they were.
He wasn’t going down easily. The end would come, but the end would be on his terms. Just the way he’d planned.
He’d faced the darkness. He controlled the darkness.
After all this time.
I am still in control.
The others were just prey. It was time he eliminated them.
One by one.
Lily, my love. I’ll start with you.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You’re not supposed to sleep when you have a concussion,” Cadence said softly.
Kyle was in her room. His back to her.
He wouldn’t look at her. “Then just rest.” He seemed to grit out the words.
His back was so tight. His shoulders tense.
She stepped toward him. Reached out her hand.
He spun toward her in an instant, his fingers locking around her wrist. “You don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?” From where she stood, it looked as if the man needed her. Perhaps far more than he realized.
“If sleep isn’t good for a concussion, then what I want to do to you sure isn’t either.” The words were a growled warning.
A warning she ignored. “Kyle.”
He pulled away from her. Dropped her hand. “Get in the bed, Cadence. Don’t sleep. I’ll stay with you. Make sure you just rest.” He turned his back on her. Again.
Resting wasn’t what she wanted.
“I need to wash away the blood.” Samples of the blood had been taken by the techs. Now she wanted to scrub herself clean. To get the smell of the caverns off her.
His shoulders tensed. “Your clothes are evidence. I’ll need to bag them. Send them to the lab.”
She glanced down at her torn clothes.
“Do you need help in the bathroom?” he asked.
“No,” Cadence said as she moved away from him. Whatever wall he was trying to put up between them, she wasn’t going to allow it. They’d come too far for that distance now.
“I don’t want you risking your life for me.” His words were a low rumble that stopped her at the bathroom door. “You think I don’t know what you were doing? You went in there, you put your life on the line, for me.”
She braced her hands on the door frame. “The victims needed me.” I’m sorry, Fiona. What if she’d recognized the woman when she first appeared at Cadence’s window? What if…
“What if you’d died for me? For a sister who’s probably been turned to bones for these last fifteen years?”
“Kyle!” She whirled toward him.
His jaw was clenched as he turned and stared at her with glittering eyes. “I saw her necklace. The half-moon charm I gave her when she turned eighteen. It was with the bones. I saw it when I was searching in the caverns.”
Cadence didn’t remember seeing a necklace. Just skulls. Femurs. Death.
“I didn’t touch it. I just saw it.” His shoulders rolled back. “She’s gone. You could have been, too.”
She hurt for him. Cadence wanted to wrap her arms around Kyle and just hold him.
He shook his head and retreated a step from her. “Take your shower. If you need me, I’m here.”
“What about what you need?” Cadence demanded. She wanted to scream at him. To break through to him. “Dammit, Kyle, talk to me.”
“What I need?” The words were so low, she strained to hear them. “I need him. Dead. In front of me.”
That wasn’t an agent talking. That was a grief-stricken, revenge-driven brother.
“That’s what I’ll have.”
She knew the words were a vow.
Danielle Burton stared at the entrance to the caverns. She didn’t want to go back inside. Ben was already in there, leading a group of local authorities. Searching deep into what she thought had to be the entrance to hell.
The bones were being brought out. Slowly. Carefully.
The FBI’s forensics team had arrived moments earlier. As soon as Cadence had vanished the night before, Ben had ordered the team be brought in.
She wondered if he’d expected to find Cadence’s body.
Dani wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
Then Ben appeared, striding from the caverns. His broad shoulders and handsome face were covered with dirt. He was walking fast, and his eyes shone with excited intensity.
He found something.
“Tapes,” he said as soon as he got close to her. “DVDs, CDs. We hit the freaking mother lode in there.”
Her breath blew out lightly as she tried to keep her expression blank. “You know what will be on those tapes.” There was only one reason for the perp to have kept them.
They were his trophies. The moments of his victims, recorded. Kept.
“I don’t want Kyle seeing them,” Ben said and some of the excitement faded from his gaze. “Not until you have a chance to view them first. See who’s on there. See what happened to them.”
Sometimes, she hated her job. “There aren’t any more survivors?”
“Not down there. We reached the cave-in wall, what I think is the cave-in, anyway, from the explosion at the last site.”
“If you reached the wall, then how’d he get out?” But she knew. Heather had already told her about Cadence’s orders to photograph and get the name of every man at the scene.
He just walked right out. He was beside us.
Ben nodded, obviously reading her expression. “The SOB is playing with us. I’m tired of playing.”
She didn’t think the guy was playing “with us.” She thought he was jerking Kyle around, and from what she’d seen, it appeared the agent was close to breaking.
Been there, done that.
“Cadence can go over the tapes with you. She’ll know what to look for.”