As though he’d shut off the main breaker to my buzz, my world dimmed. The hum in my body silenced and the cloud that had lifted in our interlude returned, darker than ever.
Numbly, I trudged up the path toward the house. There were things to process and absorb – the last hour, the last six months. My entire life. But I didn’t have the bandwidth to even try. I was tired. I was incapable.
I’d assumed Reeve had gone back to the house, but when I got to the top of the path, he was in the garden with Filip. And Amber.
He was bent over the fountain, as if examining the contents. In my anesthetized state, I couldn’t tell if the air was tense, or if it was just me. But one look at Amber’s face, her expression both distraught and horrified, told me something was wrong.
“What’s going on?” I asked tentatively.
It was Filip who answered. “The fish are all dead.”
“What?” I peered into the fountain and immediately started to tremble. The water in the basin had been emptied, but all the fish that had been inside, maybe a hundred of them, were dead on the bottom.
The sight was chilling. More chilling was the gut notion that it had been deliberate.
“I came by here on my run earlier,” I said, trying to remember if I’d seen anything odd. “Shit. I didn’t pay attention to the fountain. I don’t know if they were alive then or not.” They weren’t flopping around now, but they didn’t smell yet. How long did it take for fish out of water to die?
“Whatever happened, it was an accident, I’m sure,” Reeve said. “A leak in the drain.” His body language said he didn’t believe that.
“No. It’s not. It’s a message,” Amber cried, and while I thought she was being a bit histrionic, Vilanakis had been my first thought too.
“It’s not a message,” Reeve snapped. “It’s a coincidence.”
Filip shook his head and held up a portion of the hose that recycled the water from the bottom of the fountain to the top basin. There was no way it hadn’t been cut. On purpose.
Amber’s crying escalated sharply. “He wants me dead! Don’t you get it? That’s what he’s been saying. Like the dog. Now the fish.”
“It’s not possible. He couldn’t get here.” Reeve seemed truly baffled, although it was hard to get a true read on him since he was doing his best not to make eye contact with me.
“Somehow he did,” Amber insisted. “Maybe he got to one of your men. But he’s here. I know it.” She thrust herself into Reeve’s arms. “You have to go after him. There’s nowhere I’m safe anymore. He won’t stop until he gets to me.”
I tried to be compassionate. I tried to remind myself that she was sincerely scared.
Reeve patted her back consolingly. “Shh. I won’t allow that.”
“If he could get here, he could get me in my room,” she said, her voice muffled as she cried into his shirt. The shirt that had only recently been wrapped around my neck while Reeve had ordered me to beg him to fuck me. “He could kill me in my sleep.”
“He won’t. I won’t let him.” Reeve continued to soothe her.
I couldn’t help it – I rolled my eyes.
Amber couldn’t see me from her angle, but Reeve could. He narrowed his gaze in my direction, his features hard and heartless. “Filip,” he said, still looking at me, “please take Amber to get her things together. Then move her into my room so I can keep her safe.”
CHAPTER 20
After that, the loneliness of the island became unbearable.
I rarely saw Amber. She didn’t have any reason to come to my part of the house. The pool by the master bedroom was more convenient, not to mention nearer to the office where Reeve spent his days. More than once, I considered joining her there with my laptop or a book, but really, there wasn’t any point. She barely spoke to me at lunch, and whenever I was close to her and Reeve at the same time, the tension stretched my insides so taut I wasn’t pleasant to be around anyway.
The nights were the worst. I stopped locking the door to my room, hoping that Reeve would turn the knob and find it open. Hoping he’d sneak in and take me in all the ways he liked. Hoping he hadn’t meant it when he’d said he wouldn’t try anything until I asked him to.
But the knob never turned. And now, Amber was more of a barrier between us than ever.
I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about the two of them, together, in his bed. I understood why he’d moved her in with him – the master bedroom was the most secure room in the compound. The walls were thicker. Other buildings surrounded it. An intruder couldn’t make it there without going through the other parts of the house, which would trigger the alarm long before the master was encroached. And, of course, if someone did manage to get to her there, she wouldn’t be alone – he’d be with her.
It was a safety measure. Maybe that was all it was. It was possible that their nights together were innocent. The bed was large. They could sleep next to each other without ever touching.
But I knew Amber. And I knew Reeve. And they’d been in love once. Was it likely that they would share a bed and not be intimate?
No. Not likely at all.
I could manage to keep it from my mind in the daylight, but once the sun went down that was all I thought about – him and her. Him touching her. Him kissing her. Him fucking her.
It made me itch for him in places I didn’t know could itch – inside my body and out.
After three days like that, I forced myself to come to terms with two things – I’d been the one to encourage Amber and Reeve to be together, and, now that they were, it was time for me to leave the island.