Always a Thief - Kay Hooper [97]
Maybe you can buy a backbone—
“I'm ready,” he said. “I'm ready to do it.”
I don't believe you.
He turned off the tap and walked out of the bathroom. Went back to his bedroom, where the moonlight spilled through the big window to spotlight the old steamer trunk set against the wall beneath it. He knelt down and carefully opened it.
The raised lid blocked off some of the moonlight, but he didn't need light for this. He reached inside, let his fingers search gingerly until they felt the cold steel. He lifted the knife and held it in the light, turning it this way and that, fascinated by the gleam of the razor-sharp serrated edge.
“I'm ready,” he murmured. “I'm ready to kill her.”
The voices wouldn't leave her alone.
Neither would the nightmares.
She had drawn the drapes before going to bed in an effort to close out the moonlight, but even though the room was dark, she was very conscious of that huge moon painting everything on the other side of her window with the stark, eerie light that made her feel so uneasy.
She hated full moons.
The clock on her nightstand told her it was nearly three in the morning. The hot, sandpapery feel of her eyelids told her she really needed to try to go back to sleep. But the whisper of the voices in her head told her that even trying would be useless, at least for a while.
She pushed back the covers and slid from her bed. She didn't need light to show her the way to the kitchen, but once there turned on the light over the stove so she wouldn't burn herself. Hot chocolate, that was the ticket.
And if that didn't work, there was an emergency bottle of whiskey in the back of the pantry for just such a night as this. It was probably two-thirds empty by now.
There had been a few nights like this, especially in the last year or so.
She got what she needed and heated the pan of milk slowly, stirring the liquid so it wouldn't stick. Adding in chocolate syrup while the milk heated, because that was the way she liked to make her hot chocolate. In the silence of the house, with no other sounds to distract her, it was difficult to keep her own mind quiet. She didn't want to listen to the whispering there, but it was like catching a word or two of an overheard conversation and knowing you needed to listen more closely because they were talking about you.
Of course, some people would call that paranoia. Had called it. And at least part of the time, maybe they weren't wrong.
But only part of the time.
She was tired. It got harder and harder, as time went on, to bounce back. Harder for her body to recover. Harder for her mind to heal.
Given her druthers, she would put off tuning in to the voices until tomorrow. Or the next day, maybe.
The hot chocolate was ready. She turned off the burner and poured the steaming milk into a mug. She put the pan in the sink, then picked up her mug and carried it toward the little round table in the breakfast nook.
Almost there, she was stopped in her tracks by a wave of red-hot pain that washed over her body with the suddenness of a blow. Her mug crashed to the floor, landing unbroken but spattering her bare legs with hot chocolate.
She barely felt that pain.
Eyes closed, sucked into the red and screaming maelstrom of someone else's agony, she tried to keep breathing despite the repeated blows that splintered bones and shredded lungs. She could taste blood, feel it bubbling up in her mouth. She could feel the wet heat of it soaking her blouse and running down her arms as she lifted her hands in a pitiful attempt to ward off the attack.
“I know what you did. I know. I know. You bitch, I know what you did—”
She jerked and cried out as a more powerful thrust than all the rest drove the serrated knife into her chest, penetrating her heart with such force she knew the only thing that stopped it going deeper still was the hilt. Her hands fumbled, touching what felt like blood-wet gloved hands, large and strong, that retreated immediately to leave her weakly holding