Into the Fire - Anne Stuart [95]
If Jamie had had any sense she would have turned and run. Except she’d known this was what she’d find. This was what she’d come after. Answers.
“Nate,” she said, taking another step into the room, her voice broken.
He swiveled the gun around to point it directly at her chest. It was dark, it was a distance, but it looked like a gun that would manage to hit its target. And do impossible damage.
“Stay right there, precious,” he said, his voice mocking. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. There’s nothing you can do to me at this point, but I don’t like to get close to people.”
“If there’s nothing I can do to you, why are you holding a gun on me?”
“Because there’s a great deal I can do to you. When the time is right. Close the door, Jamie, and come on in. Haven’t you got a word of welcome for your dead cousin?”
It was her last chance to run. She closed the door behind her. “Where have you been for the last three months?”
“Dead. Closer, sweetheart. I want to get a good look at you. I only managed to get peeps at you, when you were going down on my old buddy or when he was doing you from the back. Who would have thought my sweet, repressed little cousin could become such a whore?”
She’d already been cold, but his words drove the last bit of warmth from her body. “You watched?”
“I like to watch. You were getting quite inventive toward the end. But then, women never could resist Killer. I’ve been watching him fuck for years now, and women do anything he wants them to. I could never figure out why he kept his hands off you back then, when he wanted you so much, but I guess he made up for lost time this week.”
“Nate…”
“I want you to come here, Jamie, and sit in the corner like a good girl. We’re waiting for a visitor. I knew you’d get here first—you always were a clever little thing. Killer would have had to deal with Mouser’s body first. He’d know this was a trap, but it would take him a while before he figured out you’d be the bait. So I figure he’ll show up sometime in the next twenty-four-hours, and we’ll just wait here for him.”
“Why?”
Nate’s smile was the same charming smile in his shadowed face. “Because I’m going to kill him, of course. After I kill you.”
She skirted around him carefully, going to the spot underneath the window and sitting down, wrapping her arms around her knees. He smelled. Not like a dead person; like someone who hadn’t bathed in months. He was almost skeletally thin, and his dark eyes bulged slightly in his bony face. Jamie looked away.
“It’s cold in here, Nate,” she said. She used the reasonable voice she’d somehow slipped into, like a calm teacher dealing with a temperamental child.
“The dead don’t feel the cold, precious. We don’t need heat, we don’t need food, we don’t—”
“You clearly don’t seem to need soap and water,” she said in a caustic voice. “Which would be all well and good if you were really dead, Nate, but you’re not. You’re sitting there large as life with a gun across your lap, and I can see you and, God help me, I can smell you. You’re not dead.”
“You trying to piss me off, precious? I’m past all human emotions.”
“Sure you are. If you’re past all human emotions, why am I here? Why are you waiting to kill Dillon? If you’re past all human emotions, why aren’t you on some cloud playing a harp?”
Nate’s laugh was eerily hollow in the chill air, and she would have almost thought he really was a ghost, if she couldn’t see his breath on the frosty air.
“Silly girl. People like me don’t go to heaven, if there even was such a thing. We go straight to hell.”
“Then why aren’t you there? Don’t let me stop you—go ahead.”
Nate chuckled. “You’ve gotten pretty feisty as you’ve grown up, haven’t you? Though I remember you always did have a mouth on you. I just never imagined you’d use it on my old friend Dillon like that.”
“Are you trying to embarrass me, Nate? Because it’s not working. I’m sitting here freezing to death, my supposedly dead cousin is holding a gun on me, and there