Into the Fire - Anne Stuart [96]
“Not a good chance you’ll be dead, precious. A certainty.”
“Then why don’t you kill me now?” Stupid thing to ask, but she was trying to distract him, to keep him talking.
“Because I’m waiting for Dillon. It’ll be that much more satisfying if he has to watch.”
“Or you could always kill Dillon and make me watch. There are all sorts of options.”
He shook his head. “That wouldn’t work. You see, I don’t care about you. It doesn’t matter if you suffer.”
It was ridiculous. She was sitting in a freezing room with a murderer and she felt as if she’d been slapped in the face. “You don’t care about me?” she echoed.
“Don’t be naive, Jamie. I tolerated you. If we hadn’t been stopped for drunk driving that night I would have killed you then. You’ve been an annoyance my entire life, trying to steal Aunt Isobel’s and Uncle Victor’s love. It didn’t work with Auntie—you always came second, you know. Uncle Victor was more suspicious, but then he died, and it didn’t matter.”
Horror was beginning to work its way through the icy shock. “You didn’t kill him?”
Nate shook his head. “He was on his way out, anyway. No need to hurry him along. Besides, been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I don’t like repeating myself.”
“What are you talking about?”
Nate’s skeletal smile was oddly innocent. “My parents, precious. How do you think they managed to get locked in the house the night the fire broke out, and I got out safely? No one ever suspected a ten-year-old boy capable of such a thing. But I was. Oh, believe me, I was.”
She wanted to throw up. “Why?”
Nate shrugged. “Because they were there. They were talking about sending me away, so I just decided to take matters into my own hands. I knew Aunt Isobel would give me free rein. She always wanted a son, and there I was, blood of her blood.”
“Weren’t you afraid she’d find out what you’d done?”
“Oh, I’m sure she guessed. And she still loved me better. Hush!”
In the distance the sound of a car broke the icy silence. “He was faster than I thought. He must really love you, precious.”
“He doesn’t love me. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me.”
Nate shook his head, shifting the gun across his lap as the sound of the engine cut out and a car door opened. “You never were that stupid. Maybe he fucked your brains as well as your body. He’s been mooning over you since you were fifteen. Of course, he was wrong about that. It wasn’t really you he wanted.”
“It wasn’t?”
He shook his head. Someone opened the door to the carriage house, and Jamie wondered if she’d have time to scream, to warn him. She’d die for it, like the girl in that old poem about the highwayman, but maybe it would be worth it.
“It was me he wanted,” Nate said simply. “Me he loved. He just couldn’t figure it out, so he went for the person closest to me. If he couldn’t accept the fact that he loved me, he could fool himself into thinking he loved my cousin, the nearest thing to me.”
“I wasn’t near to you. Not by blood, not by nature. I’m adopted, remember?”
A frown crossed his face. “Don’t confuse me. He only wanted you because he couldn’t deal with his feelings for me.” His voice was getting shrill, and his grip on the gun tightened. As if he hadn’t quite managed to convince himself.
“All right,” she said in a soothing voice. “But why don’t you put the gun down? You don’t really want to shoot anyone, do you?”
Nate smiled, his good humor restored. “Of course I do, precious. I’ve never shot anyone before. I usually use a knife, though I’m not above taking advantage of whatever’s available. I want to see what it’s like to use a gun.”
Someone was coming up the stairs, making no effort to cover the sound of his footsteps. It was a strange noise, a clicking, dragging noise, as if some huge monster was crawling up the stairs, moving closer and closer. But the monster wasn’t the mysterious creature on the stairs, the true monster was sitting a few feet away from her, raising the shotgun as the door slowly opened.
“Come in, Aunt Isobel,” Nate