“Alice?” he bellowed as he entered, the screeching alarm obliterating his voice.
You’ve lost her. Again.
He willfully quashed down the unhelpful, panicked voice of doom. He sprinted through the media room toward the hallway.
ALICE’S eyelids fluttered open. The pain in her head had diminished to a throbbing ache, but her face, jaw, and hands burned like acid had been poured on the skin. Is that what had brought her to alertness? Where was she? In the distance, she heard the pulsing alarm.
Memory came sluggishly.
Kehoe.
He’d tried to kill her. All those horrible things he’d said about Lynn. What if the things he said were true? Did that mean that Kehoe could be her . . .
No. Don’t think about that right now.
Thad had been there. He’d saved her, and she’d dragged herself to the hidey-hole in the pantry of the kitchen. The childhood memory of it must have been triggered by the trauma and her fear.
In a pause of the throb of the alarm, she heard a thump outside in the pantry. The outer light switched on. Icy tendrils slithered beneath her skin. She stared in frozen horror at the slit of white light shining beneath the fake wall at the back of the pantry. Did the wall vibrate, or was that Alice’s entire world shaking?
The fingers of ice reached all the way to her heart and clutched as she watched the wall slowly swing inward. Light flooded the secret space. Someone stepped into the opening.
Kehoe stared down at her, looking like a horror with blood streaming from his temple and his right eye swelling. His preppy glasses—the very symbol of Kehoe’s fastidious personality—were now bent askew on his face. There was a smear of blood on one of the lenses. Alice couldn’t breathe.
A disgusted frown tilted Kehoe’s lips.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t find you? You’re bleeding like a stuck pig. Your tracks led me straight to you. I knew you were much stupider than Lynn, but I have to say, I’m disappointed, Addie.”
She hated her weakness; despised it. But she was paralyzed as he stepped into the little space, breaching her zone of safety. That was when she noticed what he held—a heavy meat tenderizer. He must have picked it up in the kitchen from the jar of utensils on the counter. The vision of it galvanized her. She braced herself on her hands and kicked at his legs as he stepped closer to her.
He kicked her back in her solar plexus, his manner almost casual. Alice made an oof sound. Her lungs locked. Pain splintered her hazy consciousness yet again.
“Don’t you just want to get this over with? I know I do,” Kehoe said with a weary grimness that terrified her almost as much as the weapon. He raised the arm that held the meat pounder. Everything seemed to go into slow motion.
She watched, as if in a dream, as Dylan slid sideways into the cramped space. Her heart lurched. For a split second, their gazes met. She only had a flashing image of him. He wore a suit with no jacket, his tie was loosened, and his thick hair was mussed, his bangs falling onto his forehead. His narrowed gaze was trained on Kehoe. He looked furious and glacial, focused and dangerous.
Kehoe’s eyes sprang wide when the meat pounder suddenly altered directions. Dylan shoved Kehoe’s arm back at the same time that he hooked his thumb and fingers beneath Kehoe’s chin. Gripping his throat, he pushed Kehoe’s head and wrist at once, banging Kehoe against the wall with a force that rattled the surface behind Alice’s back. The meat tenderizer fell from Kehoe’s grip, clattering to the unfinished concrete floor. Before Kehoe could recover, Dylan lifted Kehoe’s head and smashed it again into the wall.
It was a brutal blow. There was a crunching sound. Alice suspected the back of Kehoe’s head had splintered the plaster. That . . . or Kehoe’s skull itself had cracked. Air popped out of Kehoe’s lungs.
Dylan pulled Kehoe’s head forward and whacked it against the wall yet again. Kehoe’s body went slack. He sagged down the wall several inches, but Dylan still had his neck and jaw in a squeezing grip. Dylan pulled his head forward yet again.
“Enough, Dylan,” a man shouted breathlessly. “You’re going to kill him!”
It was like she was watching the scene through a ten-foot tank filled with water. Everything was hazy and muffled. She saw a man peer around the opened back wall of the pantry. He wore a uniform. It was Jim Sheridan. He was too big to squeeze into the already overfilled space.
“Dylan,” Sheridan barked.
Dylan stilled.
Slowly, Dylan turned and met Alice’s gaze. In that quick second, she knew that killing Kehoe was precisely what he’d planned to do before Jim found them. She didn’t flinch from his savagery, but she was struggling to keep her eyelids from drooping and losing consciousness again. Dylan’s grip on Kehoe’s throat loosened. Kehoe’s body slid and crumpled to the floor.
Alice stared fixedly at Dylan’s face as he drew closer to her. He crouched over her and gently touched the skin at the side of her ribs. She recalled hazily that she’d flung off her T-shirt because it had betrayed her in the darkness.
All the focused savagery that had frozen Dylan’s handsome face before melted away, only to be replaced by a poignant, helpless pain. That mysterious, inexplicable bond they’d shared even as children pulled tight. He was feeling her pain in that moment, and she hated it.
“It’s going to be okay, baby,” he murmured, his hand moving and his gaze flickering over her anxiously, searching for wounds.
“My deputy has called an ambulance. Don’t move her, Dylan,” Jim Sheridan said, but Alice’s stare didn’t budge off Dylan’s face. She didn’t want to stop looking at him.