The email he’d used to break up with me leaked. Yeah, he broke off an engagement in an email. And I suspected he was the one who’d leaked the email. Not because I’d cheated on him or betrayed him in any way. Because that’s what Kieran did. He liked to play with people. Liked to see how they would react to tragedy. Heartbreak. Life was a movie to him. He was the director.
I wasn’t about to let that happen again. Hence me choosing men who were rich—so they weren’t after my money. Who weren’t in the business—for obvious reasons. And who were as cold-hearted as I was.
Salvador was cold-hearted. Figuratively.
Now literally.
Well, he’d only just been shot in the last few minutes, so I was guessing his heart was still warm.
I’d let myself in with the key he’d given me for nothing other than convenience. I made sure that he never came to my place, never entered my space. And I arrived late at night, whenever I felt like I needed to be fucked. Salvador lived in a gated community in Calabasas, one of the most expensive and security-heavy communities around LA.
I should’ve known something was up when his gate guard wasn’t there, and the golden gates opened on their own. Then there were the two security guards that were usually strolling somewhere around the plush grass of his estate. Armed. Heavily.
I’d known from the start he was sketchy. Not many people who were as rich as he was were squeaky clean. If you wanted to be rich, you had to be prepared to stain your soul. I’d also suspected he had ties to some kind of crime syndicate, which hadn’t really bothered me either. I wasn’t the police, moral or otherwise.
But even knowing those things about him, I hadn’t trusted my gut feeling that something wasn’t right with the absence of guards. Didn’t look to the worst-case scenario. I’d been too pissed off for such things, too stuck inside my own head. But I’d known something was wrong the second I walked from the large foyer into the formal living room.
Raised voices. Not something that would usually cause alarm, as Salvador was Italian, after all. But something had crawled up my spine so I’d stopped just short of walking into the living room.
“I did what you asked,” Salvador hissed.
“I know,” a flat, calm voice replied. “Which is why I’m here. You’re no longer of use to me.”
I peered around the bookshelf right around the time a muted gunshot rippled through the air. Salvador’s body hit the marble floor with a thump and blood immediately spilled out from the hole in his forehead.
I’d thrown my hand over my mouth to stop my gasp and immediately hit the floor. If the shooter had looked up, he would’ve seen me. I was crouched behind a bookshelf, watching the murderer scroll through his phone with one hand and casually hold a gun in the other hand. I was watching him and thinking about my ex fiancé... I need to get out of here.
That was not practical, thinking about anything but the man with the gun. I should’ve been taking note of details. If I survived this, I needed to be able to describe him to police.
He was wearing a bespoke suit. Had a three-hundred-dollar haircut. A fucking fake tan. He looked like he should be managing a hedge fund and not splattering brains all over a floor.
He was not what I imagined a murderer to look like. He looked like he was doing his fucking taxes in front of a dead body.
He looked far too...normal.
Coleson Kitsch.
I was attending a charity event wearing couture, he’d leaned forward to kiss my cheeks in greeting. I’d pegged him as just another billionaire in a nice suit. Men at those things never had one exact job title. They were “businessmen,” which meant they had friends in high places and tax havens all over the world. His lips had been on my fucking skin. He’d made an impact because he’d reminded me of Kieran, in a bad way. His gaze was intense. Probing. There was something slightly off about him. Which of course, attracted me to him. I didn’t like the nice guys. The straight edges. Kind eyes. Too weak. Too easy for me to walk all over.
The ones with cruelty in their gaze, those were the ones that intrigued me. Even in our brief interaction, I’d seen that in Coleson.
Good thing I was whisked off by Andre before I could engage in some not so subtle flirting. Andre had muttered something about not mixing myself up with Kitsch and I’d dismissed it as him trying yet again to pair me with someone in the industry.
He glanced up and my stomach jumped into my throat. He was looking right at me. There was no way he could miss me.
And I was frozen.
I didn’t get up or try and run, didn’t look for a weapon on my own so I could act like the heroine I so often played these days. No, I was completely and utterly predictable. The weak woman, unable to move, awaiting her death.
I saw it all with stark lucidity. Heard it all. His shoes clicking on the marble floor as he approached me. The urine trailing down my leg. Another muted shot and maybe a flash of pain then nothing at all.
Saw all of this in less than a moment and yet I still didn’t fucking move. Wasn’t it meant to be fight or flight? Not cower behind a fucking bookcase, seconds away from releasing your bladder.
But it didn’t happen. The releasing of the bladder or the murder. His blue eyes flickered away, he glanced down at the body once more before walking away.
His shoes clicked on the floor.
And then there was nothing but silence.
That terrible, dead silence that would ring on the insides of my skull for the rest of my life.
2
It was not my idea to pull into the underground parking lot of Greenstone Security at midnight.
So not my idea.
It was my publicist’s idea.
Because he was the first person I’d called when I was sure that Coleson was not coming back to murder me. I was that useless. My life was so managed, so organized for me, my first instinct was to call the man who took care of most of my problems for me. Not, you know, the police or anything else.
To Andre’s credit, his pause after I told him I’d just witnessed a murder was less than a second before he started shouting orders at me.
I’d listened, because I was afraid, uncertain and too fucking weak to do anything else.
The police arrived at the mansion within minutes, only half an hour before Andre himself, which was impressive considering the LA traffic.
He’d been by my side the entire time, or as often as he could be while the police questioned me. First it was the uniforms, but as they recognized who I was—immediately—they made calls and a detective in a bad suit took over questioning.
Luckily, they didn’t seem to think I had anything to do with the shooting, since they’d arrived so soon after I’d made the call. They’d swabbed my hands for gunshot residue “to rule me out as a suspect.” Briefly, I wondered what would’ve happened if they’d found it. Or, if no one believed my story and they pinned the murder on me. The trial would be big. A circus. Huge news. The killer movie star. The spectacle of it all.
Likely, my high-paid defense attorneys would get me off. Probation. House arrest. That’s just what happened when you had enough money and fame. The right status.
But no, of course they didn’t take it further. They took my word for what it was, the truth. Maybe because they couldn’t imagine the woman they’d all likely jerked off to doing this, but more likely because my all white outfit didn’t have a speck of blood on it.