what you believe? Well, I think you’re a liar whose delusions of grandeur are pretty much unparalleled. I didn’t do this to you; you did this to yourself. You were smart enough to have gotten the scholarship without cheating. That was a choice you made, and you paid the price for it.”
Trent picked up the gun off his lap and pointed straight at her head.
So much for tough love.
“You destroyed my future. The good I would’ve done justified the decisions I’ve made.”
Quinn struggled not to show the fear that was threatening to swamp her. She locked her muscles in place to try to stop her tremors.
“Let me go, Trenton. You’re smart enough to completely reinvent yourself. Our feud can be over right now. You’ve gotten your revenge—my career is in shambles; my financial life is barely tolerable. You got what you wanted. It’s time to end this.”
He turned down the road leading to the TSC campus. Maybe he was starting to see reason and would let her go. She’d walk all the way home from campus if she had to. She just wanted out of this car.
“That was originally my plan. An eye for an eye and all that. I’d never been happier when I learned you’d left Cambridge.”
He shook his head. “But then you came here, and instead of everything falling apart for you, it seemed to fall into place. I’ve been watching you, you know. I used to watch you from inside your house, but then that damn dog started to bark every time I was nearby. Did you like my fire the other night?”
She bit back a sob. He was going to kill her. She had no doubt about it now. He’d been in my house. All those times she’d thought she was being overly paranoid from living in a big city, when really, her instincts had been right all along.
“If you came all the way out here,” he continued, “and had been miserable—no job, no friends—maybe that would’ve been enough for me. But that wasn’t what happened.”
He slammed his hand without the gun against the steering wheel as he pulled into the faculty parking lot. “You got a job you actually seem to like, somehow scored the town’s hottest stud, and a bunch of new friends. People here who’d only known you a few weeks believed you were innocent faster and more thoroughly than people who’d known you for years back in Cambridge.”
He parked the car in the empty lot, turned off the engine, and swung the gun in her direction, his face red with rage. “It was unbelievable. You should’ve been suffering, but you were thriving.”
“I’d hardly call it thriving.” He had no idea how much his manipulation had caused her to question her own judgement, even her own sanity.
But on the other hand, she did think of Oak Creek as home now and the people here as her friends.
Baby and the Linear Tactical guys could—and would—rescue her, not because she was Riley’s sister, but because she was their friend too.
They would if they knew she was in trouble. How could they? She’d never dreamed anything like this was the reason for her problems. There was no reason to think anyone else would.
“You were going to go to jail today. I was going to make sure of it.”
He opened the car door and, keeping the gun pointed at her through the windshield as he walked around the car so he could unlock the door and yank her out. “Scream and I’ll kill you right here. Not that there’s anyone around to hear you.”
He was right. The campus was empty for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. “How had you made sure I was going to go to jail?”
He shrugged as he pulled her with him past the offices and toward the building where she taught one of her classes.
“You and I are about the same build; did you notice that?”
She hadn’t. She’d only noticed the police officer uniform when he’d first been talking to her, but now that he’d pointed it out, she realized it was true. She was probably average for a woman, five-foot-six, one hundred and twenty pounds. He was the same, but for a man, he seemed smaller.
“I used to get teased about it in high school—how I was closer to a girl’s size than a boy’s. But it came in handy when I was making it look like you broke into the computer lab here then made sure the police got the footage.”