Resonance of Stars (Greenstone Security #5) - Anne Malcom Page 0,4
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.