Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,75

interrupting my muffin. “I knew you’d be mad at the intrusion. But once we got past that, you’d be impressed that I found you. No one on any of the message boards knew where you went. Sure, your social media shows the woods, but that could be anywhere. I knew you needed me. You haven’t posted anything about the book, your publishers released the cover. When that happens, you’re usually on, talking about the characters, teasing. But nothing. You’re blocked. You needed me.”

Oh, sweet Lucifer. “What’s your name?” I asked, scooting even closer to my nightstand. Why in the fuck didn’t I sleep with my gun underneath my pillow?

“Nathan,” he said. “My real name is Jacob, but I had it changed to Nathan after I read End of Knowing.”

“Of course you did,” I muttered. “What else would my biggest fan do but change their name to the main character’s of my least popular book?”

“Are you mad at me?” he asked, tilting his head, his expressing clearing. “I thought you’d understand. Appreciate me.” His voice changed then. Morphed, into something I recognized. Danger.

Yeah, this was the part where he went from adoring to murdering.

I didn’t hesitate. It would’ve been different if I did, I was sure. Committing to my survival was not something I was meant to hesitate with. To be fair, his instincts were not that of a trained killer. Just that of fat boy with a mental health problem. So, he didn’t know I even pulled gun until I’d drilled two rounds into him.

He was dead.

My father taught me to shoot to kill. If I was pointing a gun at another human being, that was the warning. Shooting it, that was the ending.

He didn’t die quickly. Or quietly.

He coughed, thick, wet, raspy. Then he gurgled, choking on his own blood. Then he crapped himself. So, his death stunk out my house.

On wooden legs, I stood to make sure he had actually died. The pool of blood spread quickly, and it touched my toes. I didn’t jerk my foot back. It was warm, the blood. Sticky. I let it pool around me as I called 9-1-1 and informed the operator of what had happened. She wanted me to stay on the line, though she sounded unsure, which made sense. She was probably a college dropout, at home because she couldn’t make it in the city and had a crappy job that paid minimum wage. She got calls about the drunk husband beating the wife, car crashes, teenagers being assholes, maybe an old person having a stroke. Not the new resident author calling to let her know she’d killed an intruder in the same house a beloved local had been murdered the year previous.

Maybe that’s why the police came so quickly.

I didn’t expect them for much longer, which was why they caught me with bloodstained feet, sitting at my dining room table, cradling a large glass of whisky.

My second.

The first one I’d had, I’d taken outside, because I had a sudden and strong urge to run outside, away from the corpse. Just to make sure he didn’t follow me.

I looked out onto the lake, certain Nathan-slash-Jacob would be crawling on his bloody elbows, trailing blood through the house, coming for me, a gruesome smile on his face, brains staining his cheek.

That image was so powerful I couldn’t stand out there any longer. I went back inside and checked to see whether he had moved at all.

He hadn’t.

Still dead, staring at nothing at all.

I’d made sure to sit myself in a position where I faced the hallway, so I could be prepared if the corpse did decide to come back to life.

They didn’t knock, but that was because the door was jimmied open. How I didn’t wake up to the sound of that happening or the icy breeze hurtling through the opening, who knew. I hadn’t closed it.

I liked the way the cold prickled my bare skin. It chased away the worst of the smell too.

“Jesus,” a man in a half-buttoned uniform muttered.

His belly was stretching the limits of his crinkled shirt, hand clutching a gun to his side. I guessed this was the chief Saint had mentioned. Pretty true to the description, since he looked hard, prepared, but appropriately shocked at being faced with a dead body.

His eyes focused on me, scanning me either for injuries or a weapon. Maybe both. I had put on a shirt and sweatpants before I poured my whisky. It felt weird being half naked in