She shuddered.
“He opened the caskets,” he said.
She expelled a shaky breath. “He knows they’re empty, then.”
“I suspect he already knew,” he said. “He just had to confirm.” And once the hired killer had confirmed it, he’d come after her—after them.
She uttered a very unladylike curse.
Milek drew out his cell phone and held up the screen showing the call log. “He’s not the only one who knows.” He hadn’t had to play his messages to confirm that. He knew his family well.
Ever since Amber’s accident a year ago, they’d been watching him closely. They had noticed the difference in him after Rus had shared the truth with him. Garek had made his suspicions clear that he thought Milek was working for the FBI agent. With his new wife’s help, he would have kept digging. But it wasn’t just Garek and Candace who’d been calling him. The entire Payne family had called.
“They all know...”
She let out a soft gasp. “Stacy?”
He glanced at the call log again and nodded. She’d called too many times to just be checking on him. She knew.
“She’s going to hate me.”
“She’s going to be happy you’re alive.”
“For how long?” Amber asked. “The shooter knows I’m alive. And he wants me dead.”
“I’m not going to let that happen,” Milek assured her.
She shook her head. “You won’t be able to stop him.”
“I stopped him today.” He wasn’t sure if it had been his shots or Rus’s that had come close enough to either injure or scare off the killer.
“You can’t be with me every minute,” she said. “I need to wake up Michael and get out of here.” She reached for the handle of the slider.
He covered her hand with his and stopped her from opening the door. Her skin was cold and silky to his touch. He tightened his grasp. “You can’t hide.”
He couldn’t lose them again.
“I can,” she said. “I just won’t make the mistake of trusting Agent Rus again.”
“Rus didn’t betray you,” he said. “If someone hadn’t dug up your graves, I’m not sure he would have ever told me where you were.”
“Then why did he tell you that Michael and I were alive?”
Because he had been suffering. But he doubted she would believe him. Since she was already having trouble trusting, he wasn’t going to push his luck. Not when he had another proposal to make.
“It doesn’t matter why,” Milek said. “But now that he told me, now that I know you’re both alive and in danger, I intend to keep you and Michael safe.”
She stared up at him and asked, “And how do you intend to do that?”
“By bringing you home.”
She shuddered. “To River City?”
“To my place,” he clarified. “I want you and Michael to move in with me.” Of course, doing that might actually put her in more danger—from him.
* * *
He hunched down in the driver’s seat and stared up at the hotel room where, moments ago, two people had stood on the balcony.
They hadn’t seen him following them from the crime scene. But then, he was the Ghost. Nobody ever saw him—until it was too late. Until today...
Frank lifted his fingers to his forehead and flinched. A bullet had grazed him. He hadn’t had a call that close in a long while. It had shaken him.
He didn’t want to actually become a ghost. But he had to make some more. He glanced down at the screen of his phone where a news broadcast played. It was out now.
Their graves found empty, Amber Talsma was believed to have faked the deaths of herself and her young son. There was speculation about all the reasons why.
Only Frank knew the truth—the whole truth. He was a professional, though, so nobody else would ever know. And because he was a professional it was time he finished the job. He could have tried when they’d been on the balcony, but he hadn’t had a clear shot. So he would wait. He was a patient man.
But he didn’t have to wait long before his targets walked out. The man had the boy clasped in one arm and his other arm wrapped protectively around the woman. But he wasn’t actually offering them much protection. He wouldn’t be able to draw his weapon this time. He wouldn’t be able to return fire when Frank started shooting.
She was the one with a new name. New hair. New eye color. New career. Home. Life.
But Milek was the one who had changed. He wasn’t the man she remembered—the one she had loved. She had fallen for his sweet sensitivity. She saw none of that in the man who had pulled her from the wreckage of her van.
So why had she agreed to go home with him? She didn’t even know him. She’d already been scared to return to River City—since that was where it had all begun, where Gregory had been murdered, where she’d nearly been gunned down, as well. And living with Milek? Being with him all the time? That terrified her.
But he’d been insistent that they needed to leave the hotel. Now. Because she’d wanted to be gone before Agent Rus returned, she’d readily agreed.
Now, as she walked with him across the hotel parking lot, she wasn’t certain she’d made the right decision. Milek had proved over five years ago she couldn’t trust him with her heart.
But could she trust him with her life and Michael’s?
He had changed. He was no longer the sensitive artist he’d once been. He was a bodyguard, all steely-eyed and focused.
Even now, as he walked her and Michael from the hotel with an arm around each of them, he wasn’t focused on them. He was focused on everything around them. The parking lot was dark, the light from the hotel faint. She could see nothing.
But she felt the moment he did. His body tensed, and his grip on the gun he held against her side tightened.
“We’re going to play a game,” he whispered to their son. “We’re going to play hide-and-seek. You and your mother are going to hide. You’re going to hear bangs again but you’re not going to come out until I tell you to.”
There was that sensitivity—just a glimmer of it—when he tried to convince their son that the danger they were in was just a game.
After that brief explanation, he acted fast, though. He passed their son to her and stepped in front of them. “Run back into the hotel,” he told her.
Before she could say anything, shots rang out. She didn’t know who was shooting—Milek or whoever he had seen in the darkness. She couldn’t ask. She couldn’t move. Fear paralyzed her.
“Run!” he yelled.
And finally her legs moved. Michael clasped closely to her chest, she ran straight for the hotel lobby. But the glass doors stopped her, drawing her up short. Was she locked out?
Slowly they began to part. So the automatic opener was just slow. Too slow. She ducked as more shots rang out. Something whizzed past her head. She hoped she imagined it, but then the glass of those slowly parting doors shattered.
She shrieked.
And Michael echoed her scream, his body trembling against hers. She swung him out of her arms and through the narrow opening. As Milek had