Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 67468 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67468 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
So that was what I did.
I twisted and took us both into the water. The moment we hit, I turned in the opposite direction, held my breath, and swam hard. I kicked for all I was worth.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the eerie-sounding voice called from behind me.
I barely kept my head above water as I swam, then walked toward the place where I knew I could get out in the dark without any spotlights.
The moment my feet touched the familiar spot that I knew led up to a set of submerged steps, the man started shouting again. This time almost manically.
“Come out!” he screeched.
I did come out. Of the water, as far away from him as I could get.
I all but cursed the way the water dripped off of me as I climbed, wincing as each drop sounded like a clap of thunder in the otherwise silent night.
The moment my feet met the dock, way far back in the parking lot behind The Marina, I didn’t think. I didn’t question my actions.
I just ran.
I ran, and ran, and ran, until my feet were a bloody mess.
I didn’t stop running until I was moving up the gravel drive of Cassius’s mom’s place.
As I was running, I’d thought about where I would go.
With a murder in our town, that meant that all local cops would be on scene, and that scene, from what little I’d put together on my own, was fairly far away from The Marina.
I wasn’t too sure why I’d chosen this particular place to go to.
Logically, it was likely because it was about a mile and a half away from where I’d been. I knew that I could get there from the beach, which happened to be the way I ran.
Whatever the reason for my going to Cassius’s mom’s house, I just hoped he’d taken my brother’s advice and put the cameras back up to alert him when there was movement on the property.
Otherwise, I’d be sitting there a while.
CHAPTER 10
I’m not saying it’s hot, but I hydroplaned off the toilet into the bathtub today.
-Text from Cassius to Alice
CASSIUS
The alert pinged on my phone, and anger and resentment started to fill my veins as I thought about Colly and why I’d had to put those stupid fucking cameras on alert.
Everything alerted the goddamn cameras. The sway of the palm trees. A goddamn iguana crawling across the ground. A trash bag rolling past.
You name it, it set the cameras off.
Not once, however, had Colly been back.
Which left me with a good enough feeling about ignoring the alert.
So that was what I did.
For five whole minutes, I tried to force myself to ignore the alert and focus on drinking a beer with my friends.
For five minutes, something nagged at me. A niggling feeling that I usually would trust, but forced myself to put out of my mind.
“Are you okay?”
The woman that’d been sitting next to me all night, Sara I thought her name might be, looked cute. She was sweet, in a down-home kind of way, and would’ve usually been my type.
However, tonight, and ever since I finally admitted that there was only one girl that overwhelmed my thoughts lately, she wasn’t the one for me.
She was, by far, annoying me.
But since she was a friend of KD’s, I’d done the polite thing and allowed her to chatter her mouth off all night.
We were at the bar in town, all of us unwinding from our days at work—or Wake’s day at doing whatever Wake did not working—and I was two beers in. It was well into what would be considered ‘late night’, but I had nothing to do tomorrow since it was officially the weekend. As did the others.
What I should’ve been doing was drinking, having a good time, and forgetting about a certain someone who was very clear with her ‘take me home’ and her unsaid ‘and don’t come back over.’
Yes, what I should’ve been doing was forgetting everything but what the bottom of my beer tasted like.
Instead, I was thinking about her.
Oh, and that damn alert on my phone.
“Fine,” I grumbled as I pressed my hand against the phone in my jeans.
It felt like it was on fire.
Was that normal?
Hot to the touch, I pulled it out of my jeans and didn’t stop the compulsion to click on the notification for the security app at my mom’s place.
Nothing was there.
Like I’d thought.
All I got was a view of my mom’s backyard and the reminder that I needed to find a new caretaker for the property that could keep my mom’s garden looking good, just like she’d liked it.
I switched to the front yard. The grass was well above what my mother would consider ‘regulation level.’ She was probably rolling over in her grave.
Gritting my teeth, I switched to the side yard, which luckily didn’t look too bad just yet. Followed the side yard up with the garage view.