With Preston spending more time at work, Ashley found herself at a loose end after her shifts, sitting at home on her own, doing all the things she’d started to get used to doing with Preston.

She couldn’t allow herself to worry that they might not work without the constant bubble keeping them together, because hadn’t he shown her? Burned it into her skin? He was in this for the long-haul, no matter how much more time he had to give to the office. He would do his best to always have weekends off, he’d told her, and he would come back here every night, no matter how late—crawl into bed with her and warm up the empty curves of her body. This was one thing she didn’t have to wonder, didn’t have to question. She knew he loved her, and that was that.

But it meant that Ashley spent a lot of time alone, and that was dangerous. Because an Ashley with too much free time was an Ashley who let her mind wander, and what it kept wandering to now was Larry Rohan’s murder. Still, all these weeks later.

It was unfinished business. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was more to this story. It wasn’t as cut-and-dried as it seemed—that Frank was involved, sure, but that wasn’t the end of it. And she couldn’t stop it from eating her up, the what-ifs and the guesswork racing through her mind in ever tightening circles.

In the end, she could think of only one way to satisfy her obsession with the case: she paid Frank a visit in jail after her shift at the hospital.

From the other side of the glass, phone pressed against his ear, Frank Germaine—McMahon—stared at her impassively, with a kind of boredom that was obviously designed to annoy her.

But his eyes were hauntingly pained, and that was the only thread she needed.

“Nice bruises,” she said, nodding at the state of his face. It seemed he’d made a few enemies in here already. Couldn’t be easy—not that she felt much sympathy for him.

He said nothing.

She cleared her throat. “You shouldn’t be in here, should you? At least, not on your own.”

That got his attention—his haunting eyes flashed a glimmer of awareness, of barely contained fury, and she smiled.

“Does the name Mark Rohan mean anything to you?” she asked, and that was it—bingo.

He bared his teeth, a cut on his lip cracking as he growled out, “What do you know about Mark Rohan?”

She considered leaving it at that, putting the phone back in its cradle and getting up, walking away. But there was a part of her that wanted a reaction, some kind of acknowledgement for the way she’d managed to put things together—an arrogance, maybe, but one she couldn’t shake.

“M,” she said, simply and without inflection in her voice. “On the note.”

He tried to be defiant, to stare her down, but she gazed back unblinkingly and then he looked away, swallowing.

“I thought Maude at first,” Ashley pushed. “Obviously. But you don’t actually have anything to do with those sisters, do you?”

His jaw twitched.

“Was Mark Rohan at the Alcott Resort that night?”

He shot a fierce glare at her, and that was all the answer she needed. Hanging up the phone, she got up and walked away, ignoring the sounds of a madman hammering on the glass, trying to get her to come back.

Obviously she had to tell the police now. She couldn’t just assume they already knew all of this—she’d never forgive herself if Mark Rohan remained a free man, able to kill any number of people and get away with it.

She hadn’t bothered asking Frank the details—who Mark was, how he was related, how Frank himself factored into it. All that mattered was that she hand over her information to the police and hope it was enough to bring Mark Rohan in.

Home first, to wash off the grime of jail and a long shift at the hospital, and then straight down to the precinct. She didn’t want to try to explain all of this over the phone—she felt she needed to be face-to-face with someone, a detective actively working on the case, one who would know what she was going on about.

Preston was due to finish work early tonight, come over for dinner, but he’d have to wait.

What if he got annoyed with her when he found out what she’d spent the afternoon doing? It was a thought that lingered with her as she dropped her keys on her side table and made her way to the bathroom. It didn’t matter. Let him be annoyed. This was the woman he fell in love with—one who couldn’t let things go, wouldn’t rest until a job felt complete.

And this job, with the impending arrest of the true murderer, would be complete.

She couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride, self-satisfaction, like the detectives in her favorite TV crime shows no doubt felt once they’d cracked a case. She didn’t know the why of the case; she barely knew the how. But she did know who, and that was the key to it all. And she’d discovered it all on her own.

Allowing herself a little proud smile, she unclipped her hair and leaned over the bath to turn on the shower, and the hand came from nowhere, the white cloth pressed tight against her mouth and nose, the unmistakably sharp scent of chloroform filling her senses as she threw her weight back at the person behind, as her heart tried to smash through her rib cage, as the world turned black around her…

Images swam in her vision, blurred shapes and colors, watery and indistinct. Her head was pounding.

Something was stopping her from rubbing her temples—her arms were pinned down and aching, and what was that noise?

“Wha’…”

“Hello,” a gravelly voice said somewhere to her left. “Ashley, is it?”

She swallowed the acid in her throat, blinked and blinked, her whole body drifting to the side as if weighted down, the floor tilting. Someone pushed on her shoulder, put her upright again. Her vision cleared enough for her to make out the outlines of the shapes.

There was a man with her, tall and blond. Not Preston.

“Wh—wha’s goin’ on?”

“I’ve tied you to a chair,” the man said simply, walking in front of her, directly into her line of clearing sight. “We’re going to have a little talk.”

“Who are you?”

She could see now, almost. See the glinting sharpness of the knife in his hand, held casually down by his side.

She wanted to panic, but someone had stolen her ability to feel anything.

He crouched, elbows on knees, knife loose in his grip. “You don’t recognize me?”

She focused on his face, studied the angles of him as her stomach lurched, threatening to expel its contents. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who this was. “Mark…Rohan.” Her words were still coming sluggish and weak, but her mind was kickstarting to life, spinning through information—where exactly in her living room he’d placed her, what she had around her, anything she could use…

“Or, as you would know me,” he said, cracking a grin, “Daniel Gold.”

There was a nail file on the coffee table behind her, she was pretty sure—and she could reach it, twist to the left and feel along the surface until she touched it, if only he would just look away for a moment. She only needed a moment.

Wait…Daniel Gold. That name rang a bell. “From Facebook?” The model in his studio-lit pictures, the one who’d sent her a friend request that night all those weeks ago. The man in those pictures looked nothing like the one crouched before her now.

His eyes lit up as if he was pleased with her. “I wanted to do a little digging on you, Ash. Like you’ve been doing on me.” He pointed the knife at her face, using it as a gesture. “Frank tells me you’ve been asking questions?”

“You killed a man.”

“I did.”

She shrugged a shoulder, as much as she could with the binds pinning down her arms. “I was curious about it.”

“It’s better to ask me than Frank. The guy’s an idiot.” The sharp trill of an eighties’-style ring tone split the tension, and he shook his head. “Did you know he’s not even rich?”

“I had my suspicions,” she said, and he smirked at her, getting up to his feet.

“One second,” he said, pulling the cell phone from his pocket. He drifted away, tapping the knife against his thigh as he muttered, and in the instant he turned his back to her, she twisted a few inches to the side and raced her fingers across the coffee table her chair was pressed against, skirting over a nail polish bottle and some tissue, the TV remote and something sticky, until eventually she met the unmistakable hard edge of her metal nail file.

“Yeah, I’ve got her,” Mark was saying as she sat upright again, nail file firmly in her grip. “Just sit tight.” He hung up and turned back to her, slipping the phone back into his pocket. Observed her for a moment before moving to sit on the arm of the chair. “Now. Questions,” he said conversationally. “You want to know how I did it.”

Half her mind on sawing at the string around her wrists, desperately trying to keep her movements minimal and not draw his attention, she muttered, “I guess.”

“We worked together. We came up with this plan together.”

“I knew that,” she said, a half-truth.

“I’d been in the resort the whole time, hiding out on the top floor.”

“Knew that too.”

“Strangled him, obviously, and dropped him through that sheet of glass.”

She felt the first bind give, the soft snap against her skin, and the resistance loosened. “Yep…”

He frowned, irritation crawling onto his face. It was obvious he’d been expecting a captive audience—and he had one, in the literal sense, but not in the way he wanted. He didn’t have her hanging on his every word, because he wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already worked out for herself. “Then what don’t you know?”

Keep him talking, she told herself as she furiously worked at the last threads around her wrist, her shoulders burning with the effort to keep them perfectly still.

“Why,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

He lifted an eyebrow, seemingly genuinely surprised. “The last name didn’t give it away?”

“I know you’re related. My best guess was nephew.”

His mouth twisted, an approximation of a smile, but it wasn’t pleasant. “Not son?”

“You’ve got parents.” She remembered that from his real Facebook profile—their names escaped her, but she knew they existed.

“I have adoptive parents,” he said. The bitterness was heavy in his voice, and for the first time since she’d woken up in this chair, she gave him her full attention. The part of her that thrived on the mystery of it all was keenly interested in hearing his story, what had happened to him to make him kill a man—to kill his own father. “My real mom died trying to push me out, and Larry gave me away.”

“Ah.” It made sense now—kind of. Kids were adopted every day, but she hazarded that not many of them would grow up to kill their biological parents. Something else was at play here, a final push. “And this was your revenge?”

His expression grew pinched, almost as if she’d offended him. “I didn’t want revenge,” he spat. “Give me some credit.” He pressed the point of the knife to his thigh, an idle movement, turning it so it made a tiny pinpricked dent in his jeans. She watched it, fascinated, as she felt the last of her bindings slacken. “He stole something from me, so I wanted to steal the one thing he cared more about than his own life: his money.”

With a last tug of her nail file, the string around her wrists slipped away, but she couldn’t enjoy the elation that thundered through her—the string had fallen to the floor, no doubt visible, and she had to keep him distracted while she worked out her next move. “What did he steal from you?”

With his face darkening, he squeezed the knife handle until his knuckles went white. “My childhood,” he said, and for the briefest of moments, all Ashley felt was confusion.

“You went to a new family,” she said. “You still had a childhood.”

He laughed, cold and bitter. “Yeah, right,” he said, nodding. Then he got to his feet, and Ashley froze. If he saw the thread on the floor… “The only thing that mattered in our house was my adoptive father’s fist, and I was never quite good enough.” He grinned at her, looking the picture of insanity. “I spent more time locked in the attic than I did being a part of that family,” he added, and suddenly, without warning and completely by surprise, she felt a profound sadness for him.

But sympathy was not going to get her out of this situation, and he was drawing closer to her. So she kept silent.

“I introduced myself to that asshole of my father months ago, and he’d even had my DNA tested to confirm that I was his son, but he still chose to keep me at arm’s length. But my lawyer tells me that I’m entitled to his fortune now, since Larry didn’t have a living will, and I’m the closest relative he had left.”

“So you’ve inherited all of his fortune,” she said. “You don’t need to kill again.”

That focused him, snapped him back from whatever dark memories he’d been revisiting. He looked at her, eyes sharpening, and pointed the knife at her. “You’re my loose end, Ashley Woodsen,” he said, with a chilling sort of finality, and she knew this was it—that she’d reached the moment where she would have to do something, or she would die.

He stepped forward, and she readied herself, and then a voice said, “Wait.” Both Ashley and Mark whipped their heads around to look at the door in unison.

Preston was there, in one of his tailored suits, staring at the scene with absolute horror in his eyes. Horror, mixed with fear.

A very powerful sensation flooded Ashley’s gut: there was the relief, but also a kind of panic she hadn’t yet felt even with a knife in her face. She was more worried about Preston’s safety than her own.

“Ah,” Mark said, “the boyfriend.” And then, in an instant, he was behind Ashley, knife to her throat, the loose string kicked somewhere beneath her chair, unnoticed and irrelevant.

She didn’t even have time to gasp, and she watched as Preston’s body jerked, as he stared at the blade pressed against the skin of her throat. As he stood there, powerless to react, with fear creating a storm in his eyes.

She felt like she was about to throw up, the true fear of Mark’s knife crawling up her spine. Her gut twisted in a thousand of knots, and her heart felt like it had stopped beating. Yet at the same time, she ached in sympathy for Preston. How powerless it must’ve felt for him, to see her on the verge of the maniac’s whim, and know that he’s unable to stop him.

“I wondered when you’d show up,” Mark continued. “Sit down there, or Little Miss Detective here’s gonna choke on her own blood.”

Preston raised his hands in surrender, took side steps until he reached the armchair, and perched on the edge of it. There was a stiffness to his movements that made him look as if he would snap, and Ashley barely heard his next words beneath the thunderous roar of her heartbeat in her ears as Mark pressed the blade more firmly against her, no doubt breaking skin.

“How much would it take?” Preston asked. “Name your price.”

Mark cackled. “You want to pay me off?”

Her hands were free; she could—she didn’t know what she could do. It would take only the slightest movement for him to slice her throat open, and if anyone startled him, tried anything he didn’t like—

“I want her to live,” Preston said tightly. He met her eye, just briefly, and she wished she could tell him to look away, to leave, to get himself as far away from this as possible—except she didn’t dare speak, lest it be the last thing she did.

Then Preston looked back up at Mark and swallowed dryly. “You could take me instead,” he said, and Ashley held her breath.

No.

Mark sounded absolutely disgusted with that suggestion. “I’m not a psychopath, desperate to kill. Christ.” He grabbed her hair, yanked her head back, pulled her throat tight against his blade. She couldn’t help but cry out. “She knows too much.”

Preston half lifted from his chair, hands still raised, complete desperation etched into his features. “You could take my money and disappear. Anything you—”

He was interrupted by the brief but unmistakable noise from his phone in his pocket, a sound that made Ashley’s heart sink like a stone. It was a human voice on the other end of the line. Asking Preston if he was still there, asking what was happening.

Preston’s eyes widened in alarm, and the room went deathly silent.

Then it was like someone had injected Mark with a dose of pure, blinding fury, because he suddenly decided Ashley wasn’t his biggest priority after all—he lurched away from her, knife and all, heading towards Preston, and what happened next was one manic, horrific succession of events that had Ashley reacting on instinct.

Mark shouted, “Was that your phone? Have you called the police?” and Preston made a noise like a growl, followed by a flurry of movement and the knife flashing, Ashley leaping from the chair, mind spiraling out of control as panic seized her—

She heard herself say, “No—Preston—” or something like it, a fight taking place right in front of her and there was a knife, god, Mark had a knife and Preston didn’t and—

She did it without thinking, wrapping her clammy palm around the marble lamp base on her side table, and as Mark drew his knife hand back, ready to kill, she brought the lamp down on the back of his head.

The thump was wet and sickening, and he fell to the floor like dead weight, the knife tumbling out of his grip and skittering away from him.

“Oh god.” She stared down at him, shock keeping her frozen, while Preston regained his breath and got to his feet.

Don’t let him be dead, she thought wildly, dropping onto her knees beside Mark and pressing her fingers to his neck. Panic completely whitewashed her mind when she felt nothing.

She’d killed him.

“Oh god.”

Desperately, she dug her fingers harder into his neck, then realized she was still holding the lamp in her other hand and threw it away with a cry, grabbing his wrist and feeling there, too.

“Ash—”

“No,” she said. “No, no…come on…don’t be dead, you asshole.”

And then she felt it—weak, but definitely there. A fluttering pulse.

Overwhelming relief had her falling back onto her ass.

“We need to tie him up,” Preston said.

Together, wordlessly, they took an electric cord and tied it tightly around Mark’s wrists and ankles, ensuring he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere or do anything even if he did wake up.

Standing back to observe the scene of the madness that had occurred here today, Ashley whispered, “I can’t believe that just happened.”

And then, as if free to let his panic manifest, Preston grabbed her and turned her to face him, feeling his way over her body, palming her face, running fingers over her throat, saying, “Are you okay?” and, “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” she said, gathering his hands in hers and waiting until she saw some calm filter into his eyes. Then they stood looking at each other, and she said, “You could’ve died for me there. Again.”

He breathed out a shaky laugh. “You’re giving me bad habits.”

It was a tasteless joke, entirely mistimed, and she almost hit him. Instead she said, “Jesus Christ, come here,” and gathered him in close, squeezed him tight, felt the way his arms clamped around her and his mouth pressed against the top of her head. Then, unable to control the rush of it in her chest, she let those feelings she’d been trying to contain spill free. “I love you, you idiot,” she said, the words coming out on little more than a breath, and he went entirely still.

Then he tilted her head back to press a fierce kiss to her mouth, and muttered the wholly romantic, “I know you do.”

This time she really did slap him, right on the shoulder, even if she was secretly pleased at how quickly he’d regained his humor. He’d faced down a madman and nearly found himself with a knife in his gut, and minutes later he was cracking jokes. It filled her with relief.

“But you did actually call the police, right?” she checked, just in case, realizing with a jolt of alarm that it was a point no one had actually clarified until now.

He nodded, and then they were kissing again, the kind of kiss intended to reassure rather than ignite anything. But it didn’t stop him from pulling back and murmuring against her ear, “This whole crime fighting thing is kinda hot, you know,” and earned himself a second slap in as many minutes.