Deceptions: A Cainsville Novel by Kelley Armstrong Page B

watched the building. Seeing Ricky, the driver quickly put the window up, but not before Ricky got a look at a familiar face.
    Morgan? Are you fucking kidding me?
    The car pulled into the street. Ricky strode to his bike and hopped on.
    You picked the worst possible night to pull this shit, Morgan. And you’re about to find out why.

A REASONABLE MAN
    G abriel paced the living room, checking the locks and the security system, looking out the window, then sitting on the edge of the couch, hoping to settle in for the night, only to be compelled to get up again.
    He’d given Olivia the bedroom. He felt better being between her and the front door. The chances of Morgan breaking in were as infinitesimal as the chances that Gabriel had somehow failed to engage the locks or arm the security system, but taking the couch helped dull the edges of his gnawing anxiety.
    He should feel better about the situation. He and Ricky had come up with a rational plan for dealing with James Morgan. The problem was that Gabriel was becoming increasingly convinced they were not dealing with a rational man.
    He’d had two e-mails from Morgan today. The first had come late morning. A photograph with the subject line “Thought you might want to see this.” Which had told Gabriel he almost certainly did not. He’d cautiously opened it on his phone, getting the smallest possible preview before realizing what it was, deleting it, and going into his trash and removing it from there, too, on the off chance he might somehow stumble over it later.
    It’d been a picture of Ricky and Olivia. Ricky had told him Morgan had interrupted him and Olivia kissing behind the diner. While Gabriel hadn’t seen much before he deleted the picture, he was quite certain “kissing” didn’t quite cover the situation. That was not an image he wanted anywhere in his brain.
    But it raised the question: What kind of man purposely walks in on his ex-fiancée with another man and takes a photo of them? And sends the picture to someone else? The levels of incomprehensible behavior were too much for Gabriel to even process.
    He was looking out the window when he caught a noise from the bedroom. He walked to the closed door and listened, and then reached for the knob. He stopped himself. Yes, there was a bedroom window—fifty-five stories up without even a balcony to climb on. Most likely, Olivia was using the bathroom. His brain whirred through everything she could find in there. The most damning items—the weapons and the money—were gone, though. He’d removed them earlier that day. With Chandler’s death, the defense attorney in Gabriel had finally overruled the little boy who needed his security blankets, and he’d stashed them in an untraceable storage locker he kept.
    Still, he shouldn’t have insisted Olivia take the bedroom. It wasn’t about putting her in a safer spot, he realized. It was about giving her a better place to sleep as a way of saying, “I’m sorry for how monumentally I fucked up tonight.”
    When she’d insisted he stay out of the prison visiting room, he’d racked his brain for what he’d done to deserve the rejection. Whatever the cause, he hadn’t taken the snub well. Not until he’d stood at that visiting room door, seen the tears streaming down her face, and all he could think was,
Thank God I’m not in there
.
    It wasn’t that he didn’t want to deal with her emotional breakdown. He wanted to fix it. To make her feel better. And he didn’t know how.
    Olivia knew whom to turn to for comfort. She’d wanted Ricky. And he’d talked her out of it. He’d been hurt and, yes, jealous, unwilling to acknowledge that someone else could help her when he could not. So how had he handled the situation? By making it worse.
    His intentions had been good. He could tell she wanted a drink, so he’d taken her to a bar where they could talk about the visit. Except he’d inadvertently chosen a place where they couldn’t talk about anything.