Unreal 2 Cold Illusion - Winter's Chill: (Adult Suspense Thriller) Read online

  “No one is lying to you, Julie,” Danielle said. “Not anymore. Okay?”

  Julie was still trembling when she saw Ethan reaching for her as he desperately nodded his head.

  “Why is he here?” Julie asked.

  Sighing, Danielle pressed her brow to Julie’s face.

  “I couldn’t… He was so worried. I had to let him know where you were,” she said. “He’s been here all night. Just waiting to talk to you.”

  Without thinking, Julie was on her feet. As Ethan moved to embrace her, she pushed him into the wall and started battering his body with furious fists.

  “I trusted you!” she screamed. “You were the only one. Why didn’t… why didn’t you…?’

  He stayed like a statue as she beat him through her tears. Still trapped in that hazy space between her nightmare and this waking moment, she saw him as Pete and Matt and his own special brand of liar. At least they had only conned her for a night. She had given her heart to Ethan. And he paid her back by setting her up for an ambush.

  “I wish I’d never met you!”

  Her eyes met his, and she saw him crumbling. At first he winced at the force of each blow, but then he was no different from the wall at his back. She wanted him to fight back, to talk, to do something. But Ethan made no more to defend himself.

  And Julie’s fury intensified.

  “Do something!” she cried. “Lie to me again! Tell me why you were really there!”

  He stayed silent as his body slumped to the ground, and when Nick tried to hold her back, she forced him back and fell to Ethan’s side.

  “Was it the plan?” she asked. “Make me trust you? Make me… make me love you?”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head, but Julie kept going.

  “And I… oh God! I made love to you! Was it fun for you to wait and see if I could stomach the thought of doing it again?”

  That triggered something, and he opened his eyes with a cold glare.

  “The truth?” he asked.

  “Can you handle that?” she hissed.

  He moved his lips about his tense jaw before he found the power to speak.

  “Of course I wanted you again,” he said. “But---”

  And she was on him again, hitting and clawing.

  “So why not just play it like your buddies?” she demanded. “Bet Carter could have given you some pointers---”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, how can you---?”

  As he rose to his feet, his limp body returned to full strength, and Julie whimpered as his hard stare enveloped her, and Julie fell back into Danielle’s waiting arms. Ethan shrugged Nick aside as he clenched and unclenched his fists. Shuddering at the thought that he meant her further harm, Julie moved closer to Danielle and buried her face in the florist’s ebony locks and waited for the world that she had come to believe in come to a brutal end.

  “Juliet.”

  She couldn’t look at him, but she felt his shadow fall over her terrified body. In that moment, she was back in the place where he first found her, bruised and naked and ready for him to take her. Would he do that now? Could she even trust Danielle to keep her safe?

  “I told you about my sister,” Ethan said in a thick voice. “You… you know what happened. How can you even think that I would…?”

  His voice cracked and he turned away from her. As she gazed at his back, clothed only in a light blue shirt, she saw years of agony rippling through the fabric. It was the one thing that didn’t add up. Had he actually suffered such a tragedy then naturally his stomach would turn at the very mention of the word rape.

  Oh Ethan…

  Despite her better instincts, she tried to catch her breath and moved towards him. His hold was cautions as he smoothed his hands down her back and whispered into her ear.

  “You’re safe,” Ethan said. “I won’t... I could never hurt you.”

  Julie started to sink into his arms when his lies slammed back into her brain.

  “But… but Kim?” she asked. “Did you hurt her?”

  “No,” Ethan said as he started to stroke her face. “I never touched her. I…”

  Suddenly he drew his hand back. It felt like a kind of confession, but she still needed the words.

  “Did you see her die?” Julie asked.

  He bit down on his lip and started to speak. Julie dared to press her hand to his cheek. A part of her loved knowing even the smallest part of him again, but it was a calculated move. She knew that he could not resist her touch, and felt his face melt into her hand as he tried to take her hand.

  “No. Tell me, Ethan.”

  He moved away from her and sank to the bed. She saw Nick and Danielle exchange a knowing glance, and he gestured for her to follow him from the room.

  But Danielle hesitated.

  “Um… you two gonna play nice?” Danielle asked.

  Ethan lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender, but Julie made no move. She wanted him back. As he was before her sense of any kind of reality was capsized by the hidden information. If she had to control her rage to get the full story, she could do it.

  “We’re fine,” Julie said.

  Danielle barely seemed convinced, but she abandoned them to the room and closed the door behind her. Again she was alone with him. Ethan looked as he had on that first night, stunned and outraged and maybe even a little sick. But was it all an act?

  “What’s your pleasure, Ethan?”

  He cringed at the sound of her voice, but Julie grew bold and drew nearer to his side and pressed her quaking hands to her hips.

  “What is it, Mr. Graff?”

  He stared hard into her eyes and dared to touch her face. She couldn’t help but sigh at the feel of his fingers on her flesh, and she forced herself to keep still as his hands ran down her neck.

  “Don’t hate me, Juliet,” he pleaded. “I can take anything… anything but that.”

  She didn’t know what she felt. But did she hate him? Could she hate him? Only a little while ago, that seemed impossible.

  And she didn’t hate him now.

  “No, Ethan,” she finally whispered. “I don’t… I can’t hate bring myself to hate you.”

  His entire body relaxed, and he wrapped his arms around her legs. Julie was unable to fight the flinch that poked through her skin, and as she started to button her collar, he was on his feet, stopping her.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t have to hide the scars from me.”

  Julie’s arms fell to her sides, and she moaned lightly as his hands moved up to the mark of her face. After all her crying and sweating, the scar sat boldly across her face, unhidden. She tried to conceal the unwanted mark with her hair, but he quickly brushed it back and lowered his lips to the deformed place.

  “Please don’t be afraid of me, Juliet,” he implored. “I know I was wrong. But I… I just couldn’t be the one to hurt you again.”

  It sounded sweet, but then all of his words sounded that way.

  “So you knew what would happen?” Julie asked. “You knew that this was their plan. And you didn’t… you didn’t warn me?”

  He sucked a deep breath between his lips but could not speak. Shaking his head, he tried to take her hands, but Julie gave nothing in return.

  “How could you do that to me, Ethan? I thought that you---”

  “I do,” Ethan started, “I love you. And… and I failed you. I should have come clean. I hate that you were hurt again because I was... I was terrified. Okay? But…”

  Again his hands moved to her scar, and Julie sighed when he touched her there. His hands were sweet, his eyes sweeter, and Julie nodded for him to keep talking.

  “But if… it there was any hope that she was alive,” “I… I swear to you.”

  “Ethan…”

  He brushed his lips against her scarred cheek and splayed his fingers behind her head.

  “I never would have left her behind,” he said. “I would have saved her, too.”

  Julie’s mind filled
with an alternate version of her rescue. Ethan would have hidden her in the tree, squeezed her hand tightly, and ran back to the house of horrors. Darting past the hunting eyes of Pete and Matt, Ethan would have stayed in the shadows until the house was back in view. Bursting through the door, he would have seen Geoffrey Troxel and Carter McCord hauling Kim’s limp form out the back. Searching for a weapon, finding… what? Maybe a vase or a candlestick? Ethan would have bashed their brains in and brought Kim back to the hiding place. Julie would have clung to her friend, and the longest night of her life would have stretched deeper into the darkness as Ethan led both girls to safety.

  “Please believe that, Juliet,” he said. “Please believe me.”

  Julie sighed as he traced the space of her scar.

  “I… I want…”

  She wanted this. She wanted him as her hero, and Julie fell into his arms. She felt Ethan’s sigh and told herself that all would be right again.

  “I was so worried when you didn’t come home,” he whispered into her hair. “Please don’t leave me again.”

  Julie rested her head to his chest and managed to nod. Maybe she could still trust him. How she wanted to. And as Ethan started to hold her, Nick’s voice pierced the air.

  “What the fuck?”

  She pulled away from Ethan and looked towards the closed door. Julie felt confused and tortured as Nick called out again, but she let Ethan wrap his arm around her shoulders as Danielle’s voice became too loud to ignore.

  “Um… Julie,” Danielle said. “You need to get down here.”

  Leaving Ethan’s hold, she pulled away from his body, but still she took his hand as they moved down the steps. Julie still took some comfort in the feel of his hand around hers, and together they approached the TV. The caption at the bottom of the screen signaled breaking news, and Julie waited as a blonde reporter appeared before a house that she instantly recognized.

  “And in what is another stunning development in the Troxel/McCord trial, Kimberly Beyer is alive, and she is home.”

  Julie fell into a fog as she absorbed the reporter’s words. The woman claimed that Kim had shown up, out of the blue, thirty pounds lighter and obviously broken. But she was alive and back in the embrace of her anguished mother. Some semblance of decency prevented pictures of that most precious moment. Instead of the reunion, the media flashed pictures of Kim as she had been, smiling, healthy, worlds away from rape. Julie knelt close to the glowing screen and touched her friend’s familiar image. There was Kim, bright eyed and smiling from behind her long red hair, and Julie wept as she fingered the picture. Even as she hoped that grinning girl still existed, Julie bit down on her lip as she knew that it couldn’t be so. After a single summer, Julie was changed forever. What would Kim look like after a year?

  “My God,” Ethan moaned. “She really is alive? How is that even…?”

  His voice trailed off, and Julie started to cry. Her tears were a harsh cocktail of relief and fear. But the latter surpassed the former, and she moved to her feet as she reached for the shop’s door.

  “Juliet! Wait. I---”

  Walking on wobbly legs, the entire room spinning around her, Ethan was just in time to catch her as she fell forward in a faint.

  17

  “How the fuck did this happen?”

  Leo was seething as Morales sped through the Lincoln tunnel en route to Jersey. The cop started to answer, but what would make any kind of sense? They had searched those woods until summer turned to autumn, until leaves crackled under the feet of every man and woman desperately, futilely trying to locate one little red-headed girl. No trace of her, no shred of evidence, and now, just when Vivian Porter had sown the seeds of doubts in everyone’s minds, poor Julie Edwards included, Kimberly Beyer was back.

  “You know how this looks, Connie?” Leo asked as he loosened his tie and pushed down the window.

  “Do you have to do that?” Morales asked as a sharp wind forced its way into the car. “It’s like eleven degrees.”

  “I need the air,” Leo said.

  “And I need my fingers not to freeze to the wheel.”

  She felt Leo’s eyes, icy as the wind if not colder, glaring at her hands.

  “I’d buy you another pair of gloves,” Leo started, “but you’d just forget them. Here.”

  Reaching into his pockets, be pulled out his own gloves and took one of her hands from the wheel.

  “So sorry, Leo,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “But we were in a little bit of a rush---”

  “You’d think it was for your first winter,” he said, cutting her off. “How can you focus on everything but the obvious?”

  Pulling her single gloved hand away from him, her mouth tensed, and she stared hard at the gridlocked road ahead.

  “Don’t put this on me,” Morales spat. “I did my job.”

  Leo scoffed and lowered his window further.

  “Apparently not,” he muttered under his breath.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing.”

  She hated that. Here was a man who could talk to juries until he was blue in the face, much like her one hand at this particular moment. But when she needed him to talk to her, really talk, he retreated into the space of a surly adolescent that preferred sulks to speeches.

  “You know, Leo, sometimes you are a total ass.”

  Raising her covered hand to her mouth, she tore into his glove with her teeth and spit it back in his lap. Two could play at his reindeer game. It would serve him right if her hands fell off. Let someone else search for the clues that he would only botch up when he was outmatched by the likes of Vivian Porter.

  They stayed in the silence of the car and the cold as Morales kept rushing down the highway, switching lanes every time the vehicle just before her strolled when she needed to run. A part of Morales longed to see this rumor of Kimberly Beyer with her own eyes. But she also wanted to get this over with so that she could return to the car, the city, and drop Leo at his door. There was no way in hell that she going to stay in his bed on this night.

  Turning off the exit ramp, Morales turned her head slightly as Leo’s phone buzzed. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched his lips curl into a frown as he read the message.

  “What?” Morales asked, hating to talk to him but still curious to know what he had just learned.

  “Vivian’s already talking mistrial,” Leo said.

  “What?” Morales asked. As she slowed the car along a strip of restaurants and novelty shops, she wondered what it would be like to live in such a seemingly quiet little town. Even in the fallen snow, unnamed strangers walked their dogs, and a group of kids did tricks with their bikes under a cleared patch of sidewalk. It seemed simple, innocent.

  But if Kimberly Beyer was actually alive, would she feel safe at home? Or anywhere?

  “Here,” Leo said as he pointed through the windshield.

  “I know, Leo,” she said as he jutted her head towards the sound of the GPS lady’s dull yet pleasant voice.

  Turn on Mapleton. Your destination will be on the right.

  “What the hell?” Leo exclaimed.

  A dozen other monotone ladies had allowed a cavalcade of reporters to beat them to the punch. Having already set up camp around Kimberly Beyer’s house, they weren’t doing much of anything but loitering. Morales knew that that would change the instant that they approached the house.

  But they had a job to do. And maybe she had missed something.

  Not happening again.

  “It’s no comment until we get inside,” Leo said. “We have to get the lay of the land, and---”

  “I know, Leo.”

  She could feel him ready to pick a fight, but it would wait. Right now, they had a far more gnarled mountain to climb.

  Morales parked a few feet from the house, and she pushed Leo’s open window back into the place with the button to her left as they hit the street. They walked side by side without looking at each other, and
as soon as the mass of reporters saw them, smelling the blood just bubbling in the water, everyone was on them like dogs in search of meaty bones. Leo’s so-called celebrity made him the obvious target of the questions, and he barked out his rehearsed response as they moved through the throng.

  “Detective Morales!”

  She shuddered at the sound of her name but quickly recovered and looked up at a broad chested blonde man with a granite jaw who spoke through his perfectly capped teeth.

  “Are you here to apologize to Kim?” the reported asked.

  Morales recoiled and slowly shook her head.

  “No. I---”

  “But she’s been missing all this time,” he continued. “And you stopped looking. How are you going to sleep with that?”

  Again the implications that she had failed in some way, but what did this sun-dappled freak that looked beyond ridiculous against the winter landscape know about real police work? Dead ends were a frustratingly real part of the game.

  “Do you know how many persons go missing every day?” Morales said. “You think we can just snap our fingers and boom, case solved?”

  She felt Leo moving back to her side, but Morales stayed in the reporter’s gaze.

  “And is that what you’re planning to tell Miss Beyer?” he asked.

  She didn’t know what she would say to Kim, but she knew what she wanted to tell him, and as she clenched her fist and prepared to slam it into his smug face, Leo grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards the door.

  “No comment!” he said as he pounded on the door and pressed his lips to Morales’ ear.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Leo asked.

  She pictured all those victims, all those photos. The cases were scalding hot until they became as cold as her hands. Morales had a notebook. Old school. Spiral bound. Eventually, she plucked a felt-tipped pen from her desk and ran a line through one name and then another. And another. She would still follow leads. Lie to the families that there was always hope. But in her mind, Morales saw them as dead as Kimberly Beyer had to be.

  Until she wasn’t.

  What if all those lines pointed the way to other people languishing in agony, praying with what little strength they had left for rescue?