Page 131 of Liar's Point

“I won’t.” She hung up and clicked over. “Hey, Miranda.”

“Hi.” She paused. “Did you get my text?”

Nicole looked down at her phone. She’d missed a slew of messages while she’d been sleeping in. Damn pills.

“I missed it. Sorry. What’s up?” Nicole leaned her crutch against the counter and reached for the cabinet where she kept the cat food.

“We got the labs back,” Miranda said. “They just came in.”

Lucy jumped onto the counter. Nicole had moved her bowls higher so she wouldn’t have to crouch down to feed her. She scooped food, and Lucy knocked her hand out of the way in her rush to the bowl.

“Which labs?” she asked Miranda.

“All of them.”

Nicole’s gaze landed on her coffee machine. The little green light was on, meaning someone had used it in the past two hours, before the automatic shutoff.

A spark of hope ignited inside her. He had stayed the night with her.

“Nicole? You there?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Well, you remember I swabbed the mirror, too, right? On the chance that even if he was wearing gloves, he might have touched his face or something, and deposited DNA on the mirror when he adjusted it.”

“Yes?”

“Well, today is your lucky day,” Miranda said. “We got a hit. This guy is in the system.”

***

Cassandra pulled the wool sweater over her head and tossed it on the bed. It was too heavy. And itchy. She would be sweating bullets in the meeting, which would make her look guilty as hell.

She returned to the closet and surveyed her other choices. What little clothing budget she had had been spent on yoga clothes for work. But she couldn’t show up for a meeting with the police in a hot-pink sport bra. Besides a wool sweater, her next best option was a long-sleeved workout shirt in a somber gray. She pulled it on and tucked it into her jeans, then stepped into the bathroom to check her reflection.

Her outfit was okay, but her face looked terrible. Her eyelids were puffy, and she was already getting that eye tic that happened when her nerves were frayed.

She stared at her reflection, and sure enough, there it was.

She squeezed her eyes shut. How was she going to do this? Alex’s plan was crazy. And she couldn’t believe she’d agreed to it. What had sounded so reasonable at eleven last night seemed ludicrous in the light of day. Alex Breda, with his deep voice and his trust me eyes, had persuaded her to scrap her plan and follow his instead. Using all his fancy legal terms, he’d convinced her that his plan had a chance of succeeding.

Not just a chance, a high probability.

But Cassandra didn’t see it—she was a pessimist. Maybe because she knew a few things that Alex didn’t.

Such as that her husband had no limits. There was nothing Malcom wouldn’t do to maintain control. He needed control over his money, control over his image, and—since Cassandra impacted both of those things—control over his wife. This was a man who took the underwear from her laundry hamper and had it tested for DNA because he believed—wrongly—that she was having an affair. This was a man who got his own brother fired from his job after he’d said something embarrassing about Malcom’s “humble roots” to a reporter. This was a man who had his accountant hit by a truck when he found out she planned to report his business to the feds.

Malcom’s response to any problem that threatened his ego or his bank account was to lash out, to clamp down, to exert control and exact punishment. And his wife leaving him was the mother of all problems because it threatened everything.

Cassandra had understood that divorcing him wouldn’t be easy, but she’d set this process in motion because she knew that the longer she waited, the more entangled they would become until she was neck-deep in his criminality and trapped in the marriage forever. She couldn’t live like that, beholden to a man who had that sort of leverage over her and who spied on her every move.

She went into the kitchen and grabbed some ice from the freezer. Tucking the cubes into a napkin, she made a pack and pressed it over her eyelids.

She sucked in a breath and held it in. Then blew it out. She repeated the process over and over while reviewing the day’s schedule in her head, envisioning every part of it going to plan. Maybe if she visualized success she could make it happen.

Her phone chimed from the bar, and she pulled the ice pack away.

Reese again.

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