Page 77 of Lights Out

I didn’t bother lying. “Yes.” Here it was, the moment she realized how disturbed I was.

Instead of looking horrified, she nodded. “Good. I would have made a rash decision and probably ended up in jail.”

“Hey,” I told her, lifting her chin as I gathered my courage.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I did this to you.”

She frowned. “You didn’t do this to me.”

“I literally did,” I said. “Or are you forgetting that Brad’s not the only man in this kitchen who broke into your house?”

She released a shaky breath and tugged her chin out of my grip. “I haven’t forgotten. Trust me, that first time, I was just as ready to shoot you as I was Brad. But,” she looked away, worrying her lower lip between her teeth, “after that, I never felt like you wanted to hurt me. I can’t explain it, and I know it sounds stupid and illogical and dangerous, and, god, it is, but something in my gut told me to trust you.”

I leaned down and bumped my forehead against hers. “It was the snacks, wasn’t it?”

She huffed out a laugh. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for homemade trail mix.”

I pulled her into another hug, wanting to hold her right there for the rest of her life, shielding her from this terrible world with my body if that’s what it took to keep her safe from it. Unfortunately, the unconscious man at our feet would only stay that way for so long, and the sooner we got him out of there, the better.

I unwound my arms from Aly and dropped down beside Brad’s backpack. “I think tying him up with his own rope has a kind of poetic justice, don’t you?”

“I do.”

Now probably wasn’t the time for those two little words to make my stomach somersault, but hearing Aly say them warmed my heart in a way that made me want to hear them from her again, preferably while standing in front of an altar of some kind, or on a tropical beach, just the two of us – whichever she preferred.

She grabbed a pair of gloves and squatted beside me as I unzipped the bag.

“Son of a bitch,” she said when she got an up-close look at its contents. Her fingers shook as she reached in, flicked asidethe knife, and pulled out the rope. “He’s done this before, hasn’t he?”

“Based on the police files I read, yes,” I told her.

“How has he gotten away with so much?”

“Money, and he’s not an idiot,” I said. “Most of the evidence tying him to his recent crimes is circumstantial. His only conviction happened when he was still a teen, and it got expunged from his record. He must have gotten complacent the other night.”

Together, we tied him up, with me hauling his arms and legs tight as I talked Aly through the motions. It would have gone faster if I had done it, but this was the kind of skill everyone should learn, and after such a close call, I was desperate to teach her everything I knew about self-defense and survivalism.

“Do I want to know how you know how to do this?” she asked halfway through.

“Probably not,” I told her. “No, not like that. That part of the rope goes under instead of over.”

She corrected her mistake. “Does it have something to do with why you didn’t want me to call the cops?”

“Surprisingly, no,” I said, and she shook her head.

Once Brad was trussed up, I made Aly double-check her knots, tugging as hard as she could to prove he couldn’t get free. We put his balaclava back in place and, inspired by my earlier freakout, dragged it over his eyes like a blindfold. Then we gagged him, and I went to grab my laptop from my bag.

An hour later, we had all the answers I could find in such a short amount of time. Brad’s phone was still at his house in a wealthy suburb north of the city. He’d disabled the GPS location services on his vehicle, so it might have been parked nearby, but if we couldn’t find it, the cops would have a hard time, too. Even if it got found, it’d be difficult to prove how it had gotten where itwas or where Brad had gone after ditching it, so I felt confident that Aly would be in the clear.

“You should stay here,” I told her as I closed my laptop and met her gaze over the dining room table.

She shook her head, her expression turning mulish. “Absolutely not. This is a two-person job, and I’m not letting you shoulder the burden of it on your own. We’re doing this together, or not at all.”

I let out a heavy breath, knowing when I was beaten. Lowering my voice, I pulled her from her chair onto my lap and wrapped my arms around her waist. “We are talking about kidnapping and complicity in a potential murder.”

She gazed toward the sound of Brad struggling against his restraints just out of sight in the kitchen. “I’m well aware, but that son of a bitch broke in here planning to do unforgivable things to me, and I’m not a very forgiving person as it is. I’m not exaggerating when I say I could kill him myself and not lose any sleep over it.”

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