Page 198 of Somebody's Watching Me
“Oh, really?” Propping herself up on her elbows, she got in his face. “I can’t visit your family in Texas or go on vacations.” Her anger deepened, sharp and fierce. “Or are you expecting me to sit around and wait while you’re off living an exciting life?”
“Not at all.” His smile grew, pissing her off more. “I expect my family to come here to meet you, and why would I want to go on a vacation without you?”
“I refuse to trap you here.” She dropped back onto the bed. “Absolutely refuse.”
“And I refuse to live without you,” he said, hoping the words would eventually make their way into that hard head of hers. “Where you go, I go. I lov—”
Jamison’s screams shot through the wall, the terror in it like nothing he’d ever heard. Rowan scrambled out of bed and over to the bag of clothes he kept in the corner.
“Stay here,” he ordered. “I mean it.”
True to form, Annabeth didn’t listen and dressed. They hurried as fast as they could, but in the process of putting on her pants, she gasped and nearly tumbled over.
“Rowan, look outside.”
He followed her gaze through the balcony door window and let out a curse. Jan McKenzie lay crumpled on the ground, convulsing with a knife impaled in her throat. Splashes of blood squirted onto what looked like a white nightgown, soaking the front completely.
Bursting out onto the balcony, he and Liam nearly collided with one another. Annabeth and Jamison were right behind them, with Jamison talking on her phone.
“Yes, I need an ambulance. The address is... Hello? Hello?” Jamison frantically waved her phone and tried to dial 9-1-1 again, but the call wouldn’t connect. “I can’t get through!”
Quiet.
Across the landscape, an eerie quiet greeted them, with the only noise being the rustling of trees in the wind.
Liam’s eyes scoured the dark. “He’s trying to draw us out of the house.”
“He’s lost his key and can’t figure out how to get in,” Rowan replied. Haven was on total lockdown. No one could go in or out without sounding one of his alarms. “Obviously, the sister is the brains of the family.”
“Well, he knows how to knock out our cell service.” Jamison held up her phone. “I’ve got nothing.”
No service. No network. No Wi-Fi.
The phones were as good as dead.
“Wait! I have service!” Jamison shouted, but just as her excitement came on, it disappeared as the phone signal died again. “It’s going in and out.”
“He’s toying with us.” Rowan understood exactly what the bastard was doing because it was what he would do if he wanted to be vindictive. “Sinclair is edging us with his own jammers. It’s his way of sayingfuck youfor the other day.”
“Grab the walkie-talkies and try to call downstairs to your mom,” he ordered Annabeth. “If it works, tell her not to let anyone outside.”
“You come with me.” Annabeth pulled at his arm. “If they want us out of the house, then standing out here is just as bad as being on the lawn.”
“Not exactly.” Liam pointed to the forest, its dark depths stretching like a wall around the estate. “Look.”
It took a second for his vision to adjust, but once Rowan could make out the figures in white moving through the forest, he let out a curse. “Tell me Abe and Izzy are not staying in the cottage.”
Jamison ran into her room and reemerged with walkie-talkies, handing one to Annabeth and the other to Liam. They had already designated two separate channels. One for family communication and the other for their operation.
“They might not work,” Rowan explained. “But as Sinclair moves around with the jammer, the block will fade enough for someone to hear us.”
Liam hit a button on the walkie-talkie and repeated Izzy’s name into the whirl of static.
“Here,” Izzy said when the distortion broke for a second. “Here, Cohen.”
“Stay inside. One down on the lawn and others in the woods on approach.”
The blinds of the cottage swayed, but before Izzy could acknowledge the order, the static returned.
