Page 66 of Take Her

I frowned but unlocked my phone, and then I chucked it at him, a little harder than I otherwise might.

“Good arm,” he said with a laugh, after catching it, but I couldn’t laugh back with him. I saw him mess with it and put it in his pocket.

“I don’t understand why we’re out here,” I said, rising up on my toes.

He jumped off of his truck, making the lights bounce. “Because you’re standing where we buried them,” he said, walking up.

My jaw fell. “You’re not funny,” I complained at the shadow that was coming for me.

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

I realized he was telling me the truth, and suddenly I was about to have another panic attack, only this time for a very different reason. It felt like the ground was rocking beneath my feet, and I was about to stumble.

“I still don’t understand,” I said, then added, “sir.”

“You wanted in, Business Lia. This is as in as you can get.”

“That’s—that’s crazy!” I said, shaking my head, and when he didn’t respond, asked, “Did you have a good reason?”

He’d stopped exactly where I couldn’t see any of him at all, his face and body cast in complete shadow while he spoke to me. “Did I need one?”

I couldn’t answer him. Not with the way my throat was squeezing up.

“Everyone thinks you always need a reason,” he went on. “Does God have a reason for half the things he does?” He sounded angry now—but not, I belatedly realized, at me.

At the death of his beloved Isabelle.

“You’re not God,” I whispered.

“No. But neither is anyone else, and that’s the point, Lia. Everyone yearns for simplicity, and for the world to make sense. They want to think that everything we do on this planet has meaning,” and he said the word with such contempt. “But sometimes, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes shit just happens. It’s how you deal with it that counts.”

I bit my lips. I couldn’t disagree with him. There’d never been any good reason for even half of the bad things that’d happened to me. And I’d also tried to kill someone once upon a time—it would be very hypocritical of me to judge him when the only reason I wasn’t also a murderer was because my plans had fallen through.

“I don’t make a habit out of cruelty, Lia,” he went on. “Witness me, not wanting to have to punish you. I don’t play mind games or lay traps. But if cruelty were ever required, in any situation—trust that I wouldn’t care about it in the least.”

“And . . . that’s why you brought me here?”

“Yes. For two reasons,” he said, his shadow standing taller as he put his hands into his coat’s pockets. “I want you to know the caliber of man whose lap you’ve crawled into twice.”

I inhaled tightly. Would I trade either of those times back, knowing what I did about him now?

I couldn’t say I would—and I didn’t know what that made me.

“And the second?” I breathed.

“So that the next time you see Freddie Junior, or anyone else at Corvo, you hear my voice in your head.”

“Saying what, sir?”

“That you know where the bodies are buried.”

I gave a soft gasp, as he jerked his head at the truck behind him.

“Get back in the truck,” he commanded, and I ran to do what I was told.

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RHAIM