“Three down!” A woman’s voice. One she couldn’t name, but it was familiar . . . or was it? Sophia couldn’t concentrate, was losing touch.
“You heard me!” the woman barked again. “Three!” Her voice crackled with authority and concern. “I need EMTs. ASAP! . . . Yes, same address! Shit, just hurry!”
“Still unidentified?” Another voice. Male?
“Did you hear me? It’s bad here!” the woman said again. “I’m losing two, possibly all three.”
Sophia closed her eyes, felt a hand on her, heard the gentle commands from a distance. “Stay with me . . . can you hear me? Come on, now, lady, stay with me . . .”
But Sophia, fading, wasn’t paying attention.
Another voice was rising over the din.
Julia was speaking to her.
While the emergency worker tried vainly to capture her attention, Sophia heard her sister’s voice, as clear as the toll of a church bell. “We’re sisters, Sophia. You and I. Twins. It’s a miracle we found each other, and now we have a special, unbreakable bond. We’re together, you and I. Nothing can destroy that. Nothing!”
She didn’t have to say it. Sophia knew. But it was so hard to concentrate, to focus . . . she stopped trying.
“We’ll always have each other,” Julia whispered in a voice that broke with its sincerity, its truth. And as the blackness came for her, Sophia heard her sister’s vow. “Always. We’ll be together. I promise.”
I promise too.
And then Sophia let go.
CHAPTER 53
James opened an eye.
His head hurt.
His shoulder hurt.
His whole damned body hurt.
The room was in semi-darkness, and he saw that he was in the hospital.
“Déjà vu all over again,” he said through cracked lips. He barely recognized his own voice as he blinked and looked around the room to spy a man seated in a chair, wearing an overcoat, holding a hat between his knees. The detective. Of course.
“You got that right,” Rivers said.
“How . . . how long . . . ?” He was trying to piece together how he got here and remembered in bits and pieces his frantic drive following Julia to the cabin—a tiny house, on his own damned property. Then there was the panic, the gunshot that propelled him into the cabin. Sophia was on the floor, and there was so much blood, so damned much blood . . .
“You’ve been here a week.”
No!
“Surgery. And you hit your head, and it wasn’t completely healed from the last time . . . oh, hell, it’s not up to me to fill you in; the doctor will do that.”
“Rebecca?” he asked, his first thoughts of her. She’d been hurt.
“Back in Seattle.”
“But she was shot.”
“Bullet went through and through. Upper arm. Didn’t even nick a bone. Got some bruises and cuts, from the fight she had with Julia Harper, but, all in all, she’s lucky. She’ll be fine.”
He felt relief that she was okay, but a little jab of disappointment that she’d left. And he didn’t know how lucky she was—or he was, for that matter, all things considered. His mouth was dry, and he licked his parched lips. “Sophia?” he asked.
“She’s alive. Behind bars. Looks like she’ll make it. I can’t speak to anything else.”
“Julia?”
“Dead. Died that night. She was the connection to Gus Jardine, who’s still angling for a plea deal. Jennifer Korpi and Harold Sinclaire are innocent. Gus played them both.”
James felt nothing. Even as he listened to Rivers explain what he’d already figured out, that long-lost twins, daughters of his mother’s half-sister’s daughter and an unknown father, had finally found each other and cooked up a scheme to seduce James, marry him, probably kill him, and inherit a fortune. In the process, they’d hired Gus Jardine to kill Charity Spritz because she was close to unmasking them, and Willow Valente because she was getting suspicious that Sophia was really two people; and they’d nearly murdered Phoebe Matrix, the landlady who had been snooping around. Julia was the more deadly of the two, but Sophia was no angel. She would be prosecuted and sent to prison for a long time.
“Not long enough, though,” Rivers admitted. “She’s a piece of work.”
“So it was all about the money,” James said.
“Seems as if. And there’s something else you missed while you were out.”
“Yeah?”
“We found Megan Travers’s remains. Rebecca actually stumbled on her—Julia didn’t even bother burying her—well, maybe she couldn’t, the ground being so hard. They left her body to freeze, buried in the snow. Sophia says the murder was Julia’s doing, with the help of Gus Jardine. He’s claiming innocence, of course. Sophia claimed that Julia had sworn she’d kidnapped Megan and was going to hold her captive in that cabin, but there was a fight, and Megan tried to escape, so she had to be killed. Julia didn’t tell Sophia and then decided to imprison Sophia when she wasn’t going along with the scheme.”
“To fleece me.”
“To marry you, fleece you, and, in my opinion, to ultimately kill you.” Rivers pinned James in his glare. “Both of them.”
James closed his eyes for a second.
He thought of the baby that had never existed and about the fact that he had been foolish enough to have been duped by them all. How his life had changed for a few weeks at the thought of becoming a father.
He thought of Rebecca again, and his heart squeezed.
Rivers stood. “By the way, we’ve still got your gun, but we’ll need to hold onto it as evidence for a while.”
“Keep it,” James said. He wanted no reminders.
The cop’s eyes seemed to glisten as he placed his hat on his head. “You sure?”
“Yeah.” He was sure. “It’s the department’s. Or yours, if you want it.”
Rivers actually cracked a smile. “Thanks.” As he left, Rivers said, “A word of advice, Cahill.”
“Yeah?”
“Lay off the women, okay? They’re just too damned dangerous.”
EPILOGUE
The next February
