He stomped over and squatted in front of me. “You’re going for a sail, sweetheart.”
Oh no. No, no. “Please don’t do this, Cole,” I begged.
“Oh, come on, Stella.” He spat my name like it was distasteful to him. “You’ve been trying to kill yourself for years. I’m just helping you out. Something I should have done a long time ago.”
“Why?”
“You want to ruin your own life, fine,” he snarled. “But I’m not gonna let you ruin mine.”
“I’m not gonna ruin your life,” I pleaded. “I wouldn’t have come here if I wanted to ruin your life. I was grateful for the opportunity to work with you again, to heal our past wounds—”
He howled with laughter, turning the hand that didn’t clutch the gun into a talking mouth. “Soooo grateful for the opportunity to heal our past wounds, were you?” he mocked me. “You were so desperate, you would have fucked a donkey for five grand. That’s why I invited you here.”
I squinted at him. “What?”
“Don’t even try to pretend with me, you manipulative cunt. You knew I’d see that interview you gave about coming clean. Big coincidence it happened to be right after I finally stopped giving you handouts, huh? You tried to call my bluff, and you lost.”
I stared at him in shock. He’d hardly been giving me handouts. It was true the stream of residual payments from Faster, on which he’d added me as an executive producer, had turned to a trickle and then finally run dry shortly before I gave that interview, but I was only trying to drum up a new flow of revenue with a book deal, not to sell our secrets—my secrets—to the press.
But he had all the power in the situation, and I reasoned arguing with him on a literal sinking ship was not going to get me what I wanted. No, flattery was what I needed. “I told you I wasn’t really going to write the memoir,” I implored. “It was a stupid interview. You’re right. I was desperate—”
“So desperate you tried to get my own son to blackmail me—”
I was genuinely baffled. “Jackson?”
A wave crashed into the side of the boat, washing over my legs and sending Cole scrabbling for support. “I’m not stupid, Stella. You give that interview, and then he reaches out after years of hardly speaking to me to ask what really happened to Barbie?”
“Iris,” I corrected him.
“Whatever. She was a whore who was using both of us, and you should be thanking me for getting rid of her.”
Fury flooded my brain. I wanted to tear into his flesh with my nails and hear him cry out in pain; it took every ounce of self-control to restrain my voice. “You said she died of an overdose,” I managed.
He laughed. “And she did. Only she wasn’t the one who administered the dose.”
God damn him. “You killed her.”
“She left me no choice.”
“But why?” I cried.
“She’d taped our session a few days before—”
“What do you mean?”
His eyes lit up in the gloom with the realization I didn’t know. “Sleep sex. She’d filmed it to blackmail me.”
Oh, Iris. She’d gone ahead and done it—gone back to him—after I’d told her not to. But had she told him about us? “Blackmail you for what?” I asked, my heart in my throat.
“To keep quiet about your affair, I assume.”
“Is that what she said?”
“She never listed her demands. She was as surprised to see me as I was her.” He braced himself against the bulkhead as the boat keeled. “She was confrontational, angry about this rabbit’s foot key chain that belonged to a friend of hers she’d found in my things—”
An image of the rainbow rabbit’s foot that disappeared from his drawer flashed before my eyes. Iris had acted so strange about it. “What does that have to do with anything?”
We stared each other down as the ship pitched and tossed, sloshing water all around us. “The friend died of an overdose,” he growled.
“So why did you have her rabbit’s foot?” I asked through gritted teeth.
He adjusted his grip on the gun. “She was one of the sleeping girls, before Iris. I found it under the bed after she died.”
“Did she die at our house?” I demanded, blinking seawater from my eyes.
He didn’t answer, but the dark mask of his face told me everything I needed to know. My body burned with hate. “Had Iris known before, that her friend was one of your girls?”
He shook his head. “But she put it together. Accused me of killing her, then rushed at me and fell into the coffee table and knocked herself out.”
I knew I was in no position to challenge him, but his story was bullshit. She didn’t just fall and knock herself out. He’d pushed her or hit her, or both. “What did you do to her?”
“She was rushing me,” he snapped. “I was defending myself.”
“She weighed a hundred and ten pounds.” I glared at him. “Then what happened?”
“She was unconscious.” He clung to the railing on the wall with his free hand to steady himself as the boat seesawed. “There was blood, and her neck was all twisted. I couldn’t have her dying like that, but I’d been shooting Bloodhound—you saw Bloodhound, right? The prostitutes whose murders were made to look like overdoses? So I thought quick and finished her off with the heroin before her heart stopped beating, then staged the car wreck to cover up the other injuries.” He actually sounded proud of himself. “I did it to defend us. Our lives, our careers. Yours as well as mine.”
The air left my lungs as though I’d been punched in the gut. I could see the scene in the bedroom like it was before me now: the shattered heavy glass coffee table, the blood, the syringe. He’d sworn she was shooting up when he found her and had fought him when he tried to stop her, falling into the table as she
