Where Evil Waits by Kate Brady

he was indeed, sleeping.
    Okay. Kara forced herself to take a couple of deep breaths. It was just as well that he get some sleep. It was time to face off with Varón.

CHAPTER
13
     
    S ASHA BROUGHT M EGAN HOME; he was glowing on the inside. So close now.
    He propped Megan’s body in the corner of her stall, snapped a couple of pictures of her to send to Kara later, then fell onto the cot in the tack room. He woke in what seemed like a blink of the eye, patted the floor for his iPhone, and lit the screen: 7:32. Less than three hours of sleep, but that was okay. The hardest work was done. Now it was just a matter of burying Megan before she got hard to handle, before she went stiff or started crawling with insects or smelling.
    He rolled off the mattress and opened the door, letting the sun pour in, then crossed the lobby of the stable to use the bathroom. When he came out he looked around. It never got old, seeing what he’d built: The arena, equipped with jumps and clean-raked footing that even Willis Montgomery would have admired, all of it climate-controlled. A restroom off the lobby area, tiled and decorated like one found in a nice restaurant, except that it also had a shower. A tack room the size of a motel suite, which, in fact, Sasha had taken over as his bedroom ever since the structure was completed.
    And eight stalls, each with rough-hewn pine for the walls and the finest flooring money could buy: a deep layer of gravel covered by a thick stall skin, topped off with eight inches of coarse sawdust for the horses’ bedding.
    Of course, there were no horses in these stalls. There was something much better.
    He closed his eyes, imagining the look on Kara’s face when he brought her here. How many nights had he lulled himself to sleep thinking about retribution? How many years had he been locked in prison with nothing but dreams of showing the mighty Kara Montgomery just what he was capable of? Of fucking her and punishing her and killing her for all that she’d cost him? And yet, ironically, it was during those same years that he had discovered something much better than a good fuck to give her.
    He’d discovered the truth and it had set him free.
    It would kill Kara.
    He showered, rummaged through a box in the tack room for a granola bar to keep him going until breakfast, and switched on a TV in the corner. He didn’t expect anyone to know that Megan Kessler was missing yet; it had only been a few hours. But he liked following the news about Penny Wolff and Louie Guil—
    Assistant District Attorney Kara Chandler, presumed dead overnight in a tragic boat explosion…
    Sasha spun toward the television. He blinked, dread clutching at his throat.
    This wasn’t possible. He listened harder, trying to replay the words already passed and at the same time make sense of the new ones coming from the reporter’s mouth. Explosion. Missing. Boat. Presumed dead.
    But Kara couldn’t be dead. He wasn’t finished with her. When Kara Chandler died, it would be by Sasha’s hand.He had the weapon. He had the practice. He’d set everything up. He would reveal the truth, watch it knock the light from Kara’s eyes, then choke the life from her lungs with the barbed wire garrote he’d fashioned in her honor. It would be his retribution. His glory.
    The story ended. Panic took hold and he grabbed the remote, frantically clicking through channels. He found a repeat of the same story on another station, watched it, then found a third.
    No way.
No fucking way.
She couldn’t have done this to him. Bitch.
    Beads of perspiration popped up from his flesh. He paced, the television newscasters summarily unconcerned that he wanted to hear more,
needed
to hear more. On every channel, they moved on—showed a few shots of authorities picking up pieces of the boat and dragging the river, a photo of Kara and her kid, and gave a brief biography of who she was. And then, as if there were anything else in the world that mattered, they moved