“There’s no calvary coming, Emily.” Colby grinned. “I know about your system and how those ESI guys can view it too. As a waitress, you hear things. So, I used this to disarm it. No one cansee you now,” she said, digging Emily’s phone out of her back pocket and waiving it at her.
Several thoughts raced through her mind simultaneously, the most important being that the woman would not have been able to shut down all of the surveillance on the property since “those ESI guys” had planted a few more that even Emily didn’t control.
This meant they could still view what was going on.
Hope flickered through Emily for the first time since waking up in the kennel. And, God…she was so grateful for Holden and his buddies for planting those cameras, she didn’t care about the permission part right now.
And even if they hadn’t, the fact that Colby had disarmed the system would be cause enough for the guys to come.
Yeah, this chick wasn’t thinking straight, for sure.
Thanks to the woman waving her phone, Emily now knew the time. It’d been about an hour since she’d stopped in the road. Deciding to take a chance that she was right about the calvary coming, she planned to do her best to keep Colby talking and hopefully, that would give Holden or Carter or whoever, time to arrive.
“So, are you the one I’ve felt watching me around town?” Emily asked, curious to know if Perez was actually a threat at all.
“Well, yeah. Who else would it be…unless you’ve stolen someone else’s guy, too.”
Emily ignored the taunt. “Do you even have an aunt here?”
“Yes, of course I do. And yes, her leg is actually broken,” she replied, putting Emily’s phone away before pulling out a gun.
Shit. Emily worked hard not to allow the white-hot fear gripping her heart to rule her mind. She needed to stay calm and not panic.
The woman kept talking. “A well-timed trip, using my foot, sent my aunt falling down the escalator at The Galleria Mallwhen she visited me in Houston the day after I first met Holden. I was shooting for her to break her ankle, but a broken leg was even better.”
Emily inwardly gasped. “You deliberately broke your aunt’s leg?”
Colby shrugged. “I had to, in order to have a feasible reason to move to Harland so Holden wouldn’t think I was crazy.”
It took everything inside Emily not to show any emotional reactions to all that Colby had just revealed.
My God, the woman was certifiable. She didn’t see that it had been wrong. If she was willing to do that to a relative, then things didn’t look so good for Emily.
She was screwed.
“Of course, my aunt doesn’t know it was me,” Colby stated, waving the gun around. “I mean, there were several people funneling onto the escalator, which gave me the idea. I made a split-second decision—then boom—down she went.”
As the woman talked, Emily moved to set her back against one of the kennel walls to see if the kennel door leading to the outside was blocked, but it wasn’t. As for a lock on the door at the outside end? She couldn’t tell. It was too dark out.
Not that she had much of a chance slipping through that first partition without the woman getting off a shot. And Emily had no idea if the plexiglass separating them was thick enough to stop a bullet. She definitely didn’t want to find out…but if she had to make a run for it, she would.
“You are causing me to be anot niceperson, Emily.” Colby sighed, waving the gun around again. “But soon this will be behind me, and Holden won’t ever know.”
“That’s not true, Colby,” Holden said, stepping into the room through the door on the woman’s left.
Colby gasped. “Holden? Y-you’re not supposed to be here.” She rubbed her temple. “No. Not yet. Not until I made Emily pay for taking you away from me.”
“That isn’t necessary, Colby,” he said, holding up his hands as he moved closer.
The lifeless Princeton now slept motionless between him and the gun-toting woman.
“It’s over,” he continued. “We know about the car accident. Your aunt told us about the piece of metal in your brain. And that you stopped taking your medication.”
She waved the gun, shaking her head. “It’s not supposed to be like this. Emily has to pay.”
“Emily hasn’t done anything wrong,” he told the woman in his calm, assertive voice. “Put the gun down, Colby.”
She shook her head. “No. Not until Emily pays. She took you from me, so I have to take something from her.”
