Meet Me In The Dark: (A Dark Suspense) Read Online Free Page A

covered by ancient conifers. A few keystrokes later and I’ve got a pretty good bird’s-eye view of her truck as it turns onto the only road leading in and out of the almost deserted resort.
    I knew back in June she’d run. I knew because she changed the wedding date four times. This was her last chance to settle down. And if she had, I might’ve called that a victory in and of itself and found another way to finish this job.
    But—I let a smile crack—I’m so glad she didn’t. Her black truck winding down the mountain road is the only reminder I need of who and what she really is.
    Sydney Helena Channing. Company kid. Use her, abuse her, and she always comes back for more . If the girl has a motto, that’s it. That’s the girl I’ve come to know and hate as I watched and waited patiently for all the many pieces to fall into place. Tonight is the first move of the endgame. And I’m about to put her motto to the test.
    Sydney is the one who started this for me. Yeah, maybe the senator was the one who set me up—but there’s no way I’d have taken the job on Christmas Eve if a teenage girl wasn’t involved.
    Channing knew that. He fucking knew that.
    I grit my teeth and force myself to push the past away. What’s done is done. The present is coming up on me in a black truck showered in white flakes.
    Almost eight years. That’s how long it took for this moment to arrive.
    I light up a cigarette and roll the window down, letting in the frigid mountain air. The snow is picking up, and good God, could this night be any more perfect to pull this off?
    I glance down at my phone tracker again and my heart rate jacks up a little with anticipation.
    Today I get full access. For the first time in years, full, unobstructed access to her. But that’s not all I’m going to get. No, not by a long shot.
    Her headlights wind down the mountain and a few minutes later there she is. She guns her truck to get through a heaping pile of snow. It’s hiding a tree that spans the whole width of the road.
    No cars in. No cars out.
    The resort is closed and so are the roads. Guests arrived two days ago and aren’t due to leave until after the wedding.
    If there was a wedding. I’d usually feel a little guilty about taking a woman the night before her wedding. But not this woman and not this wedding.
    I’m not the one running. She is.
    The truck doesn’t plow through the snow like it should, like she expects. The hard-packed snow underneath the innocent-looking pile shoots her straight into the air.
    I appreciate the beauty of a two-ton projectile completing a mid-air arc as it flies towards me and then gravity takes over and pulls her back down to earth front-end first. The crunching of metal almost drowns out the hiss of airbags being released, and then the mountain goes quiet. The only sound is the muted music coming from her radio.
    A song I know well. A song she knows well too.
    I smile at that. I smile at the crashed and smoking truck on the snow-covered road. I smile at all of it.
    I open the door of my truck, and that little annoying alert dings through the stillness. I ignore the open-door alert and step out. My steel-toed boots crunch in the snow as I walk towards the tree, and then I place a hand on the frozen bark and hop over it, listening for her moans.
    But what I get instead is swearing. “Fucking shit!”
    Perfect. It would’ve really sucked if the crash had killed her before I got my chance to end this properly.
    I wait as one gloved hand reaches outside of the broken window of the driver’s side door and pulls the handle. The truck is tilted at an angle, so she tumbles out onto the snow in a heap. “Shit,” she groans.
    I watch silently as she gathers herself up onto her knees, and then, after a few wobbly seconds, she rises to her feet. She huffs out a long breath of air and wipes her brow, covering her hand with blood.
    “Fuck.” Her head comes up and searches around and she stops dead as she realizes