When She Left: A Thriller, page 1
PRAISE FOR E.A. AYMAR
When She Left
“When She Left keeps you guessing with breakneck pacing and unexpected twists, but what truly stands out are the characters: quirky and flawed but endearing as hell. But be warned: in an E.A. Aymar novel, no character is safe. Ever.”
—Alma Katsu, award-winning author of The Hunger and Red Widow
“E.A. Aymar is an exceptional talent. You’ll be riveted by his uniquely realized characters, immersed in his high-intensity plot, and blown away by the poetry in his voice. At once a harrowing story of power, escape, and raw courage and a heartbreaking tale of family, love, and necessity, When She Left reveals the soul-crushing desperation of facing mortal danger while attempting to undo the past. Superb, thought provoking, and propulsive and, in the end, touchingly redemptive.”
—Hank Phillippi Ryan, USA Today bestselling author of The House Guest
“E.A. Aymar steps on the gas within the very first pages of When She Left and doesn’t let up throughout this wild ride of a thriller. Relentlessly paced, with characters that are complicated and feel real enough to talk to, this book will keep you up well into the night as it speeds and twists toward its surprising conclusion. Read it!”
—Alison Gaylin, Edgar Award–winning author
“What a churning cauldron of intrigue and human complication. Love, loathing, and lies abound. A real page-turner. Aymar bats a thousand with When She Left! This one will stick with you.”
—Tracy Clark, author of the Cass Raines and Detective Harriet Foster series and winner of the 2020 and 2022 Sue Grafton Memorial Award
“An action-packed story with well-drawn characters that will make you laugh, gasp, and keep turning the pages.”
—Cate Holahan, USA Today bestselling author of The Darkness of Others
“When She Left is perfect for fans of Elmore Leonard. It’s darkly funny and packed full of richly drawn characters and gasp-out-loud twists, and the writing is gorgeous. Get your copy now.”
—Jess Lourey, Edgar-nominated author of The Taken Ones
“Cliff-hangers and plot twists abound in this intriguing page-turner. From a nail-biter of an opening scene, E.A. Aymar deftly propels the unconventional cast along an adrenaline-jolting narrative to a gratifying finale. This is crime fiction at its finest, a seamless fusion of character study with mystery/thriller. Don’t miss it!”
—Wendy Corsi Staub, New York Times bestselling author of Windfall
“Aymar is at the top of his game in this bold, high-stakes thriller where no character is safe. It’s excellently written, thought provoking, intense, and gripping, with enough shocking twists and turns to keep you fully immersed until its stunning end. Don’t miss this one!”
—Lisa Regan, USA Today bestselling author
No Home for Killers
“This is a bold, relentless, breathtaking thriller from start to finish. E.A. Aymar writes about complex, damaged characters with incredible grace, anchoring the heart of this book in family conflict and trauma. Taut and twisty, with intense pacing and perfect plotting, No Home for Killers is a remarkable read. I absolutely loved it.”
—Hilary Davidson, bestselling author of Her Last Breath
“Tough, haunting, full of surprises and vivid characters, No Home for Killers is hard boiled and thoughtful, riven with pain and spiked with humor, and never less than a pedal-to-the-floor thriller. A gripping read.”
—Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award–winning author of the Unsub series
“I had so much fun reading No Home for Killers. It’s an action-packed thriller filled with characters you root for and bad guys you love seeing go down. I couldn’t stop turning the pages. One of the best books I’ve read this year!”
—Matthew Farrell, bestselling author of We Have Your Daughter
“E.A. Aymar’s No Home for Killers is a breathtakingly paced thriller, a character-driven journey of rage and justice that will leave you pondering the subtleties between good and evil and right and wrong. Violent yet sensitive, Aymar’s command of the noir thriller is on full display here, in what is absolutely his best book yet.”
—Jennifer Hillier, USA Today bestselling author of Things We Do in the Dark and Little Secrets
“Aymar skillfully blurs the line between justice and vengeance in a gripping tale of crime and its consequences. His masterfully drawn characters are at times both relatable and brutal as the tension builds through each shocking turn until the final twist that will haunt you long after the book is closed.”
—Isabella Maldonado, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Cipher
“This book is a delight from start to finish—by turns funny, poignant, and action packed. Twists and turns to keep us guessing the whole way. E.A. Aymar is a master storyteller, delivering fascinating characters in a realistic setting. Make a home on your shelves for this one!”
—Eliza Nellums, author of The Bone Cay and All That’s Bright and Gone
OTHER BOOKS BY E.A. AYMAR
No Home for Killers
The Unrepentant
They’re Gone (written as E.A. Barres)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2024 by Ed Aymar
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781662504532 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662504549 (digital)
Cover design by Faceout Studio, Amanda Hudson
Cover image: © Dusica Paripovic / ArcAngel; © Grant Faint / Getty; © The Good Brigade / Getty
To John William Hart
What a gift you were.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE MELISSA
CHAPTER TWO LUCKY
CHAPTER THREE RUBY
CHAPTER FOUR JAKE
CHAPTER FIVE LUCKY
CHAPTER SIX MELISSA
CHAPTER SEVEN JAKE
CHAPTER EIGHT LUCKY
CHAPTER NINE RUBY
CHAPTER TEN MELISSA
CHAPTER ELEVEN LUCKY
CHAPTER TWELVE JAKE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN MELISSA
CHAPTER FOURTEEN LUCKY
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIFTEEN MELISSA
CHAPTER SIXTEEN LUCKY
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN RUBY
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN LUCKY
CHAPTER NINETEEN RUBY
CHAPTER TWENTY LUCKY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE MELISSA
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO LUCKY
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE JAKE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR LUCKY
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE MELISSA
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX RUBY
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN LUCKY
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT MELISSA
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE LUCKY
CHAPTER THIRTY JAKE
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE MELISSA
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO LUCKY
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE JAKE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR LUCKY
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE MELISSA
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX LUCKY
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN JAKE
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT LUCKY
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE JAKE
CHAPTER FORTY MELISSA
EPILOGUE: FOUR YEARS LATER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE
And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.
Genesis 19:17
CHAPTER ONE
MELISSA
Melissa Cruz realized she was trapped the moment those two men sauntered into the twenty-four-hour diner.
“They found us,” she whispered to Jake Smith. Hope had finally begun to seem like a possibility, and now it was over, the abrupt ending of an interrupted prayer.
Her fists tightened helplessly in her lap. Breath was hard to come by.
Jake sat across from her, his back to the door, oblivious. He didn’t look up from his camera as he spoke. “Who what?”
Melissa brought her hand to her forehead to hide her face, hoped the movement wasn’t obvious. “The people hunting us,” she said, low and intense. It was difficult for her to say the whole sentence, fear nearly turning it into a question. Hunting us?
Jake swung around.
“Jake!” Melissa whispered desperately.
He ignored her, kept looking at the two men who had entered the diner. Stared as they sat at a booth near the door.
“Turn around!”
Melissa’s high hiss broke through, and Jake turned. The bruises coloring the left side of his face, a faded map, were already less apparent than they had been yesterday. But Melissa still noticed them.
And, despite her fear, they still caused her heart to ache—love and guilt wrestling inside her like a pair of angels tumbling to earth.
Melissa wanted to believe him, wanted to let that wave of relief wash over her. “How do you know?”
He shrugged, unconcerned. “They don’t seem the type. Polos, slacks. One of them has a lanyard. Probably here for some kind of convention. Came to get food after a party.”
Men always had this sense of certainty, of working in absolutes, the world defined by their perspective. Nothing’s wrong. We’re fine. I thought so. Sometimes Melissa found this confidence comforting, even if she knew it was misplaced.
She peered again at the two men. “Or they’re trying not to look suspicious.”
Jake grinned, that easy smile that always softened everything inside her. “Honestly, if the Winterses made custom polos to find us at midnight in some random diner, then they deserve to catch us.”
He lifted his camera and snapped a pair of pictures of the half-eaten food on their table, the soft apple pie and finished dinner and empty coffee cup in front of him, the cooling bowl of tomato soup and nibbled grilled cheese sandwich in front of her.
He reached across the table with his free hand.
“No one’s after us,” Jake insisted.
Her hand was cold in his. Melissa had accidentally left her jacket in the car, and the diner wasn’t warm. She could feel the chill coming in from outside, from the thin glass window alongside their booth. “No one just leaves them. Especially the way we did.”
Melissa had heard stories about men and women who’d tried to leave the Winters crime family, how they’d been caught. The parts of them that had been found.
“And you need to be more careful,” Melissa went on. She disliked the bossiness in her voice but couldn’t help it. “You can’t just stare at someone when I tell you they might be watching us.”
“I do that?”
“You just did!”
“Must be a guy thing,” Jake mused.
“I think it’s a you thing.”
Jake looked like he was going to say something else but caught himself. He returned to his pie.
Melissa watched him, her mind split with worry about their current situation and self-exasperation at how brusque she was being with him.
“The Winterses have every cop in the area looking into them,” Jake said, between bites. “The last thing anyone in that family can do is follow us. It was the perfect time to leave.”
“There’s never a perfect time to run off with another man.”
Jake nibbled from the piece of pie and abruptly pushed the bowl next to a plate of chicken-fried steak he’d turned into crumbs. “That’s a really good point,” he admitted.
Chris Winters was going to find them, and Melissa knew, intimately, the impact of her ex-boyfriend’s anger. She could almost feel it—a rope binding her to him; the two of them forever connected.
“Do you regret it?” he asked.
“I don’t,” she said honestly. “I just wish I wasn’t so scared.”
Talking with Jake helped. Reminded Melissa why she was running off with him.
“And I don’t feel comfortable in public,” she continued. “I feel like I should be looking everywhere, and my shoulders are tight, and I keep having to pee. Although maybe that’s all the water—”
“No one at some diner at midnight is going to remember us,” Jake interrupted. “All they’ll be able to say is we were some random white guy and a hot Spanish chick.”
“Panamanian,” Melissa corrected him.
“See?” That easy grin. “I’m saying!”
And again, Melissa remembered how that grin used to relax her, its offhand assurance.
It didn’t work now.
When she’d imagined running off with Jake, love had been their North Star, rightfully guiding every decision, their devoted accomplice. And she still did love Jake. Melissa looked at him, and it was like sunrise in her chest, but she hadn’t realized how much her fear would weigh.
Melissa wondered where the waitress was. She hadn’t seen her since their food was brought out.
The only customers were her and Jake, a middle-aged couple in the back, and the two men quietly talking in the booth near the entrance. And it was likely to stay that way. This remote diner, somewhere outside Frederick, Maryland, didn’t seem like it would draw a crowd, much less on a cold late-December night. That was why she and Jake had picked it, the first time they’d left his old Honda Accord and the safety of its enclosure, the opportunity to speed away from danger.
“Those men in the front,” Melissa said slowly, thinking as she was speaking, “with the lanyards. No one helped them.”
“What do you mean?”
“They just walked in and sat down. And they haven’t ordered anything. They haven’t even looked for the waitress.”
Jake was back to examining his camera. “People do that.”
“No one comes to a diner at midnight just to sit and talk without ordering anything. No one . . .”
A door opened with a sudden whisk, like a ghost was gliding by. The waitress emerged from the kitchen, headed over to the two men in front.
Melissa let out a shaky breath. “Maybe I do need to chill.”
“Maybe.” Jake snapped another quick picture of her, frowned at the display on his digital camera.
Melissa had grown used to the constant presence of his camera. Just don’t pay attention to it, Jake had told her when they’d first met, and that seemed impossible at first—impossible to ignore the way he needed everything documented and memorialized, and then intensely scrutinized. Often reshot. Jake’s hopeless annoyance when he didn’t get the exact picture he wanted, his contagious cheerfulness when he did.
“You really think we’re going to be okay?” Melissa couldn’t help the skepticism in her voice.
“It’s not like we stole money from them or anything,” he offered. “And Chris took his anger out on me already.” Jake touched his cheek, his fingers grazing the bruises.
“I know.” Her voice small and childlike, far younger than her twenty-three years.
Melissa had seen violence before, horrible images that tugged at her like lecherous hands. She carried them with her, memories like a small frantic germ, determined to infect. But she felt dizzy when she thought about Chris’s fists slamming into Jake’s cheek, that weird, happy light that almost seemed to illuminate Chris’s face as he knelt over Jake’s body. The anguish—and the anger—she’d felt for Jake. She remembered the wine bottle in her hand. The thick glass as she stood behind Chris and raised it high.
“Melissa?”
She was bombarded by memories, unbalanced between two different worlds, not fully present in either. Vertigo climbed her body like hungry spiders. “I’ll be back.”
Melissa slid out of the booth and headed to the restroom. Pushed open the door for the women’s room, made her way to the sink. She pressed her palms down on the cold counter, closed her eyes, and breathed slowly, deeply, the kind of hypnotic breathing the counselor she’d once briefly seen had recommended.
Deep from the diaphragm. Hold it for five seconds.
Exhale slowly, like a quiet stream in a wooded area. Imagine sunlight through shadows.
Three slow breaths.
Melissa opened her eyes, walked into one of the stalls, covered the seat with toilet paper, slid her pants and underwear to her knees. Unhappily leaned forward, elbows pressed into her thighs.
She pulled her phone out of her purse and checked her messages. She’d texted her friend Carla Acosta hours ago, asking if she’d heard anything from Chris or the Winterses, and Carla kept telling her no:
Ellos tienen otras cosas preocupado.
But Melissa didn’t buy that Chris or the Winterses would be focused on anything else.
She thought about contacting Carla again but decided against it, knew it couldn’t calm her fear and uncertainty.
Or that other thing, the tiny feeling darting inside her like a pesky gnat.
Guilt.
Melissa felt sorry for Chris, despite how viciously he’d hurt Jake. A four-year relationship was a lot to leave, even if that last year had been spent arguing, so often on opposite sides that a breakup seemed inevitable.
At least, it had to her.
She’d been able to hide her guilt from herself, smother it in justification and Xanax. Those mornings when she’d leave Jake’s apartment, the summer sun emerging hotly, like snarling honesty forcing her to confront what she’d done with Jake the night before: that was when Melissa had told herself that she was going to end it soon. That this wasn’t the kind of thing she’d ever do when she was eventually married.
