IN THE MOVIES I’d watched that involved the police, they pulled up at crime scenes, flashed their badges, and strutted all over the place. But those were uniformed cops, not undercover detectives. It made sense that the men who’d essentially taken me prisoner would operate differently to avoid blowing their cover.
We circled the block in their car, with me wedged in the back between Talon, who didn’t appear to care, and Garrison, who I caught flashes of irritation from, though he mostly kept quiet. They seemed to think it was better that I wasn’t squashed too closely against Blaze after my demonstration of my feelings on personal space this morning.
It’d been an involuntary reaction. I was probably lucky none of them had shot me in the heat of the moment. I hadn’t wanted to hurt him, not really; I’d only wanted to make sure he never touched me like that, with all those wheedling compliments and admiring glances, ever again. That he never stirred up the memories of a time when I hadn’t been able to enforce those boundaries, and everything… everything had been horrible.
A ghost of that old pain trailed over my thighs, and I willed it away. It’d been years. It shouldn’t have still affected me. Or maybe it made sense that it did, when it was the only real experience I had with getting close to a man when I hadn’t been focused on how to kill him or someone around him.
Still, I could tell my reaction this morning had been an error from a strategic perspective. Blaze had been by far the friendliest out of the four men who were holding me captive. He was probably my best shot of getting the information I needed and getting away from them when the time came—if I hadn’t just blown that shot.
He was sitting in the front passenger seat now, monitoring video footage of nearby streets on his laptop. From the little bit he’d said out loud to the others, I’d gathered he’d been able to hack into the city’s street cams.
Whatever he saw on them, he seemed satisfied with it. “We’re good to go,” he announced without looking back. He hadn’t met my eyes since breakfast, as if he thought I might get just as pissed off about his gaze being on me as his hands.
Julius parked a couple of blocks away. We all got out onto the sidewalk, Garrison scooting after Talon and me rather than going out the door on his side, I guessed to keep me consistently surrounded. Lovely.
The man in charge had already given us the drill before we’d arrived. We were going to walk past the mansion’s front gate and around the corner to check out one of the side walls. Any more of a circuit around the place, and we’d look suspicious. We were all wearing sunglasses and baseball caps in a variety of styles to obscure our faces, not that anyone could see much of me while I had four men who were all several inches taller than me around me.
With the June sunlight searing down over us, the dark glasses only cut down the glare, helping my ability to make out details rather than hindering my vision. As we reached the edge of the household’s property, I scanned the stone wall, the vines that clung to it here and there, and the street around us.
It looked like a totally different place from the shadowy estate I’d fled across two nights ago, but my stomach clenched as we came up beside it anyway. Images from the massacre flickered through my mind, and I closed my eyes. Julius turned to look at me when I slowed, and I almost shook myself out of it, but caught myself just in time. I was playing the part of a grieving friend. He’d be more suspicious if I didn’t seem affected.
“Sorry,” I said quietly. “It’s just hard, being back here, remembering what happened…”
“If she’s not up to the job—” Garrison started.
Julius cut him off with a sharp tone. “We’re here now.” He nodded to me. “If you see anything that sticks out to you, say the word. If not, we’re no worse off than when we started.”
I had a feeling he’d still be annoyed that they’d taken the risk of hanging out around a crime scene they were trying to keep on the down low if I didn’t come up with anything. I needed to show them I was a valuable asset so they’d share enough with me that I could use them too.
I got my first break as we came up on the gate. My gaze caught on a small, dark shape on the pole just outside the entrance, tucked against the fixture for the electric wires.
“There’s a camera there,” I said, tipping my head as subtly as I could. “I never noticed that before. It’s on city property, so it couldn’t have been put there by Anna’s family, but it wouldn’t make any sense for the city to want a view of their front drive. Maybe the murderers put it there.”
“Why would they do that?” Julius asked.
I braced myself for a snide expression, but his face showed genuine curiosity. Perfect. I shrugged. “I don’t know. If it was important to them to kill everyone in the house, maybe they’d want to monitor the entrance to be sure no one got away?” I shot another surreptitious glance at the camera as we walked right past the pole. “It looks new, too. No bird crap on it like there is on the post around it.”
Julius checked it out for as long as he could before we’d ambled by, equally careful with the angle of his head. “You have a point there. Good work. Keep going.”
I couldn’t tell whether they’d been aware of the cameras already or I’d pointed out something new, but the praise sounded as genuine as his earlier curiosity. Garrison was studying me from the corner of his eyes a little more assessingly, as if he was realizing he might have underestimated me. Yeah, I’d call that good work.
The perps had been good with their work too, but then, I’d already known that. After we rounded the corner, I almost missed the subtle telltale signs. When my attention snagged on them as I studied the wall, I peered closer for a few beats and then dropped down as if I needed to tighten the shoelace on my sneakers.
“What are you doing?” Garrison asked, but without quite as much snark as before. He couldn’t help being curious too.
I suppressed a smile. “I just wanted to give you a chance to look too without it being too obvious why we’re stopping. This works, right? I think this might be the spot where the murderers got onto the property. You can see a couple of places where the vine’s pulled off just a little—that happens sometimes when I’m climbing over, but I was on the other side last night. And there’s kind of a scrape mark on one of the stones near the top, just a small one.”
“What makes you think that had anything to do with the murderers?” Blaze asked from behind me. I couldn’t see his face, but he didn’t sound as tense as I’d have expected speaking to me.
I straightened up, and we started walking again. “I could be wrong. It just seems pretty high up for it to have been someone simply bumping into it. And the vines would have grown back unless they were disturbed pretty recently. I don’t think people were climbing into the property very often.”
The scuff had also shown the faintest hint of the tread of a shoe, but showing that much perceptiveness might make these guys suspicious rather than impressed.
And they did seem to be impressed. A trace of a smile had touched Julius’s lips. Talon let out a low chuckle. Garrison kept his mouth shut, which at this point I counted as a win. Blaze was tapping something into his phone behind me at a pace that sounded eager.
“You’ve got keen eyes,” Julius said. “Where’d you pick up observational skills like that?”
Okay, so maybe he was impressed and suspicious. An answer leapt to my tongue. “I guess all the physical training I did taught me to think on my feet. It’s a lot more than just strength and fitness, the instructors always liked to say. You have to anticipate your opponents’ moves in advance as much as you can.” That wasn’t even a lie.
I hesitated as if embarrassed to admit the rest, which was totally made-up. “And, you know, living with my dad and then my boyfriend… I had to stay on my toes, keep alert to their moods and any clues about what they were getting up to so I knew how to avoid trouble as much as possible. Not that it helped me all that much in the long run.” I ducked my head and rubbed my elbow.
The tapping behind me stopped momentarily. “You got away from them in the end,” Blaze said softly, and it hit me that I’d been forgiven. At least by him. The knowledge sent a weird flutter through my chest.
Julius didn’t argue with my story. I couldn’t help pressing my advantage. I’d coughed up some intel for them—now they owed me.
“So,” I said as we meandered on along the long stretch of the side wall, “do you have any idea why this happened? I mean, some of the people Anna lived with could be jerks, but—I can’t imagine—for someone to kill them all like that… She never hurt anybody.”
Garrison made a scoffing sound, his usual attitude returning. “I don’t think you knew your ‘friend’ all that well.”
“What do you mean?”
“All those people definitely weren’t a family,” he said in an almost gleeful tone, as if he enjoyed the possibility that he’d horrify me with his revelation. “And they were mixed up in all kinds of shady shit. Human trafficking would be at the top of the list.”
“Garrison,” Julius said with a warning in his voice, and the younger guy had the decency to look chagrinned.
I was too busy reeling from his comment to appreciate seeing him chided. Human trafficking? The household? In all the work I’d done for them and with my trainers, I’d never seen any hint of that kind of activity.
“That’s ridiculous,” I couldn’t help saying. It must have been stories made up by our enemies, the ones we’d been working so hard to protect ourselves against. Maybe even the same pricks who’d ended up slaughtering everyone else in the house.
Garrison just grunted. I’d cut off the information supply instead of opening it up. I had to turn the momentum of the conversation around quick.
“If you think that, you must have found out a bunch about them and who they supposedly worked with or whatever, right?” I said. They’d said someone was sniffing around about missing items from the house. “You must have an idea already of who did it.”
“Not something we can share with a bystander,” Julius said, his tone firm. “That sort of information is classified.”
They definitely had suspects. “I’m hardly just a bystander anymore,” I pointed out. “I might not have known much about what went on around Anna, but I talked with her pretty often. Sometimes she mentioned people who’d come around. If you give me a description or a—”
“What part of ‘it’s not happening’ do you not understand?” Garrison snapped.
I was pretty sure he was just sore about the fact that Julius had laid down the law. “I’m trying to help.”
“And we’ll let you know if you can offer more assistance than you already have,” Julius insisted.
We were getting close to the corner of the property. “This is the spot,” Talon remarked in his cool, deep voice, the first time he’d spoken since we’d left the car. Maybe even since we’d gotten into it. I was way too aware of his muscular frame just inches from my own body. His voice wasn’t as commanding as Julius’s, but it drew my attention all the same. My mind kept tripping back to the startling hunger he’d stirred low in my belly when he’d leaned over me in the chair.
“The spot for what?” I asked, refusing to let his presence distract me.
As we kept walking, our pace slowing just a little, Julius fished a plastic bag out of the leather messenger bag he was carrying. “I know you were in a tough spot, but you have plenty of cash. I don’t think you need the jewelry you grabbed. My suggestion is that you leave it here so that there’s no chance of the murderers tracking you down. If they are looking for those items, you’re better off without them.”
My hackles rose. “You went through my things again?”
“Only to give them back to you.” He handed the plastic bag to me. “I don’t see any cameras right here. No one but us would know how the jewelry ended up in the yard. It’s your decision, but I recommend you take my advice. It’ll also mean we have no evidence we could bring against you in court.”
He’d promised they wouldn’t arrest me for robbery—but of course I couldn’t trust a promise from cops, especially ones who played as fast and loose with the law as this bunch did.
My fingers tightened around the plastic. But the necklaces inside meant nothing to me. I didn’t even know who they all belonged to. I did still have the cash, currently tucked into my pockets.
And that point about no evidence against me was pretty compelling.
We’d almost reached the corner. I met Julius’s eyes, and could see plainly in them that I had to do this if I ever hoped to get them on my side.
Let this gesture buy me a sliver of trust.
I lowered my hand and swung my arm upward at just the right angle to send the bag sailing over the wall without the gesture being too obvious. Because maybe there were cameras even I hadn’t spotted. My loot thumped to the ground on the other side.
“There,” I said, picking up my stride and forcing the men to walk a little faster around me. “Now let’s catch the assholes who killed my friend.”
