I LAY awake on my cot long after I’d supposedly turned in for the night. The men had made a show of turning off all but the dim security light that shone over the front door and heading toward their own bedrooms, but I hadn’t believed their act for a second. They were just dodging any more questions I might have asked.
It might have been two hours or maybe three when my perked ears caught the faintest rustle of movement in the main room. I retrieved my new phone from where I’d stashed it under my pillow tonight and slunk to the door. There, I eased it open the slightest crack.
The four cops had already gathered near the entrance. They weren’t talking, just equipping themselves with a few last weapons—Talon tucked a pistol out of sight by his waist; Blaze checked a holster strapped to his calf and then tugged his pantleg over it. Julius stood closest to the door.
The flip phone was an old model, but it still had basic camera functions. I pressed the button to zoom the screen in as much as it’d allow me, just as Julius reached to tap in the lock code. He didn’t bother to hide it now, since he had no idea I was watching. Most people wouldn’t have been able to pick out the numbers he’d pressed at that angle in the dim light, but my well-honed eyes translated the movements into a sequence I immediately memorized.
It was far from the first code I’d had to stealthily obtain, and I doubted it’d be the last.
As soon as I’d seen that, I let my door ease all the way shut again. No point in risking them noticing the tiny gap when I didn’t need to.
I sat on the floor next to the door with my ear tipped close. There were a few more rustling sounds, and then the soft click of the door shutting behind them. I waited several more minutes to be sure they didn’t unexpectedly come right back. Then I nudged my bedroom door carefully open and slipped out into the main room.
There was no sign of any of them. I checked each of their bedrooms to be sure, getting whiffs of their varying scents that brought a tendril of heat into my belly alongside my eager anticipation.
Tonight, I was going to get some real answers.
I ducked back into my room to stuff my remaining cash and the phone into my pockets. I’d need both out there in the big bad world sooner or later, depending on what I ran into on the way.
My reaching hands hesitated over my tote bag. The stuffed tiger’s worn head poked out the top.
Part of me wanted to snatch it up, but that was ridiculous. I couldn’t bring it along on a mission. Even if I’d had a bag that wouldn’t get in the way, there’d still be a small chance of it throwing me off balance or snagging in a tight space.
We go into every mission with just the bare bones, Noelle used to say. That way we can stay focused on what we really need and what’s really important.
What the hell did I want a toy for anyway? I might be back. And if I wasn’t, oh well.
But for some silly reason, a weird pang shot through my chest as I stood up and walked away from it.
I didn’t like going out unarmed, but the sharpest thing I could find in the kitchen was a dinner knife. Did the guys just never use anything sharper with their food or had they hidden them all after I’d arrived? I frowned at it, and then my gaze slid toward the sofa.
There was a different kind of weapon here.
With a wry smile, I marched over to Talon’s knitting bag and dug out a spare needle. I could wield that more effective than the blunt knife. He could get a little satisfaction from knowing I’d taken his comments to heart even if the theft annoyed him.
Tucking the needle into my pocket, where a few inches of it still protruded, I strode over to the front door and typed in the code. The bolt thudded over in an instant. Another smile sprang to my face, my triumph washing away any lingering uneasiness about what I was leaving behind.
The short hall outside held only an elevator, no entrance to a stairway that I could see. That seemed like one hell of a fire hazard, but I wasn’t here to complain about how up to code the building was. I pressed the button to summon the elevator.
It whirred to a halt, and the doors parted. When I stepped in, my first time riding it without a blindfold, I noted the rows of buttons on the righthand side. Fourteen floors. I’d estimated well.
But none of them were lit up, and the little screen over the door that usually would have shown the current floor was blank. Interesting. Another mystery I didn’t have time to investigate now.
There were a couple of underground levels for a parking garage, but I didn’t know how to find the guys’ secret passage that most likely involved a subway tunnel. The main entrance should work just fine. I hit the button for the lobby.
As the elevator descended, the carpeted floor under my feet thrummed. I shifted my weight, staying limber and on guard.
There were an awful lot of things I didn’t know in my current situation, but that was okay. I’d get through it. I had an address, and I knew at least a few of the people I expected to see there. I’d completed plenty of assignments with no more information than that.
There was nothing all that impressive about the lobby the elevator let me out into. The paisley-print carpet looked clean, the glass doors that led out past the mailboxes to the street unsmudged, but it didn’t hold the same sense of wealth that the household’s mansion did. It actually reminded me more of my own rooms in that house: simple and practical but well-made and maintained. Somehow that brought back the pang in my gut.
I was going to avenge all those lives lost. Tonight might be my first step to really achieving that vengeance.
As I pushed past the outer door, the night air washed over me, refreshingly cool but tinged with the familiar reek of gasoline and tar you couldn’t escape down here on the street. No wonder the guys liked their rooftop deck.
I hurried away from the apartment building, scanning the darkened road. It was past midnight now, only a few cars rumbling by on the street. I’d have looked for a quiet side-street where I could have stolen one, but I wasn’t familiar with the street I was heading to or what part of the city it was in. I wasn’t sure where I was going.
I headed toward a busier street up ahead. Just as I came around the corner, I caught sight of a cab with its available light on. At my wave, it pulled up by the curb, and I hopped in, calculating what would be a safe distance from my actual location.
“55 Freeton Avenue,” I said, figuring that’d drop me a couple of blocks from 102. The cabbie nodded and gunned the engine. I settled into my seat, glad to see he didn’t appear to be much for small talk.
Even with barely any traffic, it took about thirty minutes to reach my destination: a grim street of dingy office buildings and warehouses not all that far from the mall where I’d met Scarlett. When the driver stopped outside number 55, a medical supply outlet store that was obviously closed, he gave me a skeptical glance over his shoulder. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
I smiled brightly at him. “This is it.” Then I handed him enough cash to cover twice the amount on the meter. He didn’t complain after that.
I watched him drive off and then set off toward 102, crossing the street and sticking close to the fronts of the buildings. Half of the streetlamps were broken or burned out, which made keeping to the shadows easier. When I reached the right address, I slowed, studying the building.
It was a little smaller than the others, squat and windowless other than a small pane of glass next to the door. The grout between the bricks was crumbling. No sign hung over the door to suggest what purpose the place served.
I slunk over and tested the front door handle tentatively, careful to stay silent. It resisted my hand, locked. That was fine. The men hadn’t looked as if they were going somewhere they expected to be met with open arms.
Had they even gotten here already, or had I managed to beat them to it? Maybe they’d made another stop on the way.
For all I knew, they weren’t coming here tonight at all and this was a target for later. It might be even better if I could poke around uninterrupted.
Slipping around to the back of the building, I found another regular door as well as a garage-style one, which suggested this was some kind of shipping warehouse. Both were closed, a tiny window in between them pasted over with faded newspaper. Whatever the place was used for, it didn’t look as if it was used very much.
What could it have to do with the household? Or was it really part of some other case?
I worried my lower lip under my teeth for a moment and then tried the back door. To my surprise, that handle turned in my grasp.
Just as I nudged the door open, the muffled bangs of a pistol with a silencer reached my ears.
My pulse jumped. Someone was here, all right, and they weren’t happy. Were the cops in there shooting at someone or having criminals shoot at them?
The murderers I’d been searching for might be right here in front of me.
Along with my body’s innate apprehension about walking into danger, a thrill of adrenaline coursed through my veins. I stepped into the short, dark hall on the other side of the door, my gaze fixing on the streaks of light showing around a corner just up ahead. Grunts, moans, and more gunfire reached my ears from the room beyond my view.
I’d recognize those noises anywhere. Men were dying over there.
I darted toward the sounds with a growing sense of protectiveness. If the bastards who’d mowed down everyone in the household were trying to slaughter my men now too, I’d make them doubly regret everything they’d done. Hopefully I could get my hands on a better weapon than Talon’s knitting needle first.
When I peeked around the bend, all I could make out were a couple of shipping crates at this end of what appeared to be a much larger room, illuminated by thin yellow light. The lids of the crates had been popped off haphazardly, them and a few crumpled beer cans lay on the floor near the wall. Holding my breath, I dashed behind the nearest crate, dodging the debris, and peered around it to get my first real look at the scene.
It was nothing like I’d anticipated.
Blood splattered every wall—every possible surface in the main warehouse room. Bodies slumped on the floor and against a table heaped with bulging baggies—some kind of drug operation, from the looks of it. Figures moved through the darker areas around the edges of the room.
One of the bodies wasn’t a corpse quite yet. The fallen man groped for a gun that’d fallen a few feet from his hand, and another bullet slammed into his skull, making him crumple. Blood was already flowing from a wound across his wrist, staining the cement floor red.
Why would you shoot someone in the wrist first and not the head to begin with?
My gaze caught on one of the figures circling the room, and a jolt of recognition shot through me. I’d have known the graceful, deadly way Talon moved anywhere. His honed brutality had drawn my attention from the first moment I’d met him, and I’d only become more familiar with it in our various sorts of sparring.
Before my eyes, he lunged behind a delivery truck parked at the side of the room and hauled out a guy who’d been crouched there. A curved knife gleamed in his other hand. Without hesitation, Talon plunged the blade into the man’s chest, jerking it upward in a zigzag motion that sent even more blood spraying across the side of the truck.
My eyes stayed glued to the slash as he tossed the guy aside to crumple on the floor. That jagged line across the throat and upper chest… I’d never seen anyone make a kill like that. But I had seen a matching wound.
My stomach lurched. I yanked my gaze away to scan the other bodies with sharper attention.
It wasn’t just that corpse, or the one who’d taken a shot to his wrist that’d opened his artery. I spotted two other men who’d gotten Talon’s knife treatment, and another who’d been shot across the forearm in just the right way. Others were sprawled in positions that hid their wounds, but from the amount of blood all over this place, letting off a meaty stench into the stuffy air, every kill had been carried out by a meticulous plan to maximize the gore.
It was brutal.
It was utter chaos, perfectly constructed to achieve that effect.
And I’d stumbled on a scene so very much like it just days ago.
One last guy made a dash toward the other end of the room, and Blaze stepped into view, the jaundiced light turning his pale red hair orange. He raised his gun and shot the wannabe escapee in the face.
A satisfied smile crossed his lips. He’d pulled off the kill as if he did it every day before breakfast, just for fun.
Who the hell were these men who’d dragged me into their lives? What kind of cops would take down a drug operation like this? Shouldn’t they… shouldn’t they only shoot people in self-defense? Where were the handcuffs and the announcements of people’s rights? Didn’t they want to, like, question any of them or something?
No. This was all very, very wrong.
The groans and the gunshots faded from my ears. I’d arrived at the tail end of the massacre, and it appeared to be finished. The silence that descended over the room turned the thump of my heartbeat in my ears almost deafening.
Garrison ambled out of the shadows, bending to check the bodies and pull wallets, phones, and weapons from their pockets. I’d seen the results of his meticulousness in the past too. He glanced over his shoulder, and Julius strode out to where the lights were brighter, just tucking his gun into its holster under his arm.
“I thought they’d put up more of a fight,” Garrison remarked, tossing another phone into the plastic sack he was carrying.
“Drug dealers are sitting ducks most of the time,” Julius said, just as casually. He swiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. Despite all the blood around me, the four men had managed to stay impressively clean. I noted only a few flecks on Julius’s shirt and one splash on Talon’s, which he was already peeling off.
He tossed it into Garrison’s bag. “Are we done here?”
“Just got to take a few more pictures,” Blaze announced. He was patrolling the room in his usual energetic way, now snapping photos with his phone.
A sickening certainty coiled around my stomach. These men weren’t any kind of cops. They were outright killers.
And this wasn’t the first kill scene of theirs I’d witnessed.
At the household—those zigzag cuts, the clipped arteries, the spectacle of blood… I’d never seen it before, and I hadn’t again until right now.
There was no way it could be a coincidence. Julius and his gang had slaughtered everyone in the household and then tracked me down and taken me… as some kind of prize? To toy with me for fun while they decided what to do with me next?
That part didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t wrap my head around why they’d have brought me into their lives the way they had. They would have just shot or stabbed me at the scene of my car accident.
But who the hell knew what went through their heads? I’d had no idea who these guys were, so I couldn’t go by my original impressions.
I’d come here hoping I’d get a clue about who’d destroyed the household, and I’d gotten a hell of a lot more than that, so much that I didn’t have any idea what to think. My head was spinning.
I drew back behind the crate. It was all right. I couldn’t take them on here, with no real weapons and no preparation—but I knew where they lived. I knew how they worked. I could sneak back there and lie in wait for when they returned…
But the unexpected revelation had set me more off-balance than I’d realized. As I backed toward the hall, preparing to make my escape, my heel smacked one of the beer cans I’d forgotten to watch out for.
It rattled across the floor into the wall, and footsteps pounded toward me in an instant. I bolted for the hallway, bracing for a shot—
The footsteps stopped. “Dess?”
I should have kept running. But the sound of Julius’s commanding voice was so familiar, so normal, that I couldn’t help spinning around as I reached the hall. Tucking myself around the corner so my body was shielded, I stared at him, wondering what he could possibly plan on saying to me.
He was holding his gun, but he’d lowered it to his side. Talon, coming up beside him, had dropped his weapon too. They both looked utterly shocked—even… horrified? A lot more upset than they’d been about the actual horror they’d just carried out.
I wanted to vomit. My lips clamped shut against the urge.
“How did you—” Julius cut himself off with a shake of his head. He glanced behind him and winced as he turned back to me. “Let me explain. I know it looks bad, but—”
Looks bad? An incredulous guffaw tumbled out of me. “You killed them,” I snapped. “You killed Anna.”
And then, because my brain had finally started working again, I whipped around and pelted toward the back door.
Julius hollered my name. Shoes scraped against the concrete floor behind me. But I rammed the back door open and sprinted down the alley, rounding the corner onto the sidewalk before I even heard the squeak of the door opening again behind me.
I kept running on and on, spikes of adrenaline propelling me forward. Nausea twisted my gut.
I’d quite literally slept with the enemy. I’d been living with them. I’d sworn to avenge the household, and instead, I’d shared my body with one of the men who killed the people there. I’d befriended another.
I ran harder, and all those roaring emotions built to an apex, flooding over in a trickle of tears. Noelle’s voice rose up from long ago in my childhood training sessions. Crying is a weakness. Crying is a weakness.
The chiding statement echoed in my mind over and over, but it didn’t stop the tears from spilling fast and violently down my cheeks.
I knew I was far enough away that the men shouldn’t be able to track me now, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop running—not until I found myself nearing a residential section of town where porchlights beamed through the night.
The last thing I needed was a suburban mother calling the real cops on me, so I slowed to a brisk walk, still breathing heavily. I dropped my arms, and my left wrist brushed against my pocket. I stopped and looked down at the bulge.
The phone.
Noelle had always been the voice of reason in my life. If the men I’d thought were on the side of the law were actually my enemies… then maybe the person who’d reached out to me was my friend after all.
I forced myself to place one foot in front of the other as I strode onward and pulled the phone from my pocket. Bringing up the message from last time, I examined it for several minutes.
What did I have to lose? Julius and the others knew that I’d seen them. No way was I getting back into their apartment undetected. All I had was a shrinking ball of cash, the clothes on my back, and this phone some mysterious benefactor had left for me.
I spotted a small shed to the side of one of the houses, and I veered in that direction, walking as if I belonged on the property. I shook the shed’s handle, and when it didn’t open, I slammed my brace down on it.
It snapped with a crack. One glance over my shoulder was all I allowed before I ducked inside and closed the shed door behind me.
A lawnmower and some gardening tools sat inside, but it was mostly empty. Plenty of room to hunker down and gather myself. It felt safer than walking the empty streets.
I dragged in a breath and typed out a short reply on the phone—an adequate one. The question I should have asked to begin with, knowing anything offered through Noelle’s contacts was more trustworthy than a bunch of strangers who’d all but kidnapped me.
How do I know it’s you?
I hit send before I could second-guess my decision, and then I waited. My mind ran rampant, the events of the past several days flickering past me. How had I been stupid enough to trust the very people I’d meant to hunt down?
The incoming text arrived with a vibration of the phone. My gaze jerked to the screen.
Meet me at the Volcano Aquarium tomorrow morning at 7am.
I stared at the words, and they clicked in my mind. Anyone from around here would know that there were no volcanos or aquariums nearby. It shouldn’t have made sense, but to me and Noelle, it did.
A sewer tunnel—hot as the inside of a volcano, I’d grumbled more than once—ran parallel to the duck pond in the center of the town. It was an emergency meetup point, one set aside only to be used in the direst circumstances.
Only Noelle and I knew about it. Only the two of us knew the quirky name I’d given it as a preteen—The Volcano Aquarium, named after the heat, the location, and the smell of dead, rotting fish.
It was Noelle. I knew it was. We’d never had to use it before. But if there’d ever been dire circumstances, it was now.
