DESS STRODE through the door after her mission looking both exhausted and fulfilled. I studied her as she flopped onto the sofa next to where I’d set myself up with my laptop and a plate of pasta I’d already polished off. She’d refused to tell us exactly what the mission was, handling this one completely on her own.
There were no obvious signs of combat on her clothes or skin. Her leggings and form-fitting top—which showed off some of my favorite assets—suggested work that required precise physical movements, but that covered a lot of areas. All I knew was that she looked content now that it was over.
“How was it?” I asked, setting my laptop on the coffee table in front of me and leaning back into the sofa.
Dess kicked off her shoes and grinned at me. “It couldn’t have gone better.”
Seeing her like that brought a warm sensation to my chest. Proud and content were two emotions that didn’t seem to come naturally to Dess, so I treasured every glimpse of them I got. She deserved to take pride and happiness in what she was capable of.
Seeing her stretch out on the cushions as if she owned the house—as if she belonged with us—only exemplified that warmth.
“Has your search brought up anything?” she asked me, and I jerked my mind back to my own mission.
“I did a deep dive into all the Malik family holdings,” I said. “Properties, vehicles, bonds, bank accounts. Everything they own, everything we could delve farther into. Unfortunately, they either don’t have much outside of the house we know about and its insured contents, or they’re very good at keeping whatever else they own off all the records I can access.”
A little of her shine faded. “So there’s nothing?”
I wagged a finger at her. “Have a little faith. I said there isn’t much. I did discover that there’s a safety deposit box at a separate bank from where they handle most of their finances in your grandmother’s—Damien’s mother’s—name.”
“Grandma Ruby,” Dess said, sitting up straighter. She used the name with a familiarity that sent a weird twinge through me. She was suspicious of these people and she knew they’d never accept her, but she’d become a part of their collective all the same. “What do you think is in it?”
I shook my head. “There’s no way to know. But the fact that it’s at a separate bank suggests that it might be something more secret than your typical safety deposit contents. It’s the best lead I turned up.”
“And you’re the best at turning up leads,” Dess said, with a softly sly smile that heated me up in very different ways. She rubbed her mouth, her expression turning pensive. “Getting into a bank would be pretty difficult, but I think the guy who owes me can handle it. Garrison said he’s an expert robber and safe cracker, known for getting at just about anything you could need that’s locked away… I wanted to keep my options open since I didn’t know what you’d find.”
She picked up her phone and dialed the guy up. The conversation didn’t last long—maybe two minutes of exchanging information and setting a time to do it—before she ended the call and gave me a mischievous look.
“Good news,” she said. “We can go tonight. He said a tech expert would be an asset, so it’ll be you, me, and Echo. I hope you’re ready.”
While Dess and I showed up a half-hour early in the still of the night, the man who called himself Echo was already waiting at the meeting spot down the street from the bank building, smoking a cigarette where he stood in the shadows between the beams of two streetlamps.
“Isn’t the first rule of robbery not to leave DNA behind?” I murmured to Dess. I hoped Garrison had done his due diligence on this guy.
She shrugged. “Not our DNA, not our problem. Anyway, what are the chances the police would make anything of ash on the sidewalk a block away from the place. If this goes well, no one will even know the bank was broken into.”
I had to admit she had a point.
The guy was certainly a character. He stood taller than both of us, but his height seemed to be all he had going for him. His arms and legs were skinny enough that I wondered if he’d been through a food shortage—and whether he couldn’t have stolen himself some meals if he needed them so badly. His tortoiseshell framed glasses looked like they were meant to be a fashion statement, but they slid down his nose as he lifted his head to look at us. Even his clothes hung loosely on him.
Should I buy this guy a cheeseburger when we finished here?
Dess nodded to him. “Echo.”
He grinned awkwardly down at her, showing a mouth of nicotine-stained teeth, and tossed his cigarette butt into the gutter. “You’re early.”
“So are you. Are we ready to go?”
He clucked his tongue. “I need to explain first.”
Dess held up her hands. “Of course. We’re ready to listen.”
“Good.” He gave a little twitch of his shoulders that made me wonder if he had a few screws loose in some literal sense as well as being half-starved. “Security guard, cameras, silent burglar alarms at every door, window, and room entrance, control panels at the vault and each secure door. That is this bank’s security. We can’t get into the vault without setting off an alarm, so no money. You can’t steal money from this bank. You can’t.”
I was starting to get a bit annoyed. Did this guy think we were amateurs? “It’s a good thing none of us is looking to steal any money, then, isn’t it?”
Dess nudged me gently with her elbow. “Echo has broken into hundreds of secure buildings. Without setting off any alarms like we did the last time we did a major break and entry. He’s never been caught.”
I shut my mouth at the mention of the near-debacle we’d faced at the genetics storage center, an embarrassed flush crossing my cheeks—I still didn’t know where my instructions had gone wrong to trigger that alarm—and tipped my head to the other guy.
“You’re just looking to get at the safety deposit boxes,” he said. “I know. That is doable. But I highly recommend against taking anything out of them too. We can get to them and get out again, but as soon as you remove contents, you alert your target that they have an enemy.”
That consideration at least made sense. “Got it,” I said.
“Can you walk us through the steps for getting to the boxes?” Dess asked.
Echo started flicking off points on his fingers. “We need to take out the security guard, but you can’t kill him. Fred is a good man. The cameras need to be diverted from the outside. Your tech man can help with that. The motion-detecting alarms are at knee level, so we can avoid those. The control systems are turned off with a key swipe, and the guard has the key card for most rooms. We lift it from him. I can handle the inner doors and the box itself by my own means which I prefer not to share.” He looked between us. “Shall we get started?”
“Absolutely.” I pulled out my tablet. “I may be able to handle the outside cameras from right here.”
It turned out that I needed to walk a little closer for the signal to be strong enough, but then I hacked into the feed quickly enough that this dude had to be at least a little impressed—not that it should matter to me whether he was. Examining the setup, I winced. “I’ll have to ‘adjust’ them one at a time as we pass them. Mess with them all at once, and the guard in the camera room’s bound to notice something.”
Echo shrugged. “Do what you have to do. Just make sure no one sees us.”
He strode ahead of us and went straight to the back door. It opened easily in his grasp, and he glanced back at us with a twinkle in his eyes. “I took care of this one earlier.”
Okay, maybe the guy did know what he was doing.
I continued looping and resetting the feeds as we slipped into the building and made our way through the narrow, darkened halls at the back of the building. Echo pointed to four small panes low down on the wall. “Sensors.”
We stepped over them no problem, swinging our knees high, although I couldn’t see the lasers that we were avoiding. Tension wriggled down my spine. I’d never been the most coordinated of the crew. It would really suck if I somehow broke Echo’s perfect record my first time on a mission with him. I’d never live the infamy down.
“How do we know if we activate a sensor?” I asked, switching the cameras again as we hurried onward.
“We’ll hear sirens,” Echo claimed nonchalantly, continuing forward with quiet footfalls. When we reached a door, he bent next to it with some gestures I couldn’t make out and disabled the lock on that one with a faint click. He closed it behind us after we’d darted past it.
He paused before we turned a corner, and the thump of footsteps reached my ears. “Fred’s doing his patrol. You want to take care of that?” He glanced at Dess with a confidence that made me wonder again what favor she’d done for him to earn this one in return.
Dess slipped around the corner without hesitation. We waited in silence. The footsteps halted with the briefest rustling of a scuffle, and then there was nothing. Whatever Dess had done, it’d taken her only a matter of seconds.
She returned from hiding the unconscious body in less than a minute, brushing her hands together like she did this every day. Which I guessed was almost true, at least in her previous career under the household’s control. She flashed the key card she’d grabbed. “He’s fine,” she reassured Echo. “He’ll wake up in a few hours.”
Echo didn’t bother speaking again as we approached the room that we most needed to enter—the one that held the safety deposit boxes. He stopped us in our tracks and pointed to the invisible sensors that would have sent us straight to prison. Lifting his scrawny legs high, he walked through them without much effort, and I went second this time, trying to move with extra caution.
Part of me expected it not to work when Dess used the guard’s keycard to swipe into the room, but the lights flashed green. She glanced over a shoulder, giving me a look of absolute confidence. We’d made it to the room with her grandmother’s deposit box, just moments from figuring out what lay inside.
I hoped it made all this trouble worthwhile.
Echo stepped into the room first. “Which one?” he asked under his breath.
“476,” I said automatically, reciting the number I’d ingrained in my memory.
He turned to the smallest set of lockboxes on the wall and pulled a tool from his pocket. Apparently he was truly worried about someone stealing his techniques and, I don’t know, making a fortune by showing them off on TikTok or something, because he placed himself very deliberately between us and his hands so I couldn’t see what he was doing with the thing. But he jammed it into the compartment somehow or other, and the next thing I knew, it was popping open.
Echo motioned Dess over to open the drawer behind the door he’d opened. I followed her, pulling out my camera. We might not be able to take the contents with us physically if we wanted to keep our intrusion here a secret, but we could steal away any evidence we found in other ways.
Dess shone the beam of her small flashlight into the open drawer. The first couple pieces of paper at the top of the pile were nothing all that exciting: something to do with stocks or bonds, very official looking and nothing salacious. Dess nudged those aside and froze, staring.
The Polaroid photograph beneath the papers showed a little boy, no older than seven or eight, lying naked on his side. His staring eyes and the bluish pallor of his skin made it clear he was dead.
But it hadn’t been an easy death by any means. His body was mottled with vicious wounds. I’d seen a lot of gore in my life, but nothing quite like this. My stomach heaved.
Who would do something like that? Who would keep a record of it?
Damien Malik’s mother, it appeared. At least as the answer to the second question.
Dess had closed her eyes, her lips pressed tight as if she was resisting the urge to vomit. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d given in to that urge, even though it would have made our exit a lot trickier. She drew in a few shaky breaths and forced her eyes open again.
Together, we sorted through the photos. There were five of them in total, each of a different child. The youngest I’d estimate was four and the oldest maybe ten. All of them were dead; all bore similar wounds that spoke of horrifying torture.
By the end of it, I didn’t want to steal the contents of the box. I wanted to burn it out of existence. And preferably out of my mind too, if that’d been possible.
Dess was still staring at the last photo, which showed a girl who looked to be about six years old. Her blond hair was streaked with her own blood, two of her delicate fingers chopped right off her hand where it’d stiffened against the floor in death. Dess drew her forefinger over one of the wounds on the corpse’s side, a jagged one that gaped open.
“The knife they’d have had to use to do that kind of damage,” she said in a strained voice. “And the way they must have dragged it through her body to make that kind of mark… It would have been excruciatingly painful. I’m not sure I’d do it to my worst enemy, let alone a kid. And they all have cuts like that, more than one. How could anyone be that cruel to someone so helpless?”
A memory flickered up in the back of my mind of a different broken body, and I swallowed thickly. “Some people are just horrible.”
“And why does my grandmother have them?” she added, that additionally horrible layer to this situation sinking in.
Echo glanced at the photos and shuddered. “That is fucking sick,” he muttered, and pulled back toward the door as if he couldn’t stand to even be near the images. I gave him a few points for having some sense of morality.
With my jaw clenched against my nausea, I snapped my own photos of each of the Polaroids. The thought of having those images on my phone made me want to set it on fire too, but we needed to be able to examine them later. There might be clues we didn’t have time to pore over right now… and I’d like to be able to have a bucket at the ready when I did, in case my stomach finally heaved itself up my throat.
None of this made any sense. Yes, we’d had our suspicions that there was something fishy going on with the Maliks, but never in a million years would I have thought it’d involve torturing children.
Of course, the torture and the deaths themselves might not have anything to do with any of them. Maybe these were images from crimes they’d discovered that they were trying to fight back against.
If that were the case, though, I didn’t know why they’d have kept the evidence in a safety deposit box instead of giving it to the police.
As soon as I’d gotten my photos, Dess shoved the box shut. Echo scurried over for just long enough to lock the door that hid it. Then he ushered us out of the room with as much urgency as if it were filling with poisoned air, which I hoped wasn’t actually the case. The mission had gotten noxious enough as it was.
We dodged the same security measures on the way out, Echo moving with ruthless efficiency. As soon as we were back out in the night air, which tasted unbelievably fresh washing into my lungs, he shot a glance at Dess. “I want nothing more to do with this,” he said, and marched away without another word.
I couldn’t say I blamed him.
Dess was silent all the way to the car. When we reached it, she got into the back instead of the front and dropped her head into her hands. I slid in next to her, not sure whether she’d want to be touched. Not sure whether I could manage to touch her in a way that’d be comforting when I was so twisted up inside myself.
“Why did she have those pictures?” she whispered. “Where did they come from? What’s this supposed to mean?”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, my voice sounding distant to my own ears. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“Five of them.” Her head jerked up, her eyes widening with panic. “What if it’s still happening? What if whoever hurt those kids is still doing it?”
I knew the right answer to that question. Resolve hardened inside me, pushing down my queasiness. “Then we’ll stop them,” I said firmly.
Dess’s forehead furrowed. “How can you be so sure?”
“I just know we’ll find a way. I’ll find a way.” I paused, and then let the story spill out, as much of it as I was willing to say. “You know what I’m like—how hyperactive I am. I was even worse as a kid. I got on people’s nerves, and a bunch of kids in the neighborhood bullied the hell out of me for it. The worst of it was—”
The words stuck in my throat despite my intentions. Dess frowned, gripping my hand. “What happened?” she asked softly.
The obvious concern in her tone unlocked my voice. “I had a dog. A mutt, no special breed—fox terrier mix or something. He was the only thing I had back then that didn’t mind how I was. And one day the bullies—they grabbed him out of my yard—I found him in the back alley, all battered and bloody. Dead. It looked like they’d kicked him back and forth until his bones broke, and then they smashed his skull with a rock.”
Fury flared in Dess’s gaze. “That’s more than bullying. They were psychopaths.”
I shrugged. “They were vicious kids. I don’t know how much they even understood what they were doing. Maybe they thought of it like a stuffed animal. Whatever. It doesn’t help anything for me to rage about it now. But when it happened—I was so mad at myself that I hadn’t managed to protect him. That he’d gotten hurt like that because of me. That was when I swore to myself that I’d never be so powerless I couldn’t save the things and people that matter to me again.”
“You don’t even know those kids in the photos,” she pointed out.
“I do know that I’ve seen them,” I insisted. “And I sure as hell care that it doesn’t happen to anyone else. So you’d better believe I’m going to fight until we destroy whoever’s responsible.”
And it wasn’t just the kids. Did Dess even realize that she now topped my list of people who mattered to me?
If uncovering the story behind those children would help her, I’d walk through Hell itself to figure out what happened and how it was connected to the Malik family. I wouldn’t let her meet a similarly horrific fate.
I would protect her, no matter what I had to give to do it.
