JULIUS AND DESS took the lead as we approached the old factory that Blaze had pulled up the address to. The symbol that marked the wall and bookcase in the mansion where Dess had lived—and the back of her scalp—had turned up in a photo on what Blaze called an “urban explorer blog.” From the looks of the worn brick building, no one other than particularly bold and determined explorers had been inside here in a while.
Possibly they’d entered through the same loose window we found. The main door was locked.
As Julius shoved the pane high enough for us to squeeze inside, the stench nearly made me stop in my tracks. Garrison made a gagging sound.
“I told you it used to be a meat factory,” Blaze said, but he pulled a face too as he slipped inside. Dess waved her hand in front of her nose.
Inside, hooks hung from the ceiling where carcasses must have once dangled. It was hard to tell how much of the ruddy marks on them and their chains were rust and how much old blood. The coppery tang to the stink suggested there was plenty of the latter still around. The owners hadn’t done much of a cleanup when they’d cleared out.
I’d smelled blood, and I’d seen houses that had been covered in it, but in the middle of our jobs, it was fresh. The factory smelled of old, rotten blood.
“Whoever left this place like this should be drowned in raw sewage,” Garrison grumbled, pinching his nose as he looked around.
I had to agree. And maybe we could burn the building down for good measure too. No one should be subjected to this ever again.
“Why are we here instead of tracking down that guy from the rally again?” Garrison added, shooting Blaze a baleful glance that the hacker returned.
“Because this is a way better lead than anything my searches for him have turned up.”
A cockroach the size of my thumb scampered across the floor in front of Dess’s feet. She stomped on it faster than I could blink, but the crunch of its shell made me grimace. “Let’s search the place and then get out of here,” she said.
“No argument here,” Blaze piped up.
“Which part of the building was the photo taken in?” Julius asked him.
The hacker spread his hands. “I’m not totally sure. This particular blogger went for flowery descriptions of his exploits over concrete details. The geotags indicate it should be in the back end of the building on the western side. We should check the whole place over to be sure we catch all the evidence that might be useful, though.”
“We’ll find it.” Dess marched ahead with her chin held high, and an unexpected flare of admiration and desire washed through me. My mind flickered briefly back to the amazing fuck the two of us and Julius had shared by the side of the road, of all places.
I generally preferred to have four walls around me if I was going to get down and dirty, but Dess had an effect on me that I couldn’t explain. She was some woman, that was for sure, striding through the wide room all cool and collected like she owned the place.
She skirted the thickest patches of reddish-brown on the floor beneath the hooks. “I wonder what exactly they killed in here.”
“At this rate, it’ll be me next,” Garrison muttered. “Suffocated by the stink.”
“Pigs,” Blaze said. “The blog did mention that. Apparently there are rumors of hauntings in here. According to the guy—if he didn’t just make this up for views—when the factory was operational, an occasional human body was tortured alongside the hanging pigs. I guess that’s one way to cover up murder.”
“Sounds like a myth to me,” Julius remarked, but he eyed the hooks pensively.
Dess marched onward to the door at the far end of the room. “I don’t know why this place would be connected to the household. Let’s grab what we came for and get out of here. I don’t have a great feeling about this.”
Neither did I. Apprehension prickled over me as I moved through the room. I headed to the front hall and unlocked the heavy deadbolt from the inside. “So we can make a quick getaway if we need to,” I told Julius when I saw him watching me.
He nodded in acceptance.
When I returned to the others, they’d split up between the side rooms. Dess was searching a smaller area with a few long metal tables and shelves built into the walls. The shelves were empty.
“It looks like a… filleting room—is that what it’s called?” she asked. “You know, the place where the pigs were skinned and cut up.”
I shrugged. “The butchering room, maybe? I don’t know.”
She peered under the table and nudged the shelves to see if they’d move. “At least they cleaned up a little better in here. The smell isn’t quite so bad.”
I checked a cupboard at the far end of the room and found only a couple of old butcher knives. Dess came up beside me and reached past me to snatch one up with a low whistle. Her arm brushed mine, sparking another rush of heat where our bodies touched.
“I bet you could make good use of these,” she said, and spun the one she’d grabbed in her hand without moving away from me. “Do you think the ghosts would mind if I pilfered one just for our explorations here?”
A tickle of amusement rose in my chest. “I’m sure they’d forgive you.”
Even twirling it casually, I could see the skill in the way she handled the blade. “Guns are more direct, but knives let you stay connected to the act, don’t you think?” she remarked.
I couldn’t restrain a chuckle. “I think I wouldn’t want to go hand-to-hand with you with any kind of weapon, but especially not that.”
She peeked through her eyelashes at me with an abruptly flirty expression. “Oh, I’d go easy on you. It’d be more fun that way.”
She flipped the knife in her hand again and drifted toward the doorway, not even waiting or pushing for a response. No demands. No expectations.
That might be the most miraculous thing about her. Despite the physical intimacy we’d shared twice now and the fact that we were still around each other regularly, Dess didn’t seem to need or even want me to fawn over her, to treat her like more than a colleague. I knew she appreciated our physical connection, but she wasn’t insisting on it becoming anything fraught and romantic.
I knew how unusual her attitude was. Because of that problem, I’d stopped sleeping with women except an occasional one night stands when the itch got strong enough. If I’d hooked up with the same woman more than once, it would inevitably turn into long text chains, hopeful phone calls, and teasing pet names fishing for one in return. No matter how clear I tried to be about only looking for something casual, that never stuck.
Until Dess. She knew how to take the good and not worry about the depth of emotion I couldn’t offer her. Strangely, that fact stirred more actual affection in me than I could remember feeling for anyone… in a very long time.
I wasn’t totally sure what to make of it, but since she wasn’t nudging me for passionate declarations, I didn’t have to make anything of it at all.
I trailed after Dess into the next room. Just as I made it through the doorway, she called out, “Hey, I got something. Is this the wall from the photo?”
I hustled the rest of the way inside, the other guys converging around us. Dess was standing by a sagging metal desk in what appeared to be the factory’s office room. On the wall across from her, up near the ceiling, a spiderweb of cracks stretched through the plaster. They crossed through the deeper groves of a carved symbol that matched the one in the mansion.
“That’s it,” Blaze confirmed, snapping his own picture of it.
“It’s obviously been there for a long time,” Julius said. “We need to figure out why. Spread out—maybe there’s been some kind of record left behind. Even a scrap of torn paper on the floor might give us the link we need.”
Garrison moved to a creaky filing cabinet in the corner. The drawers appeared to be mostly empty, but he fished out the few papers he found inside, glanced at them, and stuffed them into the satchel he’d brought. Dess started paging through the few decrepit binders left on a shelving unit next to it. Julius checked the desk drawers, and Blaze and I knelt down to paw through the stray documents that had fallen to the floor.
They were grimy with the grit that scattered the linoleum, a coating of dust—and an occasional footprint. Those were probably from the “urban explorers” who’d passed through, but they could be more relevant than that. I passed them to Garrison to add to his stash.
“Hold up,” Blaze said suddenly, freezing in his hunched stance next to the desk.
The rest of us stiffened automatically, even Dess. She’d been around us long enough to recognize that if any of us sounded a warning, it should be heeded.
“What’s the matter?” Julius asked.
“There’s a fixture on the ceiling in the corner,” Blaze said without looking directly at it. “I didn’t notice it before because the shelving unit blocked it from my line of sight near the doorway. I don’t know for sure what’s inside it, or if there’s anything at all, and if it’s what I think it is, there’s a strong possibility it isn’t even active—”
“What do you think it is?” Garrison demanded through gritted teeth.
Blaze shot a glower at him. “A camera. If I were going to bet on it, I’d say there at least used to be a security camera in there.”
Dess frowned, but her stance stayed tensed. “Why would anyone still be monitoring security feeds in this place? It’s obviously been abandoned for years.”
“Exactly,” Blaze said. “That’s why I said it probably isn’t even active. If it even is a camera. But still… if it is active and monitored, it’s too late now. We’ve already been caught on it.” He paused. “And if I missed that one at first, it’s possible there are others I missed too.” He muttered a curse at himself.
A deeper chill prickled down my spine. Was that why I hadn’t liked the feeling of this place—some part of me had sensed that we could be being watched? Of course, the stink explained my uneasiness perfectly well on its own.
“They apparently didn’t mind the urban explorers before us,” Garrison pointed out. “No reason to think they’ll have a problem with us. If someone is watching.”
Julius’s expression had turned even more stern than usual. “We shouldn’t take the chance, especially since we don’t know how long we might already have been under surveillance. Grab all the loose material in here that you can quickly, and let’s move out.”
Dess swept the binders into a bag of her own and opened it wider for Julius to shove handfuls of crumpled papers into. Blaze and I scooped everything we could off the floor into a heap that we crammed into Garrison’s satchel. We might have missed a few bits and pieces, but I agreed with Julius that it was best not to tempt fate by thumbing our noses at the risks any longer.
Tramping back into the thicker stink of the front room with the hooks, my stomach lurched despite myself. I hesitated, wondering whether we should squeeze back through the window or walk out the front door.
And then that question didn’t matter anymore.
The front door burst open, and at least a dozen men charged in through it. More leapt through the window we’d opened and smashed others besides. In an instant, we were all but surrounded.
My hand shot to my ever-present weapons, a gun at one hip and my knife at the other. Garrison dropped his satchel and brandished his own pistol. Blaze and Julius whipped out their weapons. Dess waggled the butcher knife she was still carrying, her free hand dipping toward the gun strapped to her calf.
We might have retreated into the rooms we’d just left, but the incoming attackers charged at us without giving us a second to prepare. As they opened fire on us, I leapt toward the cabinets along one wall for some kind of shelter, dragging Dess with me and shooting as I went. Weirdly, the second I had my arm around her, the bullets flying my way seemed to falter. But bangs were still echoing all around me.
My comrades had all dived for whatever other cover they could find. Our attackers kept shooting in their general directions, but they all marched toward the spot where I’d ducked down with Dess next to me.
An icy sense of understanding snapped into place in my head.
They were here for her. They’d kill us to get to her, but they didn’t want her dead. They were aiming to take her back, just like Garrison’s contact had threatened.
Fury unfurled in my chest, searing hot. They’d only capture her over my dead body, and I didn’t intend to give them that.
I fired off a few more shots, and the advancing men fell back to the side where I couldn’t reach them without leaning out of the minor shelter I’d found. My gaze caught Julius’s, and then Blaze’s, and then Garrison’s around the room. A matching rage shone in all their gazes.
All of us were ready to fight to the death to protect this woman. I had no doubt about that. She was one of us now, and we protected our own.
Bullets started rattling the side of the cabinet, some puncturing one or two layers of metal. It wouldn’t be long before they passed right through the side where we were crouched. Dess sucked a breath through her teeth with a hiss, and I knew what I needed to do.
Yanking the cabinet door in front of me like a shield, I lunged out and squeezed the trigger.
