The hard leather steering wheel creaked under my grip as I stared out the windshield, taking in Snow’s Mortuary as dawn crept over the horizon.
My gaze tracked right, the small footpath scoring the earth around the side of the building. The one that led back to the cabin I’d only just left. As if she was about to run out and stop me. Beg me to come back. I scoffed at my own pathetic longing, jamming the ignition button before I could sink any lower.
Thoughts roiled in my head. Nothing, nobody ever made me so slow and uncertain. Emily Snow was not the sort of person I should be coveting. I needed to be acquiring more assets right now, not liabilities.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but even then I couldn’t escape her. Vivid images flashed over the backs of my eyelids, a projected silent film of every forbidden touch. I saw her eyes, wide and open. Pleading. Ready to surrender to me, to give me everything.
I opened my eyes and threw the car into reverse, roaring into the silent cabin as I hit the gas. Fucking enraged.
Was my little lamb any better than an illicit drug? My body ached for her as if in withdrawal.
Drugs were everywhere when I was growing up. In my mom’s nightstand, in her purse, in her veins. In the pockets of most of the other teenagers in our neighborhood.
I vowed never to touch them and I never had. I couldn’t have something else control me like that.
But Emily wasn’t just flowing through my veins, she’d seeped into every cell and fiber of my body. She’d broken down my defenses and permeated every thought, tainting it with her unique essence.
Her grip on me was tighter than any drug I could’ve shot into my veins, and just as lethal.
Driving away from the mortuary, it didn’t stop. If anything, the sensation worsened. I felt the call, the pull of her drawing me back.
Sweat beaded at my temples.
Air pushed hard out of my lungs.
I never should’ve come back here.
I focused on the brightly lit road ahead, pushing the Aston to its limits, letting the whine of the engine and the force of its speed drown out my incessant thought patterns. Always looping back to her.
Nixon would have some choice words seeing me right now. The worse fucking part was that he’d be right.
Flashing lights in my rearview broke the spiraling chain looping thought. I glanced up into the rearview, spotting a car right on my tail.
Either they’d appeared out of nowhere, or I wasn’t paying enough attention. I was betting on the latter.
It was a rarity, having company on this road, especially at this hour.
There was virtually nothing between the mortuary and my estate aside from a few dirt side roads leading to all but abandoned mansions owned by the wealthy and powerful who had no time to use them.
I accelerated, and the other car did the same, gaining on me until he was right on my ass. I hit the gas again but not before he clipped the back of my Aston.
Motherfucker.
Adrenaline flooded my veins as I fishtailed, regaining control.
This early in the morning?
I wasn’t in the fucking mood.
The car fell into line behind me again, accelerating.
Bastard.
I put my seatbelt on, having to work twice as hard to keep control of the vehicle at high speed with one hand. It clicked into place and I pulled the belt tight over my chest, bracing with two hands on the wheel as I hit the brake.
The car’s slick engineering brought it to an absolute halt in seconds, the tires screeching against the pavement for an instant before the inevitable crash.
My body lurched forward and I was ready with my blade as the airbag deployed, stabbing it dead before it could crush my nose.
The ear splitting ring of breaking glass and twisting metal assaulted my ears as the car collided with mine.
The Aston whipped across the road, coming to a tire-whining stop just off the side of the road.
“Fucking jackass,” I muttered, my chest aching from where the seatbelt bit into me. I unfastened, leaning over to take the Glock from the glove compartment before pushing out of the ruined car.
The rear was caved in beyond recognition and I sniffed, tasting blood in the back of my throat as I set my sights on the mangled late model Honda with its hazard lights flashing in the middle of the road.
My upper lip curled.
Whoever it was picked the wrong damn day.
The driver hunched over the wheel, immobile. I wrestled the door open, cutting my palms on the jagged metal. It groaned before giving, coming entirely off its hinges. I tossed it to the pavement and wrenched the man from his seat onto the broken glass covered pavement.
He moaned, coughing as he rolled from his back to his side. I staggered back a step, recognizing his face.
Blood ran down into his eyes from a gnarly gash in his forehead and it looked like his right leg was broken. Yep, the white pressing through his denim jeans couldn’t be anything else but bone.
I grabbed the back of his head, forcing his head up into the light to be sure.
I never bothered with names but I never forgot a face. This little fucker worked for me.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put a bullet between your eyes,” I snarled, releasing him. He groaned, dropping his head. And then he swung. It was a weak attempt at a punch, but with as much blood as it looked like he’d lost, I’d give him applause for trying, even if he missed.
The sound of a bullet blasted through the air, momentarily stopping everything around it, the air, my breath, my body, before I grasped for his arm, pinning it to the ground.
He cried out.
I slammed his arm to the ground again, knocking the weapon free and kicking it across the road and into the ditch.
“Who sent you?” I demanded.
He glared up at me through one squinted eye, the other still battling the river of blood running down his face, and losing.
He ground his teeth together, determined not to talk.
“Talk, you little shit.” I sneered, kicking his injured leg.
He screamed, reaching for it, the sound at odds with the golden glow of sunrise and the birdsong in the trees.
This had Nixon written all over it.
“The only way you have even the smallest chance of surviving the next five minutes is by opening that useless fucking mouth and telling me exactly what I want to hear.
I bent to a crouch, tugging my gun from my waistband to press it into the notch under his jaw.
He went from screaming to utter silence in the blink of an eye, his breaths hissing out between his lips. “What exactly was it you were trying to do?”
“I-I was at the mortuary,” he stuttered. “I followed you.”
“On Nixon’s orders,” I said, not a question, but the dead man nodded into the barrel of my gun anyway, confirming it. “When did you speak to him?”
Nix was still in lock up, but that didn’t mean the traitor couldn’t make calls. I thought I’d weeded out all the potential conspirators from my ranks, but this fucker still managed to slip through.
How many others were still out there?
My blood cooled, coming to terms with everything I’d allowed to happen because I wasn’t paying attention.
“Y-yesterday. He wanted me to follow you. Said you liked going to the m-m-mortuary. He wanted me to—”
“Enough.”
I felt something small tug in my chest for the boy. He was barely into his twenties. Barely a man. Easy to manipulate.
“Sir,” he tried. “I–”
“Stop talking.”
His blue eyes quivered. I recently learned a hard lesson about trust. If I couldn’t trust Nixon, everybody was out. If this boy existed, there had to be others.
“Who else is there? Who else did Nix have working with him?”
“N—nobody else,” he blurted and heat poured down my back.
“I don’t like having to repeat myself,” I warned.
“Nobody! Nobody. I swear. It’s just me. He told me it was just me. He was going to make me his right-hand man when he…” His words died in his throat feeling the gun press into his skin.
I breathed in deeply, forcing it out hard.
“Well, right-hand man, I hope it was worth it.”
I moved the gun, tapping it against his breastplate through his blood-soaked shirt.
He was gone quick, fluid flooding his lungs, taking his dying breaths through choked moans. I watched the light leave his eyes, until the dull sheen of a lost soul clouded his irises.
I left his corpse on the road as I went back to my car, but before I could settle back into the seat, the rear left axle snapped and the tire rolled away down the road.
I chuckled darkly, taking a calming breath as I turned my face to the sky.
What kind of sick, twisted, luck was it that after dragging myself away from her, this piece of shit would see me returning to the mortuary, corpse and cash in hand.
Muttering a string of curses, I dug around near the pedals, finding my phone. The broken screen sliced into the tip of my pinkie finger and I growled as I jammed the screen, blood marring the dial pad.
“Boss?”
“I need a cleanup crew three miles out to the east on the main road. Two vehicles to clear. And bring me my Lincoln. Tarp the back for me, would you?”
“You got it, boss.”
I hung up, tossing my phone back into the car as I leaned against the frame to wait.
A minute later, another car came down the road, not from the direction I expected. My throat tightened, seeing the boxy dark shape, picturing Emily behind the wheel. But the vehicle slowed and the driver’s side window rolled down to reveal a bearded gawker with a lit cigarette between his fingers.
“Shit, man, you all right?”
I stalked over to his car and he recoiled back in his seat but didn’t speed off. I drew my gun and lazily rested it against the base of the window frame, drawing a gasp from his mouth.
“You saw nothing,” I said, plucking the cigarette from his fingers to put between my lips. I took a long drag, shuddering at the release. Much as a good fag after a good fuck. A good little hit of nicotine after a kill was just enough to take the edge off. I blew the smoke in his face, flicking the cigarette over his lap, making him pat out the still-hot ashes.
“I saw nothing,” he repeated, his face paling, eyes jerking between me and the road, begging for me to release him.
I reached in, patting him on the shoulder. “Good man. Off you go.”
Watching his taillights vanish over the hill to the west, I couldn’t help thinking Emily would appreciate my show of mercy. The old Ruarc would have added the gawker’s corpse to the pile for burning, just to be safe.
But there would be enough bloodshed in the days to come. If nothing else, this little incident proved it was time to finally put an end to it. I’d been holding back. Drawing it out.
No more.
It was time for Nixon to meet his maker.
