Sophia’s voice, hissing at him, dragged his attention from the past. “I can hear movement from upstairs.”
Monster grunted and sat up. “What?”
“I think our friend upstairs is awake. What are we going to do?”
He shook off the last residual cobwebs of sleep and rubbed his hand across his face. “How long have I been out?”
“About eight hours. Your shoulder is looking better.”
He nodded. He felt better, though guilt filled him at the idea he’d been sleeping all this time when Lily had been in danger. If something awful had happened to her in that time, he’d never forgive himself. “Are you sure you know where Rodriguez will be keeping Lily?” he asked Sophia.
She nodded. “It’s always the same place for his new pets, as he likes to call them. It’s a place out in the desert where he knows they can’t escape.”
A creak of floorboards came from upstairs, and they both glanced toward the ceiling.
Monster got to his feet, testing out his limbs. He needed to know he was stable enough to be able to fight if needed.
“Here,” Sophia said, pushing a glass of water toward him. The color was cloudy, and he frowned in suspicion. “It’s just a combination of salts and vitamins, to help rehydrate you, and some pain medication for your shoulder. It will help, I promise.”
He didn’t have much choice but to trust her. After all, she could have killed him, or simply let him die, any time over the past day, but she hadn’t. And part of him still felt like he knew this woman. Even though years had passed since they’d last spoken, she didn’t feel like a stranger to him.
Monster drank the concoction down in a couple of large gulps, and set down the glass on the counter.
More movement came from upstairs.
Sophia snatched up a set of keys, which he assumed Rodriguez’s man must have left, and then tugged a light-weight, zip-up jacket from the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “Here, put this on. We need to go!”
The floorboard creaked again, and Monster took the jacket from her and carefully pushed his injured arm into one sleeve, tugging it up to cover the bandage over his shoulder. He hooked it over his back and slid his other arm in, before pulling the two sides together and zipping the jacket up.
He knew Sophia wanted to go, but he wasn’t about to run from some guy who probably had a raging hangover. The idea of leaving someone behind who would immediately either take after them, or else contact Rodriguez and tell him they were coming, just didn’t sit right with him. He wasn’t a coward, and he wasn’t afraid of death—either his own, or someone else’s at his hands.
Footsteps fell heavy on the treads of the staircase, and Monster knew he had to make a decision. He didn’t have long. His gaze flicked to the countertop, where a block of knives sat.
“We can’t leave him here,” he said. “He’ll inform Rodriguez.”
“No, he won’t. He’s just one of Rodriguez’s monkeys. He’s barely got the brains to think for himself.”
“Monkeys can be trained. I don’t like leaving loose ends.”
She caught his hand to tug him toward the front door, but he pulled free and made for the counter instead.
Her eyes flicked toward the staircase, wide and desperate. She opened her mouth as though to call a warning, but then shut it again. A thread of confusion ran through him. Why did she want to protect this man?
“Let’s head out the back,” she hissed. “He won’t see us then.”
Monster nodded, but didn’t move. He couldn’t just walk out and leave this guy to hunt them down. Loose ends weren’t working so well for him at the moment.
He jerked his chin toward the door. “Go! I’m right behind you.”
“No, what are you doing?”
“Just go!”
The footsteps had reached the bottom of the stairs. They were slow and sluggish, most likely the result of the half a bottle of liquor he’d consumed before crashing. Monster wasn’t fully fit himself, but he would use the other man’s hangover to his advantage.
Moving as quickly as he could, he snatched a knife from the block—a slender, sharp blade used for filleting fish, and stepped back behind the door. The footsteps had reached the bottom of the stairs now. Monster held his breath, wondering if the man would make his way to the front door, which could spell disaster if he had to take after him on a public street with a knife in his hand, but then the footsteps turned toward the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” Sophia whispered, her blue eyes wide.
He didn’t speak, but jerked his chin toward the back door again.
She looked between the door to the hallway and the rear exit, appearing torn between the two, but then she made a small sound—somewhere between a sigh and a sob—and turned toward the back door. She bent and picked up her purse which had been left on the floor nearby.
As she unlocked and opened the door, the man’s voice sounded, so close. “Sophia? That you?”
The interior door opened and the man stepped through. His attention was drawn by the open back door, from which Sophia had just fled, and he didn’t notice Monster in the shadows.
Monster stepped up behind him and caught him from behind by the jaw. Moving quickly, so the other man barely got the chance to cry out, he yanked the man’s head back, exposing his throat, and slid the sharp edge of the knife across his skin.
The man gave a gurgled cry and his hands lifted to clutch at his throat. A sheet of blood cascaded down the front of his body, and Monster stepped back to avoid the deluge. The man’s hands fluttered at the wound in his throat, and he managed to turn to see Monster standing behind him, before his legs gave way and he crumpled to the floor. Blood left his body in pulsing spurts, spreading across the linoleum, and creating a pool beneath him. Monster stood and waited for the light to go out of his eyes and for the spurts to slow down to a dribble, signifying the heart stopping.
Monster wished he felt something, some kind of remorse or even disgust for the man dead in front of him. But he felt nothing. Perhaps his father’s training had worked after all. He was the cold, heartless creature his father had always wanted him to be. All he could think about was the fact this man had played a part in Rodriguez taking Lily from him, and for that alone, Monster was glad he was dead.
He had blood on his hands in a quite literal way.
Though he didn’t want to wait around, he stepped toward the sink. He turned on the faucet, and rinsed any trace of blood from his hands and beneath his fingernails, and then wiped any fingerprints from the knife handle. His DNA was probably all over this place from the treatment of his gunshot wound, but he couldn’t do anything about that now. He also preferred not to leave bodies lying around, but considering what they’d left back at the private airfield, he guessed that ship had already sailed.
Giving the body a wide berth, purely so he didn’t get any blood on his shoes, rather than it being anything squeamish, he strode to the door Sophia had exited from. He stepped out into a small, paved yard, and then rounded the house to the front. Sophia sat behind the wheel of the vehicle he’d been brought to the house in. She was peering toward the house anxiously, the engine already running. Dawn was just starting to bloom in the sky, threading the blue with strands of orange, pink, and yellow. The early hour meant there was no one around to see them leaving, and no one called the alarm.
She leaned back in her seat as he opened the passenger door and slid into the car.
“What the hell were you doing?” she demanded, then she raised both hands, her lips pressed together as she shook her head. “Actually, no. Don’t even tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“I was only doing what had to be done.”
“I hope you haven’t just landed us in a big pile of shit.”
“It’s better this way. He’d only have come after us, and alerted Rodriguez to the fact we were coming for Lily.”
Sophia pulled the car out into the street, her foot on the accelerator as she spoke
. “You don’t know that. He had no way of knowing you’d go to Rodriguez. He might just have thought you’d escaped.”
“Then he’d have still alerted Rodriguez. It’s better this way, trust me.”
Though she was staring at the road, he didn’t miss the way she pressed her lips together and gave her head a slight shake of disapproval.
“I don’t understand why you’d want to protect someone like that,” he said. “He helped to kill three of my men, and he played a part in kidnapping two women. You should be happy to see him dead.”
“I’m a healer—that’s my job. I don’t like death or violence in any form, no matter who it’s against. I want to help you, but I can’t encourage you to hurt someone else, even if the someone else was an asshole. “
He shook his head. “Sometimes violence has to happen, even if we don’t want it to. We can have it forced on us, and it shapes the people we become.”
She took her eyes off the road for a moment and glanced over at him. “Did your father hit you?”
He grimaced. “Do you even need to ask?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”
“The hitting wasn’t the worst of it. I could have lived with that. It was the other things he did, the ways he controlled me. Those are the things that are harder to come to terms with.”
She nodded. “Even though I was only in your home for a short while, I knew exactly what kind of man he was. I guess I was just hoping you’d turned out differently.”
Her words cut him. “You don’t think I’m any different from my father?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I guess I’d just been hoping all these years that you’d escaped this life. That you’d ended up happily married in a regular job, but I suppose those were the silly dreams of a young girl. People don’t escape this life until they’re dead.”
“I’d hoped for the same thing for you,” he said softly.
“What do you mean?”
“That you’d gone on to live a normal life.”
Her mouth twisted. “Normal doesn’t exist for people like us.”
Monster (Present Day)
They drove out of the small town, leaving it far behind and getting on the Interstate.
They needed to come up with a plan. They couldn’t just show up at Rodriguez’s place and expect him to hand Lily back. He’d never do that. Monster knew he’d have to fight, and most likely kill, if he was ever going to get his Flower back again.
He wondered what had happened to Chapman and the women they’d rescued from the shipping container. Had he dropped the girls off and tried to join them at the airfield, only to be stopped by the police? Or had he decided he couldn’t leave the women and so never made it as far as the airstrip? There was a chance Chapman had some idea of what had happened, and was looking for him. He thought he knew Chapman’s cell phone number off by heart, but he worried the police had him in custody and were monitoring his cell phone.
His thoughts turned to the location of his own cell phone. He must have dropped it somewhere along the way. He hoped it hadn’t been when he’d been thrown by the force of the explosion back at the hangar. The cops would be crawling all over the place by now, and there was no way he’d get the phone back. He was always cautious, never storing numbers in his phone, and clearing his history, but he was sure someone skilled in the police force would be able to get a wealth of data from the SIM card.
He also wished he hadn’t wiped off the gun Lily had used to kill the trafficker she called Cigarette Hands. The police would have found the body of her friend, Cameron, and the gun beside it. They’d soon figure out the same gun had killed the trafficker—though that evidence had probably been destroyed in the plane explosion. Even so, they’d have run prints on the weapon, and found Lily’s. It wouldn’t take long to see she was the same woman who’d been missing for over a month, and who had also reported she’d been taken by a sex trafficking ring. The cops would assume she’d been recaptured and hopefully would have launched a search for her. But all of this was wishful thinking. He’d rather Lily be arrested for a murder investigation and serve time than for her to be in Rodriguez’s clutches. At least with the cops she could plead self-defense. With Rodriguez, it was life, with no chance of early release.
Monster looked over to Sophia as she drove, concentrating on the road ahead. He still couldn’t believe the young girl from his childhood had reentered his life. He’d never thought he’d see her again, had wondered if his father had been responsible for her death. Knowing he hadn’t had lifted a weight from his heart. Even though she’d never completely escaped the criminal life, at least she’d been treated well.
He glanced down at the purse on the floor of the car at his feet. The same purse Sophia had grabbed before she’d fled the house.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a cell phone in that thing?” he asked.
She looked over at him, her eyebrows raised. “Sure. Who the hell doesn’t own a cell phone these days?”
She leaned over as she drove, so she was practically in his lap, her cheek dangerously close to his crotch. The proximity of a woman’s face so close to that area caused an instinctive reaction in him, so he had to turn away and stare out of the window until she was done. Sophia fumbled around inside the bag until she produced a cell phone.
She handed it to him. “Knock yourself out.”
“Thanks.”
Quickly, he dialed Chapman, thankful he’d always had a good head for numbers. It started ringing, and for that, at least, he was grateful. There was a chance the other man might have destroyed his phone after hearing things had gone so badly wrong at the airfield.
A male voice answered. “Yes?”
“Chapman, is that you?”
“Holy shit, Merrick,” he said, his voice alive with surprise. “I thought you must be dead!”
Thank God, it was definitely Chapman on the line, and not a cop trying to fake him out.
“It takes more than a shot to the shoulder to kill me.”
“Where the hell are you?”
He glanced around, but didn’t see any signs. He’d been too far out of it on the drive here to take in much of the scenery. He mouthed to Sophia, Where are we?
“We’re about to head east on the highway,” she replied.
“Did you hear that? We’re taking the highway east to look for Lily in the desert. That bastard Rodriguez took Lily and killed Sean, Mason, and Evans.”
“No, sir, not Sean. From what I’ve found out, he was alive but unconscious when the police arrived on the scene. Because they haven’t been able to get a word out of him, they still don’t know how he fits into what happened at the airfield. As far as I’m aware, he’s in the hospital, under police custody.”
“Shit.”
The news of Sean still being alive was both good and bad. While he was happy the other man had survived, he also didn’t want him in the hands of the police. If the right cop came down on him hard, he might just tell him everything he knew, and that would include a whole heap of information about Monster. Even though Monster had trusted these men—and still did—he wouldn’t blame Sean for spilling the beans in return for a shortened sentence. After all, they were essentially just muscle for hire, and he didn’t pay them enough to buy their complete silence.
“Do you think Sean is still unconscious?”
“No idea. I haven’t been able to get near him.”
“Is he at the same hospital you took the women to?” It occurred to him that he should probably ask after their wellbeing as well, but right now he needed to focus on the things that directly affected him.
“No. That hospital was too small. He’s been taken to the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.”
“Hang on,” Monster said. He turned to Sophia, who was still concentrating on driving, while flicking curious glances over to him every so often. He recounted the conversation briefly and then asked her, “How far away are we?”
“An hour.
Maybe ninety minutes.”
Monster nodded. “We need to get Sean out of there,” he said to Chapman. “Think you can meet us a couple of blocks from the hospital?”
“Us? Who have you got with you?”
“An old friend who is helping. Can you meet us or not?”
“Yeah, of course. I don’t want the cops to have Sean any more than you do. I know him being there is a security risk.”
“Let’s just hope he’s well enough to walk out of the place.”
Monster wasn’t going to say it out loud, but if Sean was still unconscious, or too badly injured to be of any help to them, he might be forced to finish the job Rodriguez started. While he didn’t want to kill one of his men, he also couldn’t risk the fallout if Sean told the police everything he knew.
“Meet me one block east of the hospital in a little over an hour.”
“Got it.”
Monster pressed the end button and dropped the phone back in Sophia’s bag.
“I assume we’re taking a detour?” she asked.
“Yeah. A couple of my men are still alive—or at least I hope one of them is still alive. He’s in the hospital after Rodriguez shot him when he took Lily. Either way, I’d prefer to approach Rodriguez with someone else at my side, no offense. I have a feeling getting Lily back is going to take a bit of firepower.” He didn’t want to leave Lily any longer than he had to, but having extra men at his side would give him an advantage.
She shifted in the seat. “I don’t want there to be a big shootout. I was hoping we could all just sit down and talk about things reasonably.”
He frowned at her. “Reasonably? You have met Rodriguez?”
Delivered (The Monster Trilogy Book 3) Page 7
