The Sabrina Vaughn series Set 1

by Maegan Beaumont

  Blood trickled from the wound but Sabrina didn’t move, taking a few seconds to weigh her options. She didn’t have time for this shit but she didn’t have time for a bullet either. “Don’t poke me.”

  He just grinned and jabbed her with the barrel of the gun again

  The instant the barrel made contact with her forehead she dodged to the left and it slid in the opposite direction, its path slicked with blood. Her left hand shot up, wrapping around his wrist, wrenching it so hard he cried out even as he pulled the trigger.

  The bullet sizzled past her, inches away from her face, slamming into the wall in a small explosion of dust and drywall. Her right hand gripped the body of the gun and twisted it in the opposite direction as her left, popping it out of his grip.

  He dropped back on his hips, ready to fight her for it, cocking back his now empty fist but she ended it for him when she clubbed him in the face with the butt of the gun, slamming it into his temple. He dropped like a stone, the fight suddenly over.

  The first thug, the one she’d dropped with the crotch shot was crawling up the steps, straight for her. She kicked him back down the stairs on her way down, bracing her hands on the wall of the narrow stairwell to vault over him. Her leg buckled under her on the landing and she fell, sprawling into the bodega’s storage room, her face landing on top of a pair of very expensive two-toned wingtips, the gun she’d taken off thug number two skittering away from her across the smooth cement floor.

  She scrambled back until she hit something solid. Wasting no time, her hand moved to her side, lifting her SIG from its holster. She looked up at the man standing over her and felt her blood run cold.

  “You’ve made quite a mess,” Phillip Song said, shifting his gaze toward the man she’d just kicked down the stairs. He was moaning, hand flopping against the floor in an attempt to push himself up. “Stand up.” Phillip motioned to her impatiently as if the gun in her hands was no more lethal than a squirt gun. Peeking out from under the cuffs and collar of his silk button down were the tattoos she was sure twisted and climbed the entire length of his body, telling everyone who he was and what he’d done to earn his reputation. Phillip Song was not a nice man.

  He took a step back, allowing her room to clamor to her feet. That’s when she saw the second man, standing in the shadows. All she could see was his outline but even that was vaguely familiar.

  “You’re bleeding,” Phillip said, reaching a slow and careful hand toward his pocket. She thumbed the hammer back in warning and he smiled. “I don’t carry a gun.” He put two fingers into his pocket and produced a monogrammed handkerchief and held it out to her. “That’s their job,” he said, tilting his chin in the direction of the stairwell where his men were still struggling to stand. They stepped into the storeroom, one of them had a knot the size of her fist forming on the side of his face, the other was covered in what looked and smelled like yesterday’s Kimchi.

  “Maybe you should add hanging on to them to their job description,” she said, swiping at the blood that now trickled along her jawline.

  Phillip smiled, saying something to them in Korean and they answered back, refusing to meet his eyes. “You’ve embarrassed them,” he said to her, offering her the handkerchief a second time.

  “Yeah?” She ignored it, not taking her eyes off his face. “Well, what can I say? I really hate being poked.”

  Phillip laughed, tucking the handkerchief back into his pocket with a shrug. “My apologies, Inspector Vaughn. They were merely following orders.”

  He knew who she was. She’d worry about what that might mean for her later. Assuming she had a later. “Where’s David?” she said.

  Now Phillip smiled at her again, his gaze slipping from her face to the gun in her hand. “My brother? Why? Are you going to kill him?”

  She said nothing. The silhouette in the dark shifted, a shadow within a shadow, and she felt it again. Recognition. She looked back at Phillip and her face must’ve said it all because the smile on his face faded away into something much more complicated than amusement.

  “What has David done now?” His choice of words were not lost on her. Now… like he knew exactly what his brother was capable of.

  She took a step toward him, leading with the gun in her hand. “I don’t have—”

  “A choice but to answer my question. Not if you want me to tell you where David is,” he said. “You pull that trigger you won’t make it off the block, Inspector. Now, please… what has my brother done?”

  She swallowed hard, suddenly finding it very hard to speak. “In less than forty-eight hours your brother has murdered three women. For his grand finale, he abducted my… friend.” Friend. Val was so much more than a friend… she was her lifeline. The rock she’d clung to for nearly half of her life. The only thing that had kept her from drowning. Losing Val wouldn’t kill her. It would destroy her. “He left a message for me—Expectamus.”

  Phillip’s shoulders sagged as he dug his hands into the pockets of his slacks, muttering something in Korean, words full of shame and disgust. “Latin. It means, we are waiting,” he said.

  Did every creep in San Francisco know Latin? He must have caught her expression. “Our mother had a passion for classical studies and tried very hard to mold her sons into sinsa—gentlemen. With the exception of David, we were a grave disappointment to her.”

  “David is insane.”

  Phillip frowned. For a moment, she was sure she’d finally pushed him too far. “She was not aware of his… predilections. My father made sure of it.” He cut a glare at the figure in the shadows. “This would not have happened if you and Denton had done your job properly,” he said, waving an angry hand at the man in the shadows to silence his excuses before he was able to give them a voice.

  “David has been… sick his entire life. Too sick to be trusted with the family business. My father was the only one who could control him. Before he died, he made it clear to me that David would have to be dealt with,” Phillip said, careful to avoid words like killed and crazy but Sabrina was able to read between the lines.

  “Your father knew what kind of man David was. What he would do if left on his own,” she said and Phillip nodded. Sabrina felt her arms go tense for a moment before letting gravity pull them to her sides. “He told you to kill him.”

  “There was an incident in college. A girl…” Phillip’s neck remained stiff against the truth. “Our father smoothed it over—made it go away but he knew that it was just a matter of time before he lost control again. David is my hyeongje—my brother—and I had hoped… but it soon became clear that Father was right.”

  “You couldn’t do it so you hired Kenny Denton to do it for you.” The sting of robberies with only one murder among them. A clerk in David’s store. “Denton killed the wrong person, didn’t he? He was supposed to kill your brother. The other robberies were just a cover-up.”

  Shame dug deep, etching lines and grooves into Phillip’s face, his expression answering the question he couldn’t bring himself to answer with words.

  She holstered her gun and swiped a hand across her jaw, smearing more blood than she managed to wipe off. “Where is he? Where is David?”

  For a moment she was sure he’d refuse, that a brother’s love would win out over a son’s duty but then he rattled off an address in Hillsborough, twenty-five miles south of the city. “It was the home my father bought for my mother. She was killed before he could bring her to the states. If you’re looking for David, that’s where you’ll find him.”

  76

  The home Phillip Song’s father bought for his wife turned out to be a forty-seven-acre estate in Hillsboro, just outside the city. Complete with gardens, rolling hills, streams and a house that looked more like a luxury hotel than any home she’d ever seen outside Architecture Digest.

  Sabrina turned onto the long, winding drive, passing beneath an ornate archway hung heavy with ivy. The one lane cobblestone was edged with pavers and lined with trees on either side,
their branches a tangled canopy, creating a tunnel of shady green.

  She aimed her eyes straight ahead, hands wrapped around the steering wheel to keep herself anchored in the now. Green and brown crept by broken up by flashes of something else she knew wasn’t really there.

  Look out the window, darlin. Looks familiar, don’t it? If you look fast enough, you might catch me before I catch you…

  Please be quiet.

  Dropping a hand to run it over the top of her thigh, she focused her attention on the road ahead. She slowed to a crawl when it split in two. According to Phillip, the main house was to the left. The greenhouse was to the right.

  She turned right, following the curve of the road. Untamed trees gave way to manicured gardens. A herd of topiary centaurs caught in mid-gallop, chasing after nymphs, frozen in flight. At the edge of the garden maze she could see Medusa and Perseus embroiled in battle. Another in the shape of what looked like a Minotaur guarded its entrance, the roof of the greenhouse peeked out from its center, barely visible over the sea of emerald green hedges. Sabrina parked her car in the gravel, next to a dark blue mustang with a bright white racing stripe.

  “You’ll find him in the greenhouse,” Phillip had told her, handing her a hastily drawn map. “Botany was a passion he shared with our mother. It’s where he spends most of his time.”

  Sitting there a moment, she felt the electronic crawl of surveillance creep across her skin. She had no doubt David knew she was here. Had known from the moment she turned her car onto the very private drive.

  She pulled her borrowed phone from her pocket to call Strickland as promised. No signal. She didn’t know how but she was sure David was manipulating the cell signal. Searching her pockets, she found what she was looking for. A flattish disk, the size and shape of a large watch battery, its top slightly domed. She hesitated for a moment before she pressed it, feeling hopeful when a red light began a slow blink. She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans and got out of the car.

  She shut her car door, not bothering to mask the sound, and approached the entrance to the maze. Like the tree-lined drive, the hedges on either side of the maze grew tall and had been bent and laced together above the path to form a canopy. Stopping in front of the Minotaur and the surveillance camera it concealed,she looked directly into the lens and waited.

  “Leave your weapons.” David’s voice came from the speaker at the base of the topiary, shaped to look like a rock.

  She didn’t answer him, just peeled off her jacket and tossed it on the ground, exposing the double shoulder holster and her SIG P250s. She took them off, along with her service weapon and dropped them on top of her jacket.

  “You think me a fool, Calliope?” he said, anger and amusement threading through his voice. “The one you keep at your ankle as well.”

  Yanking up her pant leg, she lifted the .380 LCP from its holster and dropped it on the pile. The knife she’d lifted from Michael’s case stayed where it was. “There,” she said, nearly biting the word in half.

  “Come, Calliope… Melpomene is waiting.”

  As smoothly as she could, she slipped a hand into her pocket, finding the flattish disc. Touching it with a silent prayer, hoping that it did what she thought it did, she kept walking.

  Allowed herself to be swallowed by the dark.

  77

  It was quiet. The kind of quiet that burrowed into your brain like a worm and stirred up memories. Things you’d rather forget. Things you wish you’d never known.

  Right then left.Left again. So many twists and turns that the entrance disappeared from sight almost immediately. Every 20 yards or so, a skylight had been cut into the canopy, allowing the waning sun to drift in and settle along the hard dirt path. It was getting late; the sun would be completely set in an hour or two.

  It didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting to Val before David did something to her that couldn’t be undone.

  She focused on the task at hand, moved as fast as she could, following the map Phillip had drawn for her with a confidence she didn’t feel. What if it was a trap? What if she was letting him lead her right into his brother’s hands? She thought of the look on Phillip’s face when she’d told him about what David had done. No. Phillip wasn’t leading her to slaughter but his motives for helping her were far from pure. He was hoping that she’d kill his brother and help him save face.

  Another series of turns brought her to the middle of the maze, the greenhouse looming in its center. The structure was huge, white metal framing large panels of glass. The path led right to the door, either sidelined with daffodils and larkspur, their sunny yellow faces turned up to catch the last of the light beneath a canopy of jasmine. The doors to the greenhouse were flung wide, propped open with a smooth white rock as if she were being welcomed inside.

  Sabrina stepped inside, instantly enveloped in a riot of color. Raised beds surrounded her, a sea of roses in every possible shade of every conceivable color. Colors she didn’t even know existed. They were beautiful but as she moved closer she could see them—the upturned thorns along each stem, as large as her thumbnail and many times as thick. Huge teeth made to tear and chew at anyone who dared come close. Beneath the cloyingly sweet scent of the roses was something else. Something that worked at the back of her throat, trying to gag her.Something dead and rotting.

  She’d taken only a few steps before she saw them. Tennis shoes poking out from behind one of the flowerbeds. The closer she got, the stronger the stench until she was forced to cover her nose and mouth with her hand in an attempt to filter it out. She knew who she’d find before she saw his face but it was still a shock. Kenny Denton lay on his back in his own blood, fermented and congealed to a thick, sticky pool around him. His throat slashed, the thinnest of cuts from ear to ear, face bloated and ugly, turned black by the warm humidity of the greenhouse.

  “Phillip sent him here to kill me.” The voice came from behind her close enough to spill a chill down her spine.

  She turned, finding David only a few yards away, completely nude and covered in blood, a scalpel held tightly against his thigh. The world seemed to tip forward just a bit, her vision going soft at the sight of it. She had a sudden image of Val laying on Mandy’s gurney beneath those high wattage lights, her ribcage snipped open, heart cut out…

  It took her a moment to realize the blood was his. Through the bright red she could see a deep slash running from hip to his opposite shoulder. Someone had wounded him. “He was trying to stop you before you hurt someone,” she said, forcing her voice to level out. Dividing her attention, Sabrina did a visual sweep of her surroundings. Searching for a sign of where Val might be.

  David scoffed, anger tightening his grip on the scalpel in his hand. “He was doing nothing more than trying to secure his place as my father’s successor. It was me. I was to head the Geondal but my father found my behavior… distasteful.”David turned his arm. The flesh of his inner-forearm was tight and red, the symbol branded into it wet and oozing. “I was never my father’s son, not really, and now I understand why. I am something more.”

  “What you are is a lunatic. You kill people, David.” Fear evaporated under the hot gust of anger that burned through her. “Women who’ve done nothing to you… Bethany Edwards. Jemma Barrows.” Valerie Hernandez. She stopped short, her brain refusing to move any further.

  He shook his head slowly as if saddened by her reaction. “I didn’t kill them. I loved them. Set them free. My true destiny is something he had no hope of ever stopping me from achieving. The Fates have chosen me for a higher purpose. You know this, Calliope.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your destiny,” she said, driven forward by something much stronger than anger. Something righteous and just that pushed her to the brink of recklessness. She cut a glance at the scalpel in his hand, her lips curled away from her teeth in a snarl. “Where is Val?”

  He lifted the scalpel, the dying sun glinting off its thin, curved blade. Pointed it at her like an acc
using finger, the sadness on his face giving way to something darker. “You and I were fated. You were my muse. The Sisters allowed me to choose. I chose you and you betrayed me, with my own brother.” He kept talking as if she’d never spoke a word, slipping away from reality into the fantasy world he’d constructed. “I saw the two of you. I know you let Ares come to you.” His lip curled in disgust, narrowed eyes raking across her face and form. “That you let him between your legs to rut on you like the dog he is.”

  He’d seen her with Michael. When and where mattered little. “Is that why you left the kolossoi? You cursed us because you’re jealous?”

  “Jealousy is beneath me,” he said in a tone that was in direct conflict with his words. “I was simply giving to you what you both deserve. Pain and misery.”

  “David, where is Valerie?” She switched subjects quickly, an interrogation tactic meant to throw a suspect off their game. It worked, the question pulling his gaze over his shoulder before he could stop himself.

  There.Look over there, darlin’. Do you see it?

  In the farthest corner, directly behind David. What looked to be shafts of light reached up from the dirt floor. Not dirt. What looked like some sort of door or hatch set into the ground, hidden by a bunch of potted plants. She took a half-step before she could stop herself, telegraphing her intentions.

  David squared his shoulders and planted his feet, blocking her from going any further. “Melpomene has served her purpose, as will you. I will become what The Fates intended.”

  His choice of words nearly drove her to her knees. Served—like whatever he’d planned to do to her was already done. “It’s too soon. The solstice isn’t for another week. You haven’t accumulated enough power.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “I told you, The Sisters allowed me to choose—you or your sisters. Foolishly, I chose you but it’s no matter. You are Calliope—superior muse, more powerful than all of your sisters combined. Your death alone will push me through the veil.”