by S. Massery
“A referral fee,” Zach agrees. “You know me, Griff. Business first, friendships later.”
I sigh. “I’m about to do something stupid.”
Working for Scorpion Industries, Zach was the one who usually did something stupid. Wyatt was always there to pick up the pieces. Mason helped with clean-up duty. Dalton watched. Jackson and I, well, we were either far from the drama or right there in it with Zach. It’s what made us family. Now, it’s as if Zach, Mason, and Jackson are making all of the good choices in life, and I can’t seem to scrape together enough common sense to pull myself out of my misery.
Life is getting a little monotonous. Yes, I’m fully aware that I’m admitting to that so soon after beating the shit out of three guys. The adrenaline is dull, where it used to be addicting. It used to be all-encompassing. Lately, something’s been missing.
“That’s fun,” Zach says. “You going to fill me in?”
I laugh. “No.”
He’s quiet for half a second. “It’s a girl, huh? Suddenly Skye gets himself a woman and it’s like a free-for-all—”
“Who else?” I cut him off. “Free for all, meaning—”
“Don’t turn this around on me,” he grumbles. “Cute girls come into the gym. I’m not a monk, am I? I get to have some fun.”
“Dalton would agree,” I say. Mason has been grumbling about their attitude toward women for years. “Just… don’t break any hearts, you know?”
“You’d know all about that.”
I watch two guys walk into the hospital, and awareness prickles the back of my neck.
“I gotta go.”
“Have fun,” Zach says just before I end the call.
I slip out of the car and jog toward the side entrance. It’s usually locked, but I swiped a keycard from an intern on my way out this afternoon. I make a beeline for the stairs. No one gives me a second glance as I walk down the hall and step into the judge’s room.
“Arthur,” I whisper. The lights are off except for a night light by the bathroom. The judge stirs as I put my hand on his unbroken foot, then his arm.
“Griffin? Back already?”
“Sorry, Judge. I think we have some trouble incoming.”
He shakes his head and grimaces. It’s hard to look at him: a cast on his leg, another on his arm. An IV is attached to his uninjured arm. Bandages are wrapped around his head from the emergency surgery used to relieve the swelling pressure on his brain. His eyes are black. Broken nose. Through it all, he still manages to grip my hand and smile at me.
He saved my life when I was younger, and I’ve never been able to repay him.
“I found the guys who hurt you,” I tell him. “I made them pay.”
Even with his swollen face, Judge Arthur Wallace still manages to look disappointed. “Griffin,” he mutters. “What have you become?”
I press myself against the wall, out of sight of the door. It’s closed, but a shadow has fallen over the vertical window. “Something to be feared.”
The door opens on silent hinges. I wait for them to draw even with me. One has a syringe in his hand, and the other holds a knife. It seems like overkill—two men to do the job of one. The judge just watches them approach. He watches me step forward and grab the man with the syringe and twist his wrist.
The syringe falls to the floor, and he grunts in surprise. He grapples with me, shoving me into the wall. Arthur starts yelling. I flip the man onto his back and kick him in the temple. His eyes roll back in his head, and I jump toward the one with the knife.
It isn’t a choice: I put myself, unarmed, between the judge and the man.
“You’re going to pay for what you did,” he spits at me.
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. I’ve been paying for what I’ve done for a long time—this little blight surely won’t make the list. In fact, this is retribution.
The lights flicker on, and a security guard bursts into the room.
Luckily for me, he has a gun.
“You okay, Judge?” the guard asks before he zeros in on the man between us.
Arthur grunts. “They tried to inject me with something.”
The man with a knife puts his hands in the air, backing toward the security guard. He winks at me, and the blood drains from my face. I can handle fighting. I can’t handle civilians—security or not—getting hurt because of my mess.
“Look out—”
He grabs the guard’s gun and shoves it toward the ceiling, pushing the knife into his belly. “This is because of you,” he says, pushing the guard in my direction and rushing out of the room.
I grab the guard’s shoulders and lower him to the ground. The judge is yelling again—violence in this nature may be my normal, but it’s most certainly not his—and I press my hand over the wound.
“Hit your call button,” I yell at him.
I like to be in control.
I like to know my enemies. To know who I’m fighting.
But right now, all I feel is confusion.
An alarm starts sounding, flashing the room with strobe lights. Doctors and nurses rush in, pausing for only fractions of a second to take in the scene: an unconscious man, a guard with a stab wound, the judge, and me.
“Easy,” they say to me. I feel half-feral right about now—I can only imagine what I look like to them. “We’ve got it from here.”
Everything in me screams to keep fighting, to keep trying to save the guard.
“Griffin,” the judge calls.
I jerk toward him.
“It’s okay. I have friends in the sheriff’s department. You should go.”
“I—”
He grabs my hand. “They wanted information. That’s why I was attacked.”
I tilt my head. It’s something I picked up in my short time with Delia and Jackson—she is always tilting her head this way or that when she doesn’t understand something. “What?”
“They were looking to find the Angel of Death’s weaknesses.”
My eyes darken. “They found one.”
He scowls at me. “They may have found two.”
Hadley.
I drop his hand and back away from him. “You didn’t.”
“They got into my files,” he says. “After—”
“Judge—you gave me their names. Local guys.” I shake my head, avoiding picturing Arthur how the police found him: nearly unconscious, bloody, babbling nonsense.
“Hired, obviously. Wouldn’t have realized that if these idiots had kept their mouths shut,” he says. He coughs and winces. A nurse pushes past me, and I shuffle back a few steps. “They weren’t from around here. Didn’t you catch the accent?”
I think back to the few words we exchanged.
This is because of you.
A slight roll on the words, almost—
“German?”
He gives me a small smile. “I knew I taught you to pay attention. But I apparently didn’t teach you how to listen. Get. Out. Of. Here.”
“How would they know about Hadley?” I ask.
He just shakes his head. One of the boys from the sheriff’s office rushes in, and I take another step toward the door. “I kept track,” he murmurs. “Of when you came back. Who ended up in the hospital and why. It all revolved around the girl. There were notes in my office, scraps of a trail I thought I was following—”
“You monitored me?”
“I did it because I care,” he argues. “Are you really going to fight me on that?”
“You could’ve just asked me, Judge. And now they know she’s my weakness.” My mind races. They assaulted the judge because of my connection to him. I’d kill for the judge, but for Hadley?
I’d do a hell of a lot worse.
And now they know. Whoever they are.
“Get out of here,” the judge says. The officer holds up his hand to block me, but I brush past him. I hear the judge say, “Leave him, Morris. He protected me.”
I shake my head and get to my car as fast as pos
sible. Hadley’s apartment is vulnerable. Maybe he wasn’t a regular burglar. I jolt at the realization, slamming my hand on the steering wheel as I speed out of the parking lot. I call Zach back.
“Long time no talk,” he says on the heels of a yawn.
“I’m being set up,” I tell him. “I think I’ve got it handled, but they figured out who I am.”
“What? Who?”
“I don’t know,” I growl. “I’m leaving tonight. Does Mason still have that contact in Amsterdam?”
“Yeah, I’ll stir something up for you.”
“Great,” I mutter. I can’t get to Hadley’s apartment quick enough. “I need to meet him in forty-eight hours.”
“Jesus,” Zach groans. “What are you planning?”
I shrug and drum my fingers against the steering wheel. “I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”
“Lose anyone on the table lately?” he asks. “Kill anyone’s brother, uncle, nephew—hell, anyone’s sister, daughter, wife—”
“Shut up. I’ve got to go.” There’s a single light on in Hadley’s apartment. Her car is in the driveway. There’s no movement through the windows.
I slide out of the car, closing my door gently, and stick to the shadows as I walk up to the side of her building. I peek in, checking each room that I can see.
Nothing.
I finally open her screen door and creep into the kitchen. The apartment is completely silent. I clear every nook and cranny that I can think of, even leaving the apartment and going down into the basement where the laundry is.
Nothing. Again.
I had a choice between protecting the judge and Hadley, and I seem to have failed them both. When I circle back to her apartment, I go to the lamp in her bedroom. It casts the room in eerie shadows. The feather I had left for her is still beside it, but now it’s held there by a small knife.
I yank it out of the wood. They don’t know what kind of monster they’ve just unleashed.
3
HADLEY
There’s a bag over my head.
I try to breathe through my panic, but there’s a bag over my head. Light barely filters in through the black fabric, enough that I can see someone pacing in front of a light source. The air smells damp—or maybe that’s the fabric. My hands are tied behind my back. My fingers have long since lost their feeling.
One minute, I was unlocking my door. The porch light was out, so I was fumbling a bit for my phone’s flashlight, plus my eight hundred keys, when the bag went over my head. Someone manhandled me into what I can only guess was the trunk of a car.
It wasn’t pleasant.
They pulled me out—two sets of hands—and carried me a short distance, then threw me in a chair. Through it all, I didn’t say a word. I bit my lip to keep silent, I held my breath when I thought I might scream, and now the whole world is silent except for the ticking of a clock.
Finally, one of them pulls the bag off of my head. I squint up at the man, who looks like he got in a fight recently. His eye is puffy, and there’s blood crusted around one of his nostrils. He’s barely recognizable—but I think he was the one in my apartment.
We’ll be back, he had said. Well, he wasn’t lying.
He circles me and leans against the wall to my left. Another man, in a white shirt that looks like his maid starched it—you know, the rich type of asshole—comes out of the shadows. He walks up and leans down in front of me, his hands braced on the chair arms.
“Do you know who I am?” he asks.
I do my best to make myself look bored, but I’ve started shaking in my boots. “Should I?” I ask. “You don’t look particularly familiar.”
Tanned skin, dark hair cut close to his scalp, a teardrop tattoo in the outer corner of his eye. No, I think I’d remember a face like that.
He reaches out and grabs my chin, staring at me. “I expected more begging,” he mutters. “Here’s the deal, Hadley Quinn. Your parents live at 225 Edge Street in Bitterwood, New York. They just adopted a dog who has a weakness for hot dogs and cheese.”
The blood drains from my face.
“They’re safe—for now. But I want Griffin Anders.”
“Why do you think I can give him to you?” I ask. “I don’t know where he is. I don’t keep track—”
“The judge kept track,” he interrupts. “And did you know that your mother kept a file on him in her home office?”
I suck in a breath.
“Come now, Hadley. Griffin tries to protect you, but he’s constantly failing. Look at yourself now.” I flinch, because his words cut deeper than I thought they would. “Look at yourself. You’re tied to a chair. You don’t know where you are. There’s no one who can find you if I don’t want you to be found.”
“He would come for me,” I tell him.
The man presses his finger into the scar on my forearm. It’s pale, barely visible unless you know it’s there, and I shudder.
“You think you know Griffin Anders,” he says. “But you don’t know anything.”
The unshakable confidence I had in Griffin starts to crack. I push my shoulders back. “I know your fate is probably worse than mine, no matter what you do to me.”
“I don’t care much about my fate,” he says, leaning down in my face. “But I’m willing to bet you care about your parents’.”
“You touch them, you won’t walk away from this.”
“I want Griffin Anders to pay for his crimes. If he doesn’t, your parents will die. His foster-dad will die. Everyone you’ve ever cared about—everyone in that godforsaken town—will suffer.”
I stare at him as he moves around me, slicing through the zip ties.
“And you’ll be the last one to follow them,” he says.
“How is he going to pay for his crimes?” I ask, automatically shaking out my arms. My fingers tingle. “Crimes against you? Crimes against—”
“Enough.” He tows me out of the basement, up into the main house. It’s all covered furniture and dust, but that’s all I get a glimpse of before we’re outside. The little house is in the middle of a field. I couldn’t even say if we’re still in Bitterwood. The night sky is covered in stars, and the only light comes from the porch we stand on and the moon.
The burglar follows us outside, leaning against the door jam.
“You’re letting me go?” I ask.
“I think you’ll find your savior isn’t as… clean as he once was.”
I shiver, remembering his touch on my scar.
The memory of bone breaking through skin almost brings me to my knees.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie. “And I don’t really know what you expect from me.”
“I expect I’ll see you soon, Hadley. And when we do meet again, you’ll have a different view of the man you once knew. I think, at that point, you’ll be on my side.”
“You don’t want to meet him now?”
He raises an eyebrow, tightening his grip on my arm. “Why?”
I jerk my head toward the car parked in the trees. It’s barely visible in the shadows. “Because he’s already found you.”
He grunts and jerks me back, into the burglar’s grasp. “Deal with this,” he hisses. He closes the door behind him, and the deadbolt slides closed.
Cold metal presses against my temple. I shudder when he wraps his arm across my collarbone. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he calls. “Griffin Anders, the long lost prodigy of Bitterwood.”
He smells like blood.
Silence, except for crickets and an owl in the distance.
Into a radio, he hisses, “Close the perimeter!”
A burst of static answers him. A body crashes to the ground in front of us, off of the porch roof, and I can’t help it. I start screaming.
The gun leaves my temple, extending past my ear. He swings us in a wide arc, movements turning more frantic. He drags us out into the clearing, in the circle of warm light.
When Griffin walks out f
rom around the side of the house, my heart jumps in my chest. There’s a hard look in his eyes and he doesn’t appear to be surrendering. There are two holstered guns at his hips, and his hands hang loosely by his side.
He just stares at the man, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Surrender,” my kidnapper orders. He brings the gun back up to my head, and Griffin’s face darkens.
“You might want to keep that pointed at me,” he warns. “I don’t like it when people threaten her.”
He scoffs. “I think my best chances of keeping you at bay are with this girl in my arms. Surrender yourself and she goes free.”
“Okay,” Griffin says, shrugging. “I surrender.”
“Remove your weapons,” the man orders. If he’s shocked at the turn of events like I am, he doesn’t show it. Maybe he was expecting this.
Griffin pulls the guns out and slowly sets them on the ground at his feet. He raises his eyebrow, and the man shakes his head.
He tosses a pack of zip ties toward Griffin. “Put those on your wrists.”
Griffin rolls his eyes. “Really?”
“Yes,” the man snaps.
All I can do is stare as he manages to finagle zip ties around his own wrists, leaning down and biting on the end to tighten it. “Happy?”
“Quite,” the man answers. He shoves me away from him and I stumble.
“Hadley,” Griffin calls. I wrap my arms around myself. “Keys are in the car. Go home.”
Go home? Leave him there?
I walk right past Griffin, only hesitating long enough to look him in the eyes. He nods at me, and a quick smirk surfaces on his face. I square my shoulders and hurry past him. I pass a man laying face down behind a tree, dressed the same as the man who fell from the roof. Once I’m in the car, I lock the doors and turn my attention back toward the guys.
The burglar-slash-kidnapper had moved toward Griffin when my back was turned. He shoves Griffin to his knees, his gun coming up—
Griffin moves like lightning. In the span of time it takes me to blink, he goes from on his knees, and the next he’s standing above the fallen man. The gun is in his hands, which are still bound together, and he pulls the trigger without hesitating.
