Detective Rivera has been a thorn in my fucking side.
And now he might catch me. I’m alone out here. No backup.
There’s the crack of a twig ten feet to my left. He’s in the woods with me. For a second I’m worried—about the crew and what they’d do if I landed in jail. Who’d be there to watch over them?
This spurs me into action. I crash through the woods, heading west, where there’s nothing but miles of trees. No use being quiet when he already knows I’m here.
Then there’s a bark. Fuck. He brought search dogs?
I turn toward the darkest part of the forest and plunge inside.
Chapter 5
Stone
“Cruz won’t want that. I'm telling you,” Knox growls as he signals and merges onto the highway. “You should have left it in the woods.”
“The search dogs would have found it,” I say, rubbing the place in my leg where one of them bit me. He took me down, and it was a close call. I had a knife, but I didn’t want to hurt the beast. It wasn’t his fault he’s good at his damn job.
I got away. Barely.
Made it to the city where I could dial Knox for an extraction.
It was too bad I lost the caterer’s van before I could torch it, but Knox’s ride is a lot nicer; a vintage Porsche that’s probably had blood in it a few times over the years. At least I had the ring in my pocket when I left the van behind.
“He wants it.”
“He won’t even look at it.” Knox is wearing a crisp purple button-down and slacks, like he’s going to some swanky hot spot for happy hour after work instead of picking up his boss from a manhunt.
“He’ll look at it,” I say. “You’ll see.”
Cruz needs somebody in this fucking life to come through for him. That’s my job. With all my brothers. Make sure they get what they need. Sometimes that means vintage cars. Sometimes that means closure in the form of a bloodstained ring.
I pull it out and take another look. It’s fat and gold with some emblem of a fancy university imprinted on it. This is the ring I promised to bring him as I held his shaking, sobbing body, and now he gets it. It took a good twelve years, but I would have searched for that fucker for another twelve if I had to. I mean to keep each and every promise I made back when we were kids, back when we were being made to do things with men that no kid should ever be made to do.
Our success in hunting those scumbags down is part of why they hit back, framing Grayson for that murder. It was a smart move; even I can admit that. It distracts us from hunting them down. And no jury will pass up the opportunity to slam a cop killer for life. Even if the supposed cop killer is innocent.
But it won’t work.
Even if Grayson’s convicted, we’ll keep hunting them. We’ll just have all the more reason to make them sorry.
“You’re crazy if you think he’s gonna want to see it. The same ring he saw all that time in the…” He trails off at the word basement. He doesn’t like to say it, doesn’t like to think about it. He prefers fast cars and oblivion. Every guy in the crew needs something different.
What do you need? a soft voice in my head asks. A voice that sounds a lot like Brooke. But I ignore that voice. I don’t need anything.
“He gets the option,” I growl. “That’s the fucking point here. And someday we’re gonna get to all of them. They all die. Begging on their knees. I don’t care what it takes.”
Knox glares into the distance. With his knowledge, he could easily have a job at some tech company. Something that has a fitness center and stock options. He would fit in there, but he prefers to run with the crew. Most of us do. There’s too much outsiders don’t know. Too much we don’t know to ever really fit in out there.
Knox doesn’t like that I dumped the body back where it all started. He thinks it’s intense that I’m keeping the promises, but I don’t give a fuck. Those promises are all that keep me going.
The guys need their leader to follow through, even Knox. Especially him. I’m the stability they never got. I’m their personal fucking angel of vengeance.
“You sure the kid didn’t see anything?” he asks again. Maybe he smells the lie on me, I don’t know. It’s fucked up that I’m lying about this, but I have her handled. That’s what’s important. She’s a good girl. She follows the rules. She’ll do what it takes to protect the people she loves.
I guess that makes us alike in some perverse way.
“She won’t be a problem,” I say.
I feel Knox’s eyes on me. “A pillowcase in a caterer’s van?”
“Or maybe it was a potato sack. What the fuck do I know? She’s got nothing to say, and that’s all that matters.” I was vague about it when he first picked me up, giving him the story Brooke and I created together—that’s all she’ll be able to tell the cops, I assured him. I said I dumped her in the park. At least that part is true.
What I don’t tell him is how it felt to feed her. How hard it got me when I buckled her in. How it felt to hold her against me in that swirling water. How she asked me for that one small favor and my whole plan fell apart.
I think about what I promised her—that I’d kill the last people she called if she talks. And I think about how much it would hurt her if that happened. I’m not sure I would do it, which is screwed up. I’m all about keeping my promises. She’s already changing me.
I think about her face as she ate, how hard it got me, watching her pleasure. It stirred something dark in me, something I’d rather forget.
We don’t do connections with women—that’s a pact we all made early on. No girlfriends, no families, no children, no white picket fences. We’re too far gone for that, too ruined, too twisted. We’re brothers to the end—out for vengeance. Most of us guys, we hit the city streets when we need to get off. No girl ever comes back to the hotel—that’s another rule.
Sex is purely physical. Nothing to get worked up about.
Until I watched Brooke biting into that fucking burger, watched how her sad eyes lit up.
She was just so hungry. Hungry for food. Hungry for affection. You never really think about how rich kids might be hungry, too. In their fancy houses and their fancy clothes.
She had been starving.
We’re winding through the dark, littered streets of poverty-stricken North Franklin City. The part we’re going toward, you can barely call it poverty-stricken—that would imply regular people actually live there, and regular people definitely don’t live where we’re going.
The part of Franklin City we live in is more like a post-apocalyptic war zone, all crumbling buildings and trashed streetlights.
We live in the Bradford Hotel, which looks like a boarded-up, bombed-out hull of an old-timey hotel. Unless you know what to look for—a tiny sliver of light seeping out from a gap in the metal covering on an upper window—one of us needs to get to that.
A break in the chain-link fence that surrounds it, just big enough for a car to nose through. Tracks in the rubble that surrounds the place, leading to an underground garage that used to be your basic hotel basement.
We don’t live under the radar so much as off the radar completely.