Devon shrugged. “He’s a Prime. They’re spoiled and used to having their way. Kind of like you.”
“I can’t even deny that.” Sensing that she didn’t want to talk more about Finn, Tanner prowled towards her and said, “Cleaning’s done. Did you manage to unpack all your things?”
“Yes. I had some help.”
“Good.” He hauled her close, loving how her heartbeat instantly kicked up. Just that easily, hunger slammed into him, as if her need could in an instant become his. “I’ve never wanted anything the way I want you.” He snaked a hand around her throat and tipped her head back. “Tonight … I want to fuck you here, in this apartment.”
Devon hummed, not seeming to feel the least bit uncomfortable exposing her throat to him. He fucking loved that. “Why?” she asked.
Because he wanted her to have that memory of him in her bed. Wanted her to think of him as she lay on it, even if there was someone else lying beside her.
He dipped his head and pressed a kiss to her pulse. “We could sleep at my place, but I highly doubt you’ll want to leave this apartment after all the trouble you’ve just taken to get it ready.”
“You’re right on that.”
Knox’s mind touched his, buzzing with a sense of urgency. Tanner, we need to talk. Where are you?
Brow wrinkling at the Prime’s curt tone, Tanner replied, The apartment where Devon’s staying for the time being.
Meet me at your apartment as fast as you can. Just that quick, Knox was gone.
Both curious and put-out by the interruption, Tanner lifted his head and pressed a kiss to her mouth. Unable to tell her about Knox’s ability to pyroport, he said, “I need to go grab some things from my place.” He slowly pulled back, hesitant to leave her for even a minute. “I won’t be long.”
Strolling into his own apartment no more than a minute later, he found Knox and the other sentinels waiting in his living room. Knox stood near the fireplace, his muscles taut, his expression hard. Except for Levi, who’d propped his hip against the wall, the others were seated. One glance at each of the sentinels’ faces was enough to tell Tanner that they had no clue what the emergency meeting was about.
Uneasy, Tanner didn’t take a seat. “What is it?”
Knox’s nostrils flared. “I’m sure you all remember Mattias Ranger.”
Kind of hard to forget someone who Knox once flung into an ants’ nest after the kid tried hurting Larkin. Mattias was Ramsbrook House’s biggest bully.
“He’s dead,” clipped Knox.
Shock stiffened every muscle in Tanner’s body, and all he could do was join the other sentinels in staring dumbly at their Prime.
“You may remember that I told Muriel to give me a list of whoever she wanted to be notified of Dale’s death,” Knox added. “Mattias’s name wasn’t on that list, but his cousin’s name was.”
“Noah,” Levi remembered. “Both their parents died in a car accident. Noah’s father was the driver.”
“Yes,” said Knox. “And Mattias blamed Noah’s father for the deaths, so he made that kid’s life a misery. Dale and Muriel befriended Noah, and I think they made things bearable for him to an extent. When I contacted him to inform him of Dale’s death, he wasn’t just horrified, he was shocked. Because Mattias was mutilated in the exact same way as Dale and Harry.”
Larkin sucked in a breath while Levi spat, “Fuck.”
Keenan pulled his flask out of his inner pocket. “That makes three people from Ramsbrook who’ve been—”
“Four,” corrected Knox.
Keenan did a double-take. “What?”
“Joseph Morgan was also on Muriel’s list,” said Knox. “He wasn’t taking my calls, but I didn’t think much of it until Noah told me about Mattias. On a hunch, I paid Joseph a visit. All I found was his mutilated, decomposing corpse. He’s been dead weeks.”
“Weeks?” echoed Larkin.
Knox nodded. “Looks to me like he was the first to die. And I’m not sure about any of you, but my view is that we were wrong in what we initially thought. Harry wasn’t killed because he knew something that Sloan wanted kept quiet. Someone is targeting people who stayed at Ramsbrook.”
“It makes the most sense,” granted Keenan. “But … why would they?”
Knox snorted. “I have no clue. I can’t think why anyone would want to remove someone’s eyes, ears, and tongue—nor why they’d prop them up against the wall in a very specific way. Is it some sort of message to the victim? Is it supposed to be somebody’s fucked-up idea of poetic justice?”
Poking his tongue into the inside of his cheek, Levi rubbed at his jaw. “It comes across as a punishment to me. The killer mutilated them while they were alive.”
“You know, other ex-Ramsbrook kids could be dead,” said Larkin.
“Yes,” agreed Knox. “But there’s no fast way to trace the whereabouts of all of them to find out—there was simply too many of them. Kids came and went from there all the time.”
Some were adopted, some died, some ran off, and some even committed suicide. Ramsbrook was no easy ride. “It’s possible that the killer’s just randomly picking off ex-Ramsbrook kids and employees, but it seems unlikely,” said Tanner.
Nodding, Larkin idly toyed with her braid. “There must be a specific reason why Harry and the others were chosen. It could have been something they did or something they failed to do. Something that made somebody feel the need to track down and kill them.”
Tanner perched himself on the arm of the sofa and folded his arms. “Either something occurred there that we don’t know about, or we’re making the mistake of thinking the killer is operating on logic.”
“You think they might be deranged or near-rogue?” Larkin asked him.
Tanner shrugged. “I’m just making the point that the motive only has to seem logical to the killer.”
Lips pursed, Knox inclined his head. “True enough. We know from our experiences with other near-rogues like Crow that, even though their minds are splintering, they truly believe they’re rational and in the right.”
“Personally, I don’t see how Mattias, Harry, Joseph, and Dale could have been jointly responsible for some sort of crime or accident that they were recently ‘punished’ for by some fuckedup vigilante.” Keenan took a long swig from his flask. “Neither Dale nor Harry had any time for Mattias or Joseph. No one had time for Joseph—he was almost as bad a bully as Mattias.”
“If the victims were staff members, I could understand it,” said Knox. “The punishments that some of them dealt out were quite severe. Severe enough to leave scars. And they were constantly fucking preaching at us …”
Knox’s voice faded away as something in Tanner’s brain clicked. His eyes fell shut as realization hit him like a ton of bricks. He rubbed at his face. “Shit, I should have seen it before.”
“What?” asked Levi.
Unfolding his arms, Tanner said, “I thought that gouging out the eyes, slicing off the ears, and cutting off the tongue was a symbolic punishment for being a plant. But it’s not that at all. What did the tutors always preach to us? See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”