So far, all I’ve found is the thick treeline bracketing the road like guards. Nothing human would get through that in thisstorm, so I watch for fallen branches as the only opponent. Red and yellow and orange leaves twirl before they thwack violently alongside the rain on my windshield, and I curl my fingers tighter on the wheel. With my illegal tint, it makes the interior of the Jeep feel darker and more foreboding out here, but I’ve got a gun in the console alongside those coffin nails, so I’m not scared. I just want to know who the fuck is texting me and why they’re leaving threats at Sloane’s door. It has to be the same person, right?
Wolf,they called me.
If they work in my world and live in that big ass house I saw on the map, they’re not a street dealer and they’re not a step up. Something bigger. A boss? A supplier? But I don’t know of any of those in this area because I keep my nose in my own business. It’s not just my parents who want me to stick to Ellicottville. Franklin wouldn’t let me deal outside my space. I’ve got money, my family has money, but my coke dealing isn’t the only thing paying for my lifestyle and pills usually don’t build this type of empire. Not anymore. I mean, they did pay for the Armani shirt I’m wearing and the slacks too, but I work at the marina and I do runs for Dad when we’re on speaking terms. Runs with envelopes of evidence I never look inside and don’t want to know about. Not drugs, he always tells me, and I usually believe him. After what I saw in the hotel room, I believe him that much more.
My parents don’t play.
I don’t want to do what they do and that’s why I don’t let them pay for anything of mine, but they’d already saved nearly a hundred grand in an account for me by the time I turned eighteen. They didn’t tell me about it until last year. They probably thought it would make up for when I saw a woman’s throat pooling with blood before it spread over our kitchen floor, Dad on his knees on top of her, the tang of death in the air.
They thought wrong.
I remember trying to tell Cortland. How I’d seen my first corpse. But my best friend was going through his own shit, and even if he hadn’t been, I knew then I couldn’t bring him into this anymore. We don’t talk like we used to because I don’t want to put him in danger.
Regardless, I have access to the money now but I haven’t touched it. I’m letting it grow and I’ll be damned if whoever lives on this street thinks they’re going to blackmail me for it.
Judging by what I’m seeing though, they wouldn’t need it. So if money isn’t the motive, what the fuck is?
I duck my head and stare at the twists and turns of the road curving ahead. The trees don’t get any thinner and the rain isn’t letting up. I consider turning around but decide against it. I need to see this house at the very least. At most, I’m going to confront the fucking owner. I’m not scared of much and it’s not because I think I’m invincible. It’s something worse.
I run the back of my hand over my nose and bump the hoop in it, wincing as I do. Laying off the coke has helped it heal better; I’ve had my nose pierced for years now but blow makes everything in that area sensitive. Thinking of it, I want some, but I tamp it down.
I’m not an addict.Dad made me say it one hundred times in the hotel. I could barely speak when he let me stop, my voice was so fucking hoarse.
The road turns again and I hug the curves, wondering if I’ll see another vehicle passing the opposite way. But in this weather, I don’t think so.
I glance in my rear view for the same reason though, just to check. Nothing but dark skies and winding asphalt.
This is not how I expected to spend my day off but someone is fucking with me and I’m not going to my dad to ask who it is and I’m not going to play games with them. And maybe this partsucks but I think of Sloane across from me at The Veil staring out the window and I swallow hard. Did I enjoy it? Yeah. I did.Thatdidn’t suck.
She’s a break.
She’s not real.
I could tell the way she looked at me when I told her what I could do to her with those coffin nails, she could never be for me. She’s too perfect, tooclean.
She wouldn’t let me ruin her, and I’m glad. I need boundaries.
She’s a daydream. Nothing more.
And the way she wouldn’t answer me about fuckingDax, another asshole I have to snoop around about when I’m done on Riddle Lane, it’s proof of that. We couldn’t be together. She’s not made to be a dealer’s girlfriend, not right now, probably not ever, and what am I made for? Fucking my best friend’s girl? Yeah. The last time I slept with someone besides the latex covered escort over the summer, it was Remi and technically, Cortland. That’s never going to happen again because he’s even more psychotic about her now but it was hot and do I think about it when I get myself off alone in my room? More than I’d like to admit. I don’t want Remi anymore though, and I don’t want Cortland like that, but it’s the last time I touched anyone willingly so it’s stuck in my head on a loop.
Yet the night after I saw Sloane, her finger in my mouth playing over and over got me there, and much quicker too. And today, watching her suck whipped cream off herself, yeah, that’s going to stay burned into my brain?—
Fuck.
I slam on the brakes and the Jeep jerks forward then back, my body moving with it as the tires slide a little on the fresh asphalt. I glance to the right and see a ravine filled with trees and a streaming body of water: a fast moving fucking river.
My pulse ticks as I snap my head up and watch the black Range Rover’s driver’s door open. I don’t bother waiting to see who it is, the way they skidded to a stop in front of me so I can’t pass and there’s no way I can do a U-turn right here. I snatch the weapon from the console, my finger on the trigger. There’s no safety on a Glock, well, there is technically, but if I pull this trigger, someone is getting hurt.
The Range’s door shuts and I inhale deep through my nose and out through my mouth as a man dressed in dark denim and an army green polo saunters right up to the hood of my Jeep. He has on a ball cap but he lifts his head and stares right at me. He’s older, I believe close to fifty now, and I know exactly who the fuck he is.
My pulse skyrockets but I don’t dare look away from him, standing like a hardass in the rain. There’s enough space between me and his fancy status symbol vehicle that I can smash him between the grill of both of them and I consider it.
Lynx Flynn.
He’s a psychopath.
I know from experience and not just my own.
