“What if I want to go south?” Enzo asks.
Jesus Christ, this arsehole makes me homicidal. “What are you, fucking six? Go south then!”
He tilts his head, considering me. “You’re cranky for a guy who got laid last night.”
“Well, you’ve managed to kill my buzz, so thanks for that.” I look pointedly to the south. “I’m heading out.”
“Ah, ah!” Enzo starts jogging in that direction. “I’m taking south. You go north.”
Deacon’s body lies rotting in the south end of the forest. I knew that Enzo, who has the intellect and uncontrollable childishness of a first grader, would insist on picking whatever location I seemed to want. Shaking my head, I head north, which was always the plan. That manky prick will be the one to find the corpse.
I stroll around the beach on the north end of the island until I get the call. “Deacon’s dead,” Enzo blurts before I can speak. “He’s in a clearing about half a mile in, I nearly stepped on him.”
For a guy who enjoys breaking bones, he sounds mighty upset. Maybe he’s confronting his own mortality? The Lords are blessed with a complete lack of human decency and a highly elevated level of entitlement. Realizing that he’s not immortal is shaking Enzo up.
Good.
Now to pretend I give a shite about Deacon’s death. “Call Leo. Drop a pin on your phone so he can find you. I’ll send in some men to carry the body back. Can you see what happened?”
“Yeah, he was strangled with his own fucking whip.,” Enzo snarls, “it’s pretty goddamn clear.”
“Who could get the drop on Deacon?” I muse, strolling along the trail. “And with the whip? Where were Brennan and the second guy?”
“I was beating the shit out of Brennan,” he says. “We can track back on the surveillance to see who encountered Denton.”
“That’s the other guy’s name?” I ask. “He looked too scared to be here. I expected him to climb a tree and hide there for the rest of the night. But let’s rule him out.”
“Fuuuuck, I’m not going to be the one to tell Richard his brother’s dead,” he groans. “Get your ass here.”
Smiling malevolently, I say, “Richard’s going to be there any minute. I’m on the other side of the island. Suck it up. One of our own is dead.”
“Yeah…”
“See you back at the house.” I hang up, my grin stretching to feral proportions. I briefly despised myself last night for not feeling anything when I stood over Deacon’s dead body. Now, I feel satisfaction. He was going to hurt my Luna, kill her most likely because he couldn’t handle a woman calling him a little bitch.
Nice to know I can still feel something. Feck, this assignment has gone on too long.
Chapter Eight
In which there is pigeon and bullets.
Luna…
Looking around the opulent suite, I suck in a deep breath and hold it. After losing my parents, I learned to stave off anxiety attacks by holding my breath until sparkles flitted through my vision, and then I’d let it out in a long exhale. If I did it long enough, I wouldn’t cry and rock in the corner of my room while Aunt Martha yelled at me to shut up.
I haven’t been alone since waking up yesterday morning on my lumpy mattress at the hostel in London. The sudden silence is jarring.
For the first time, I let the sheer unreality of the last twenty-four hours sweep over me. I swear, I’ve been so careful, reading all the warnings for women traveling alone, all the horror stories about being kidnapped by human traffickers. The warnings never included a private island, a mansion, and a nauseating array of murderous, wealthy sociopaths chasing suckers like me through the woods.
Shuddering, I have to accept that so far, I’ve been lucky. Wallace is likely no better than his fellow “Lords,” but he protected me from Deacon, and apparently, he knew where Marla was hidden all this time and didn’t send anyone after her.
Pacing the room, I try to come up with a plan. Could I steal that yacht still tied up to the dock? It’s a brilliant idea, aside from the fact that I know nothing about boats. Do they drive like a car? The closest I’ve ever come to a watercraft is a beat-up canoe that Pop used for fishing.
Wait.
Guns. These are definitely the kind of people who would stockpile weapons. Hurrying over to the desk, I yank open the top drawer. Nothing there but a collection of pens. The next three drawers are empty, but the bottom one is locked, presumably to keep me from his iPad.
I don’t know how to pick a lock.
