He might work with us right now, but we’ll never be on the same side.
RJ ignores him, the same as I do. “Honestly, I haven’t gotten to her request list.”
“Could I do it?”
He thinks for a minute. “Yeah. I think so. I’ll set you up when we get home.”
“Don’t forget we need to buy suits.”
Reed snaps to get our attention, and I want to break one of his fingers. “Will you keep monitoring?” he asks RJ.
“Of course. But will you do anything?”
Reed stares down at his cup. “If there were a reason for us to raid the place, maybe.”
“What would you need for you to raid it?” I ask, thinking through the pieces of our plan.
“Honestly, nothing short of a perfect case or shots fired would get us in there. Or an invitation to the auction.”
“Noted,” RJ says, that requirement added to his mental list of moving pieces we need to keep track of.
Reed glances between the two of us before holding out a hand to RJ. “Hand over what you’ve got. I’ll see what I can do.”
I spend the next week comparing lists of horrible men with their health records, the back doors into the medical record systems RJ set up over the years as creepy as they are necessary.
But one name keeps popping up: Bryce Mason.
This list is a death sentence, and I can’t decide if his name belongs next to convicted rapists who repeatedly break the terms of their parole, or the pedophiles who moved next to elementary schools but didn’t update their address with the registry.
So I put his name at the bottom of the list. Then, second guessing my choice, I write to Clara in the code we came up with, asking her thoughts. I can’t include it in a text, not with the weight the answer holds. It’s not my call to make.
That settled, I paint until the winter sun fades, dinner the farthest thing from my mind.
I’ll give her the note tomorrow. Then, I just have to wait for her response.
Three weeks.
Then either we’re free, or we’re fucked.
The shake in my lines is one I pretend is purposeful.
Chapter 39
Clara
The cabin is deep in the woods off a narrow, unplowed gravel path, the kind of place nobody would notice. The SUV inches through the snow, bouncing when it hits unseen obstacles beneath the blanket of white.
We visited the cabin this weekend, but that trip didn’t go as expected. It turns out the man currently trussed up in this torture cabin was the guy who introduced Bryce to online pedo video sharing. If I didn’t know this family better by now, I’d have thought they were giving me this man as a fucked-up peace offering.
Instead, he’s here because he leaked information about Trevor, and as Trevor’s too important to the plans their father has, this man has to disappear. Only the prisoner’s reaction to seeing me was creepy enough that everyone agreed we should regroup—delaying my descent into torturer, I suppose.
This is all so fucked up.
The message Walker passed to me via Jonah sits heavy in my mind, the same heaviness that presses me down the farther from the main road we get.
Where’s the line between evil and keeping my people safe?
The porch creaks as Trips and I step onto it, Falk our ever-present shadow. Trevor’s pet guard joins us, and it’s all I can do to keep my persona in place. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to torture and murder a man, no matter how vile.
