Shoving thoughts of my sexy, concerned redhead from my mind, I tapped the voice-to-text feature on my car phone and pulled up Vox’s thread.
Cal:
Yoooo, you at Apex?
Vox:
*Thumbs up emoji*
Perfect.
I hadn’t been lying when I told Ryan I actually had things to do. I had been slacking pretty hard on Damian’s request to hunt down that squad of killers, and if I pushed off progress anymore, there would be hell to pay.
Turning back onto the highway, I made my way to Apex and what was sure to be a night full of stalking and potentially a little bit of violence.
Just what I needed.
I foundVox in his room. Everyone who worked for Damian had a room on base. There was also a mess hall where we could eat in groups and prepare for missions when the task called for it.
Vox and I had rooms on the same floor. This entire floor used to be filled with children Damian had collected over the years.
Many of them had been taken over by hired mercs since I had worked with Damian to stop recruiting kids, but it didn’t stop this place from feeling haunted by their memories.
Damian found most of us the same way he found me. He had informants stationed in most major precincts, and they reported to him when a potential candidate came in.
He usually looked for children who had committed some form of homicide. He wasn’t picky about whether or not it was self-defense or a crime of passion. They just had to have shown some sort ofpotentialfor violence.
It made us easier to train.
Many of us didn’t make it to adulthood. The jobs we went on were dangerous, and most of us died in the field. Some kids never made it through training. Sometimes, their minds broke under the pressure. I wasn’t sure what Damian did with the kids who couldn’t handle it, but I told myself he put them back into group homes or something.
Maybe I was delusional, but I had to be sometimes, or my own mind would probably fucking break too.
I waltzed into Vox’s room to find him at his desk, typing away on some code that took up all three of his monitors. His room was essentially a cement box. There were no windows in here,but he had plastered the walls with metal posters over the years, and his electric guitar and amp were nestled in the corner.
Flopping onto his unmade double bed, I rested my elbows on my knees.
“Hey Voxy, how’s it hanging?” I asked, and he let out a silent sigh, spinning away from his screens to face me. He looked exhausted, and I suddenly felt bad for leaving him alone with this project for so long.
My gaze fell on the only other thing on his desk besides his monitors. It was a framed picture of him, me, and our friend Gavin from when we were kids.
I think we were sixteen when that photo was taken.
Gavin was smiling at me through the frame, his soft, light brown hair tumbling into his bright blue eyes. He looked like he should have been a surfer instead of a mercenary. Maybe he would have been if Damian hadn’t stolen him away.
Much like me, Damian had found Gavin in a precinct after he’d been scooped up for self-defense charges. He’d stabbed his father thirty-six times with a screwdriver after the man had beaten his twin brother to death in front of him.
Much like Vox and I, Gavin made it through the early rounds of training. It wasn’t until we were much older that he started to really fall apart.
We were in our early twenties when Gavin started talking about quitting Apex. At first, I thought he was crazy, but the more he talked about it, the more appealing the idea became.
Even Vox seemed tempted to join him.
Gavin knew Damian was holding my sisters over my head, and we had begun to plan a way to extrapolate them from his insanely complex web when suddenly, Gavin just… disappeared.
At first, I thought he had left without us, but deep down, I knew he would have never left us behind.
Vox thinks that Damian killed him.
