I sat alone in the Masked Merrow office, steeping in the darkest possible thoughts of self-deprecation, when I finally decided to call her fiancé, Joseph. I'm sure he was out of his mind with worry by now. She had been my body double for years, and not once did he seem to oppose her line of work as an escort or my decoy. He should have been the first person I called this morning, when I realized she was missing.
But I was a fucking coward. I hid behind the persona of the Red Riot's boss and worked on mob shit until there was nothing left to do. And I waited until just after eight in the evening to find the guts to call him. There was no one in this world I hated more than myself right now. I didn't even care that I was running on fumes. This call should have been my priority.
Their wedding invitation was sitting in the top right drawer of the very desk I sat behind. She was planning it for this winter. We had just gone cake sampling last month, and I crammed a piece into her mouth as we cackled and messed around in the bakery. I was going to be her maid of honor. And all I could do was stare at the desktop in silence after breaking the news of her death, forcing myself to listen as Joseph fall apart on the other end of the line. That was, until he began apologizing profusely.
To me. Joseph, Patty's high school sweetheart, was apologizing tome. Because his world was collapsing. I couldn't let him do that to himself.
“No.” The word burst from me like a bullet shot from a gun. “Joseph, you donotget to apologize to me. I’m the one… It’smy fault she’s…” My throat closed around the truth. Even after several hours of sitting with it, so many tears cried over it, I had to sit with the fact that if Patty had nothing to do with my fucked-up life, she would be marrying this wonderful man. “Of course, there will be a couple Riot guys watching over you for a while, just in case, and I’ll be sending her hazard pay to the account she had set up for direct deposit.”
“Fuck, Lore,” Joseph gasped, still struggling to gather his composure. “You know I don’t give a shit about that. I loved her… but I know you did too. I’m just… I’m so fucking sorry you had to find Patty like that. I know she wouldn’t have wanted that for you.”
Obviously, I wasn’t a total shit person; I hadn’t gone into detail on the extent of Patty’s mutilation. But Joseph was a smart man. He knew there were not many ways out of this life, and most of them were pretty violent. My mask sat staring back at me from where I’d tossed it on the desk before this phone call. It was like the weight of all my choices up until this point had been dumped on my shoulders all at once, bowing my back almost to the point of breaking. Patty Millsap was… she was my rock. She was the one who found me on the streets of Vegas when I fled here, wearing nothing but some ragged clothes and a cheap Halloween mask. She brought me into the Masked Merrow to introduce me to the previous owner I eventually bought the club from. She helped me get a job that paid under the table, let me live in her apartment, and cared for me like a mother, despite her being four years younger. When Lyre and Taylor came to look for me in Vegas, she was the one who stood between us until they could prove they were family who cared about my wellbeing. Patty had self-appointed herself as my protector long before she became my body double. I never told her my whole sordid past, but I think Patty caught on to enough to know she was the only person I had to cling to after I escaped fromElio. I couldn’t contact my family, and I had no one to rely on in America when I first snuck into the country by very illegal means.
I may have made it to this point in my life without her, but it would have been a miserable existence. And now she’s gone.
“… Lore?” Joseph’s voice broke through the deadening haze that smothered all thought. “You still there?”
I cleared my throat to answer. “Yeah, yeah, sorry.”
“It’s okay.” God, I didn’t deserve this poor man’s sympathy, or his kindness. “Listen, I’ve gotta… I need to go make some calls. Our families, um, they need to know.”
“Of course.” I tried to hide the deep sniffle with a breath. “Yeah, please let me know if you need help with anything. I’m feckin' serious. I know you’re not an official member, but you’re still one of us.”
“I know. Thanks, Lore.”
I sat on the line for a long time, paralyzed by the wild storm of emotions brewing in my head. It wasn’t like I was a stranger to death. But in the wake of mourning the loss of one of the most important people in my life, clarity born from rage bubbled low in my stomach, like a volcano building its strength. And Elio Messina was about to be fucking Pompeii. Speaking of, I could warm up on his vile son, currently locked in the club’s unofficial torture room.
A knock at the office door dragged me out of my downward spiral slightly, and I lifted my head. Jerel—who had slipped in at some point while I was borderline catatonic to plant himself on the sofa—set his laptop aside to answer the door. “How is she?” Taylor’s voice was subdued, but not low enough to miss.
“Come on in, T,” I sighed and rocked back in the desk chair. My fingers threaded together, and I pressed them against my burning eyes. “What else has hit the fan tonight?” A pounding headache was starting up, quickly gaining strength to the pointI almost flinched with every pulse. Something thudded on the desk. My hands shifted so I could peek beneath them to find the bottle of water Taylor brought with him. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet...” The solemn tone of his voice made my stomach twist with concern. Slowly, I tilted myself forward and slid my hands down to scrub my face in preparation for whatever he was about to waylay me with. “I figured you’d want to know about this.”
Taylor placed his phone screen-up in front of me and pushed it closer, pressing in his code upside down and pushing play on the voicemail that appeared behind the lock screen. It was from Grant. Specifically, the call was from his encrypted phone. He was supposed to be in Chicago by now, so why would he call Taylor?
“I swear to–” I was just about to bolt out of my chair until a voice came through the speaker that wasnotGrant’s. Actually, I could go the rest of my life without hearing this voice again. My knee-jerk reaction was to stop breathing, like I was the girl who threw herself off a balcony into the Mediterranean Sea all over again.
“Hello, little kit.”
A visceral reaction triggered from those three words, spoken inhissmooth voice, overcame me in an instant. I gagged violently. The trash can set at the corner of the desk was almost not close enough to catch the projectile vomit I spewed out. Both Jerel and Taylor swore and rushed around to help however they could, a hand sweeping my hair back and rolling the chair back while another moved the trash can closer as I retched again. My entire body revolted just fromhearingElio Messina’s voice. Dazed and emotionally drained, I flopped back into the chair while staring at the innocent phone as if it held a gun to my face.
The voicemail notification said it came just minutes ago. The implication was damning. I wanted to hurl again.
“We haven’t found anyone flying into Vegas from Italy, or on any connecting flights within the last week or so,” Taylor reported as I stared unblinkingly at the lit screen. “There’s a lot to comb through, but my guess is that if Elio is actually in Vegas, he drove in from out of state. It had to have been recently. And I’m wondering if–”
“The shooting at the club was supposed to be a distraction,” I finished. “Yeah, I’d say that was a pretty effective one. Motherfucker!” Just the assumption that Elio was here, in my city, under my nose for almost a week without me knowing, had my blood roaring in my ears. I felt like a fucking idiot, falling for something so simple! “Andrea sending Grant to muddy everything up should have tipped me off that some shit was about to go down. Fuck!”
I felt like an idiot.
“So… now what?” Taylor’s voice was full of apprehension. “We could get guys out on the street, but we haven't made much progress with finding what crevice Elio crawled into.”
Maybe it was impulsive. Maybe I’d dealt with enough bullshit today to not be bothered with the fallout. But I stabbed the contact card to call back Grant’s phone and propped the phone up on the water bottle, turning on the camera to start a video call. The other hand reached for my mask to slip on before the call connected, a necessary barrier to protect what I could. He picked up on the third ring.
That bastard’s ageless face filled the screen, and this time I managed to hold back another wave of nausea. He looked the same as he did ten years ago, right down to the perfectly coifed blond hair. He probably spent a literal fortune on work and Botox to keep his face looking like that. I knew for a fact the asshole was at least eighty now. Not old by shifter years, but certainly not the model-esque image he groomed himself into.Seeing his unchanged face brought those two nightmarish years back into crystal clear focus.
Keeping one hand out of frame, I clicked into a tracking program on Taylor’s phone that I could control remotely from my computer, and started running it on the call.
“Kit, thank you for the video call. It is so good to see your face again.”
