“When did he leave?”
“His shift was over like an hour ago.”
Fuck.I stormed by, nearly body checking him on my way out.
“Should I tell him you stopped by?” the man called behind me.
I didn’t bother to answer and looked up and down the street when I stepped outside.I’m putting a tracker on him. And sewing a phone to his ear,I decided, speeding away from the fish shop and the few blocks over to his shithole apartment.
It annoyed me that he wasn’t where I’d left him. Didn’t he know to wait for me? I thought back to this morning when he seemed uncertain if he really would be coming back to my place.
Am I coming back later?The vulnerable way he’d asked that, standing there with those two death-defying plants dirtying up my sink—it was almost as though he hadn’t understood when I called him mine.
I would have to make it crystal clear.
Every streetlight lining the sidewalk was busted, shrouding the entire block in black. I pulled up to the curb and scanned the road and nearby buildings. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I pocketed the keys and got out of the car. I didn’t know what apartment was his or even what floor he lived on, but as I stepped into the building, someone else was coming out. I grabbed him by the front of his coat, whirling around to pin him into the doorjamb.
“What apartment does Haz live in?” I asked.
“Top floor. Number five.”
I let him go and looked for the elevator, but there wasn’t one, so I headed up the stairs. The enclosed, dirty space remindedme of unsavory places I’d been to in the past. Nothing good ever happened in places like this, and it made my skin crawl that this was Haz’s norm.
The second I stepped into the hallway of the fifth floor, I knew something was wrong. Without hesitation, I charged forward, seeing the wide-open door up on the left.
“Haz,” I called before I even stepped past the busted wood with the number five in the center.
This morning, Haz said he wanted to clean up before I saw the place, but the complete fiasco my eyes feasted on was definitely not from him. The shoebox apartment was completely tossed. There wasn’t one thing left unturned.
Jaw clenched, I grabbed the gun tucked in the waistband of my pants at my back. The black trench I wore swished around my legs as I swept the place, and I couldn’t decide if I hoped I found him here or gone.
When I discovered the bullet holes in the drywall, couch, and the open door of the fridge, my blood turned to ice. I was not a man who knew fear because how could I fear anything when I simply didn’t care?
So this twisting, almost panicked sensation trying to tie my insides into a knot was foreign and, for a split-second, almost crippling. It was worse than I thought, my obsession with Hazard.
I cared.
I didn’t just feel territorial, fascinated, and aroused by him.
I cared.
I wasn’t upset that someone was messing with what was mine. I was worried for his well-being.
If something happened to him…I shut down that fissure of panic. I needed to focus.
Whoever did this will see the devil long before I send them to hell.
I stalked to the broken window to peer out onto the fire escape, but my stare caught on the red smears on the broken glass.
Infernal rage smoldered inside me, the temperature so blistering it only proved I was capable of devilry here on Earth.
Footfalls heavy, I backtracked past the cracked door to the apartment across the hall.
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.“Open up,” I demanded. “I’m not leaving until you do.”
The slide of a chain and the unlatching of a few locks were followed by the door opening a mere crack.
My hand slammed on the wood and shoved, the body behind it stumbling back as it sprang wide. “Where is he?” I demanded.
