I knew he’d meant the words to comfort but they didn’t – they just reminded me of the lie I’d been living in from the moment Mace had walked into my gallery. I remembered the hatred in his eyes when he’d first looked at me and a shiver went through me.
“I saw it that first day,” I whispered.
“Saw what?”
“He wanted to hurt me. I was afraid of him but then he helped me. Some wood fell in the studio and he stopped it from hitting me.” I shook my head. “Why would he do that?”
Cole’s fingers began massaging my neck and I had to admit, it felt good.
“Because he knew on some level that whatever that shit someone told him you did wasn’t true. He was watching you long before he met you, Jonas. He probably had a lot of chances to hurt you but something held him back.”
My whole body began to shake as the reality I hadn’t even dealtwith hit me. Mace was a murderer. He’d been hired to kill me which meant he’d likely done it before.
“I need a little more time, Cole,” I managed to say.
Cole nodded, his hand on my neck tightening just a little bit. And then he did something I hadn’t been expecting. He leaned forward and brushed his lips over mine. The contact was brief but it left me reeling. He released me the second his lips left mine and then stood.
“I left some breakfast on the nightstand,” I heard Cole say as he moved towards the door. “Come down when you’re ready.”
I nodded but didn’t look at him. As soon as I heard the door close, I lifted my fingers to my mouth which was still tingling. Cole kissing me was almost too much for me to handle. Almost. Because even though I couldn’t process what it meant, the warmth that spread through me afterwards helped chase some of the coldness away and I managed to climb to my feet.
As I made my way to the bathroom, I saw a cup of coffee sitting on the nightstand next to a plate stacked high with pancakes. I ignored the food and drink and went to the bathroom. I noticed the busted door but couldn’t remember how it had gotten that way. I didn’t remember much after climbing in the shower and letting the hot water wash over me.
I managed to find a new toothbrush in the cabinet under the sink and scrubbed my teeth and then got dressed. My clothes had been sitting on the end of the bed and I could see that they’d been freshly laundered. I eyed the food again but couldn’t stomach the idea of trying to force it past my lips. I took a couple sips of the coffee in the hopes that it would take away some of the exhaustion I was feeling. The coffee was sweeter than I’d expected and I wondered if Cole had made the assumption I liked it that way, or if Mace had had a hand in it since he knew I only ever ordered flavored lattes when I went to the coffee shop down the street.
The reminder of my daily coffee runs had me remembering the studio as bullets had started flying and tearing into the walls around us as we’d huddled on the ground. Only I hadn’t huddled when the first bullet had torn through the space – Mace had used his body topush me out of the way and shield me. And at some point, he’d gotten shot in the process.
I shouldn’t care. I didn’t.
Frustration tore through me as my inner voice called me a liar, and it nagged me even as I left the room and walked down the stairs as images of the blood that had stained my shirt washed over me. Mace’s blood.
I didn’t hear anything once I reached the first floor but the layout of the house was pretty simple and I found the kitchen with little trouble. But as I walked through the entryway, I spied motion to my right and saw Mace sitting at a small table in the alcove that the owner of the house used as a dining area. Cole stood next to Mace and I felt a little sick as I realized what he was doing. Mace’s flesh was torn open on his left bicep and Cole was in the process of stitching it closed. Mace didn’t even make a sound as the needle pierced his skin repeatedly but when his eyes caught mine, he flinched and then dropped his gaze. I couldn’t remember any time that Mace had actually looked afraid of me, not even last night when I’d held the gun on him, but that was exactly how he looked now. Like he wanted to be anywhere else.
Cole noticed me and then motioned to the chair at the opposite end of the table. I didn’t want to be so close to Mace but I knew I didn’t have a choice. The sooner we figured out what was going on, the sooner I could get away from both men. I’d already made a plan to call Devlin and Casey the first chance I got. As much as I liked being able to do things on my own like starting my studio, I had absolutely no qualms about relying on Devlin’s power and connections to help get me out of whatever mess I’d been tossed into.
Cole kept stitching as he said to Mace, “Tell us, Mace. Everything.”
It felt strange to not have Mace’s eyes on me when he spoke since he’d always been so direct with how he looked at or spoke to me in the past.
“The group I work for…we monitor a lot of different channels to pick out potential marks.”
I swallowed hard at the term but held my tongue.
“But we mostly use the Deep Web,” he said.
“What is that?” I interjected.
“It’s the internet beneath the internet so to speak,” Cole said as he continued to drive the needle through Mace’s skin before tying off the thread. “There’s a lot of illegal shit there including black markets for everything from stolen credit cards to body parts to child pornography.”
I found myself wanting to throw up again. Mace lived in a world where looking through that kind of shit was normal?
“You found my name there?” I said in horror.
“Our tech guy, Benny, has algorithms that look for certain crimes,” Mace said quietly. “From there we look at police reports, trial transcripts, whatever we need to determine if we should step in. Crimes against kids are high on our list. We also look for people who are trying to hire hitmen to take out a spouse or a loved one and we step in and stop it.”
“You kill them? The people you decide are guilty?”
I saw Mace flinch at that but then he stiffened. “We do what it takes get the innocent victims justice.”
