Seth pointed at the blue dot on the map, and Kaydon slammed the car into drive, whipping it the other way.
“We don’t need the airport. Jonathan lives a few miles from here,” Kaydon explained, knuckles whitening around the steering wheel.
Bryson gripped his seat belt, wincing as the sudden stop jarred his side. All this time, Jonathan had been less than ten minutes away. Anger rose in him, but with every mile they covered, relief edged in—maybe they could still make it in time to stop whatever was happening.
Light started to peek out over the horizon and Bryson had to avert his eyes from the blinding glare.
Bryson pulled down the collar of his shirt, glancing in the passenger mirror, surveying the damage. The tube in his chest was new, and fresh stitches lined the surrounding tissue. The area was clean and bandaged perfectly.
“That patch-up won’t hold for long,” Seth warned quietly. “You’ve got maybe an hour before those stitches start to give.”
Bryson forced himself to breathe deeply, willing the pain to stay buried. “We’ll deal with that later,” he muttered. If Jonathan had already hurt Adria—if they were too late—there’d be nothing left to fix. This was his fault. She’d tracked them down trying to protect him. Maybe this time he could return the favor.
He glanced at Seth in the rearview mirror and said, “Thanks, Killer, you did good.”
Seth held his gaze in the mirror while reaching up and squeezing Bryson’s good shoulder. “Let’s go get our girl.”
Gravel spat from the tires as Kaydon tore into the driveway. Bryson ignored the ache in his chest and shifted carefully so as not to jar his ribs, hand already on the door handle as the car scraped past an ornate stone sign reading “Balin.”
Another two vehicles were already parked in the driveway. Bryson’s legs burned as he got out of the car. Each step reminding him to move gingerly. Despite his injuries, the three fell into a practiced formation, weapons drawn, gear still smeared with the blood from Regan’s guards.
Cold sweat pricked at Bryson’s neck when they saw the front door was ajar. Kaydon and Seth slipped in first; Bryson followed, wincing as he twisted through the threshold.
The front hall was empty. Bryson pressed himself against the wall, every footstep echoing in his skull. He tried to steady his breathing, but each inhale made his side protest.
At the first corner, Bryson saw the first sign of violence. A body was slumped against the paneled wall, head leaning against a trail of blood that started about three feet higher. Seth knelt—felt the figure’s neck and gave a soft shake of his head. Dead—one of Jonathan’s men, if the uniform was any indication.
Two more bodies lay in shallow pools of blood a little further down the hall. Each victim executed with a single bullet to the head. Bryson swallowed hard, every nerve on fire. They moved silently to a grand staircase. Kaydon took point, Seth behind him, then Bryson at the rear.
At the top, six bodies lay crumpled, not neatly shot but beaten and left to bleed out. One man still gurgled, muffled beneath the weight of the corpses above him. Bryson found his gaze lingering on the scene, before he signaled to the others to press on.
After clearing several rooms—each a tableau of its own violence—Bryson rounded a final corner and froze. A cold barrel of metal pressing against his temple.
“I should’ve known it was you three making all that noise,” Eric’s gravelly voice rumbled. Relief washed through Bryson as the gun shifted away.
“Where is she?” Bryson rasped.
Eric nodded toward the dark threshold behind him without a word.
Kaydon and Seth slipped past him, but Bryson lingered.
Why was Eric just standing there?
She couldn’t be dead. With grim determination, he limped under the frame into the room beyond.
CHAPTER 12
NEW YORK
The vast bedroom sprawled before Bryson, floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the early morning fog like a morbid painting. A forgotten basketball game flickered on the 70-inch TV mounted to the wall, its commentators’ voices reduced to an unintelligible murmur. Their animated gestures reflected distortedly in the ornate, gold-trimmed mirror that dominated the side wall, creating twin spectacles of normalcy in the house of horrors.
The smell that hit Bryson was a mixture of decomposing plants and iron.
As he ventured deeper into the room, the plush carpet muffling his footsteps, a high-pitched sound sliced through the air. Almost like someone was crying.
Heart hammering, he rounded the marble corner. There, amid gleaming fixtures and polished stone, sat Adria. Surrounded in porcelain white, she leaned her head against the golden flecked-tile.
Seth and Kaydon stood near her, but she wasn’t crying. She was laughing.
