With no real evidence, Eve decided she believed the woman completely.
So much so that she took her cell phone off the nightstand, hid it under the blanket on the bed and grabbed her coat.
She was out the window and running before the door to the bedroom even opened.
THE WINDOW WAS OPEN, and Eve was gone.
Good girl, Darius thought, gun to his back, and the man holding it laughing behind him.Now, stay gone this time.
“I guess some things just don’t change,” the man said. “If there’s a window, Eve surely will find a way through it.”
The man must have shrugged. The gun moved against him slightly.
“I suppose I should have been quieter, though,” he continued. “But you know what they say about hindsight. Twenty-twenty and all that.”
Darius was hurting. Not only had the man gotten inside the house and beaten him good, Darius had let it happen. All because of the picture the man had showed him on his phone.
A picture of Winnie and her father, tied up and bloody somewhere nondescript.
It had been the master key to every space in both of Darius’s houses.
A master key that would have broken, had Eve not fled through the bedroom window.
Darius was glad for her quick thinking so she was out of danger.
But also because of who the man was.
This time, Darius had recognized his attacker.
This time, he knew the danger had pushed them all to the brink.
“I should have kept better track of you,” Darius bit out, turning to face the fourth gunman of the week. “Last I heard, you were incarcerated in Tennessee.”
Jon Decanter had aged, and not just in the simplest of terms. Time had been unkind to him, taking a boy who had been Darius’s age and making him a man who appeared older, more worn and grizzled. His clothes gave him the appearance of a PTO dad, but the scars along his jaw and arms spoke to a different kind of lifestyle.
His gaze, however, hadn’t changed.
Hate rested there.
Angry and all too familiar.
“You track me?” Jon laughed again, the sound chilling. “Like little Evie would let you do that. After what she did, after the prank I pulled on you? I’m surprised she left you to me now, if I’m being honest. Then again, it’s easy to be brave as a kid who doesn’t know the world yet. Now that she’s had a taste of money and fame, I’m sure she won’t risk that for some lowly detective who never could move on.”
Darius balled his fist.
He could disarm Jon right then and there. Get the gun with or without one of them getting hit in the process and really give it to his personal ghost from the past.
But.
If the adult Jon was anything like the kid Jon, then there was an element of instability and callousness to him that could destroy any chances of Darius saving Winnie and her father.
Or Eve, if she decided to climb back through another window to try and save him.
Darius decided the best plan was to see whatJon’splan was—and quickly.
“If tying a kid up to a piece of industrial equipment to slowly get mutilated is a prank, then I’d hate to see what you think a good joke is.”
Jon must not have liked the snark. He pushed the barrel of his gun harder into Darius’s back. Normally, the pressure wouldn’t bother him, but it just so happened to be the area that had been kicked repeatedly by the demon in humans’ clothes behind him.
