The sun came up slow and gray through Camille’s living room windows. I’d been sitting in the same position for four hours, Mehar’s head on my shoulder, my gun on the armrest, my eyes on the front door. Rider was across the room in a chair by the window with his weapon in his good hand even though his left wrist was wrapped in a dish towel full of ice.
At 9:47 AM a key turned in the front door lock.
I moved Mehar’s head gently off my shoulder and stood up. Rider raised his weapon. I positioned myself behind the wall that separated the foyer from the living room and waited.
The door swung open. Mega walked in carrying a bag from Home Depot and a coffee. He took two steps inside and saw Rider’s gun pointed at his face and the coffee hit the floor.
“Don’t,” I said from behind him.
He spun toward my voice and my fist met his jaw before he finished the turn. He stumbled backward into the door and I hit him again, in the stomach this time, and he doubled over and the Home Depot bag fell and I grabbed the back of his neck and drove his face into my knee. Something crunched. Blood sprayed. He dropped to the tile floor gasping.
“Where is my sister?”
“Quest, listen to me.” He held his hands up.
I kicked him in the ribs. He rolled onto his side wheezing.
“Where is Serenity?”
“I did all of this because of your mother!” He was spitting blood and talking fast, the way men talk when they know the next wrong answer might be their last. “Vivica hired me. She reached out to me months ago through a connect inside theprison. She told me to hire the Vipers, to target the warehouse, to get close to Serenity for information. All of it. I was working for her.”
I stood over him and let those words sit in the room. My mother. Vivica Banks. The woman who lied about my father, who orchestrated the attacks on my business, who used Mega as a puppet to tear my family apart from the inside. I filed that away because right now Serenity was the priority and Vivica was in a cell where she’d stay until I was ready to deal with her.
“I don’t care who hired you,” I said. “Where is my sister?”
“I’ll tell you where she is. But please don’t kill me. Please, Quest. I’ll tell you everything. Just promise me you won’t kill me.”
He was crying. Full tears, snot, blood from his broken nose mixing with the tears running down his face. This was the man who kidnapped Serenity, got her hooked on cocaine, beat her, assaulted her, and used her as a pawn. And now he was on Camille’s foyer floor crying and begging for his life.
“I promise I won’t kill you slowly,” I said. “When it happens, it’ll be quick. That’s the best I’m offering. Now talk.”
“She’s at a motel outside Berryville. The Mountain View Inn off Route 340. Room 6. She’s there.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah, alone. I left her there when Camille called.”
“Tied up?”
He hesitated. That hesitation told me everything.
“Did you tie my sister up and leave her alone in a motel room?”
“I had to. She would’ve run.”
I wanted to kill him right there. Every cell in my body was screaming at me to put a bullet in his skull and step over him and keep moving. But a scream from the back of the condo stopped me.
“CAMILLE?” Lyric’s voice, panicked. “Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with the baby!”
“She’s faking,” I said.
“She’s not faking.” Mehar was already on her feet, moving toward Camille. She looked down at the floor, then at Camille’s face, then back at me. “Her water broke, Quest. This is real. She’s in labor.”
“Now? Right now?”
“Babies don’t wait for convenient timing.”
Camille came stumbling out of the hallway gripping the wall with one hand and her belly with the other. Her face was twisted in pain and there was fluid running down her legs and she was breathing in sharp gasps.
