“Over here,” Axe said, pointing past an old tree that had been knocked down, lying on its side. Just past it, a man with a slit across his throat, his eyes wide and stuck in pursuit. His body had been cut in half, the limbs broken into pieces, left in a pile together. I didn’t know him by name, but I recognized him. He was one of the newer guards, having worked here for two years or less.
Whoever had done this, had killed the man, thenchosento chop him up into pieces. I would have guessed it was for transport, but he was left behind as if they had wanted us to find him.
“A warning?” I asked.
Axe shrugged.
“A dropped attempt?” Derek asked.
Axe motioned with his hand for us to follow him. There was more? That wasn’t good.
A few yards away, through a clearing of ivy, a naked woman lay on her side, her hands covering her stomach. Axe pushed his boot over her arm, and her hands jerked away, revealing a deep cavity. A bullet wound.
“You think he shot her?” I asked.
“How?” Derek asked. “His throat was slit.”
“Enough adrenaline and you can pull the trigger,” Axe said. I believed him. He knew how to get the adrenaline going in the most resistant victims.
“So, he shot her and thought she was dead. Or maybe he was still hunting her,” I pieced together, trying to get the story straight in my head. “But then she snuck up from behind and cut his throat?”
None of us said a word. Sage City had been in our family’s territory for generations, and while we had the occasional dispute with our rivals, nothing like this had happened before. Our feuds were usually dealt with by gun on the streets or out of sight. But we had never had an enemy hunting our guards, especially not so close to our family’s house.
“The woman was found here too, right?” Derek asked.
He meant Ellie. She had been found naked too, though Axe had said she was untouched, too frantic to be a threat. The only scrape on her chest had been from a twig she had brushed against when he saw her trying to run away.
But anyone could act. That included Ellie. She could have been hiding anything.
“We should stay here for a while,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the Adler House, where our parents lived. We had a rotating group of men surveilling the woods, but I wanted someone inside of the house too. “We can take shifts,” I continued, “Guarding the house. At least until we’ve got this figured out.”
“You’ve got that woman to deal with,” Derek said, shaking his head.
“She has a name,” I muttered. “I can keep Ellie in the workroom.” I turned to Axe. “You’ve got room, right?”
Derek shook his head again. “Forget about that. Axe and I will stay here. But that woman, Ellie, she’s connected to this. Can you get information out of her?”
What he was asking was whether I was willing to use creative methods to see what she knew. Methods like Axe often used. I didn’t like the idea of torturing her just to get information, but if I did it simply because I wanted to fuck her, somehow, that was better.
Two birds, one stone. You did what had to be done when it came to family. Someone was clearly trying to go after Gerard. It was up to us to protect our family’s legacy.
I nodded. “Got it.”
I checked the security system on my phone. Ellie was in the shower, sitting on the stone floor, her knees bent in front of her, her arms wrapped around her legs. I clicked the rewind button and saw that she had been in there for over an hour, sitting and waiting. Her lips moved as if she wasn’t alone, but when I turned up the volume, no words came out. The hairs on my neck stood up.
Last night, once I brought out the knife, something had changed inside of her. Her eyes went from violent and vengeful, to terrified. Beads of sweat gathered above her lip, and a single tear ran down her cheek. I could have fucked her right then. Could have established that power dynamic and made her see that I would always take what I wanted, whenever I wanted. That I didn’t care if she was crying.
But I couldn’t do that. If I had made her cry, then hell yes, I’d fuck her. But her fear was focused on the knife. I had to figure out why she had that fear before I could move on.
I might not have understood where she was coming from, but I knew, without a doubt, that there was another layer to the mystery. One I intended to decipher.
By the time I got back to the penthouse and had changed back into a suit, she was dressed, sitting on the rooftop, looking out at the horizon. A loose tank top hung on her chest, her light brown hair whipping past her shoulders. It was always colder up there; I’d have to send Maddie to get Ellie more clothes.
Ellie looked at me, her eyes blank.
“Let’s go,” I said, gesturing for her to follow me.
We were silent on the way to Jimmy’s, but what was there to talk about? I wasn’t going to keep her in the penthouse, not when we had found three people dead in the woods, and she was the only one who had lived.
