Page 3 of Ricochet

Alec Vaughn.

Where my voice carried a deep, gruff quality, Alec’s was lighter, like a gentleman’s, betraying the fact that he happened to be a ruthless mastermind who’d made quite a name on the streets over the past few years.

I snarled at his question, grinding my teeth as I worked out a tingle in my jaw.

“Come now, hatred and vengeance aside, she’s a stunning creature. Surely you can appreciate that.” He stepped into view. Even smack in an abandoned shithole, Alec never failed to look meticulous with his three-piece suit and fedora.

Though our styles differed, Alec and I shared two similarities: we both knew a thing or two about computers and both of us carried an unquenchable thirst for revenge—only, I’d yet to discover the root cause of his. The only thing Alec had divulged about himself, aside from his name, was his talent for hacking and his penchant for hiding stolen money.

He’d come to me a while back with a proposition, one I couldn’t refuse—a well-constructed plan that was better than anything I had at the time. To exact revenge on the men who’d destroyed my life, and, ultimately, the smiling couple who mocked it every day.

I huffed at his intrusion, coaxing the lingering ache in my head with the heel of my hand. “How the hell do you always find me?”

“Public affair involving the Cullings. The only abandoned building with a sweet vantage point. It’s not rocket science, my friend.”

I smirked at that. “I look forward to the day I actually pull the trigger.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t done it yet.” A click preceded the warm scent of tobacco, and Alec moved beside me at the window, a thick Cuban cigar making my taste buds pucker. I’d never been one for smoking cigars, but damn, if every time the bastard lit up, I didn’t suddenly taste that smoky flavor. He flipped the cigar, and blew on the end of it, before tipping it back and putting it to his mouth.

“The bait worked,” I reluctantly confessed. “I’m sure you had no doubts.”

His eyebrow winged up. “You’ll do it, then?”

“Do I have a choice?”

A wicked smile danced across his face. “No.” He blew a plume of smoke into the air, parking the cigar between his teeth as he crossed his arms behind his back and paced. “I trust you’ve read the files.”

“Every word.”

A month earlier, Alec had handed off a chip, all smug and proud of himself. Police files. Criminal records for each of the men who broke into my home three years prior. Not just any men, though. Around Detroit, they were known as the Seven Mile Crew—the most ruthless band of contract killers the city had ever known. In a matter of just a few years, they’d snuffed the most dangerous gang members, quickly climbing ranks and banking cash. But they got greedy. Brandon Malone, their leader, and his brother, Julius, decided they didn’t want to be hitmen anymore. They wanted to be the bosses. So, they partnered with Culling in a quiet operation that would reduce the kingpins in the city, level some of the shit neighborhoods, and propel Brandon and his crew to an untouchable status.

The gangs and Culling’s closest confidantes knew it as The Culling, and it happened once a year, on the city’s most feared night of crime.

Detroit had always been notorious for shit going down on Devil’s Night. Arson, vandalism, murders. It waxed and waned with the enforcement method of each mayor, and had been at an all time high just before Culling took office. Under the guise of making legitimate arrests, Culling assembled a task force of Angels, to combat the crime on the surface, while underhandedly paying off the gangs to kill other gangs. Level a neighborhood and eliminate the smaller fish, all in one sweep.

To the rest of the public, it was a mysterious method that’d somehow begun to transform the shittiest neighborhoods in the city into something its people only saw in the surrounding suburbs. From trash to class, including fancy apartment complexes far too expensive for most of the existing Detroit natives.

For that very reason, I couldn’t just let the city’s justice system deal with the bastards. No way could I sit idly by after what they’d done, what they’d stolen from me.

For a price, a man could find any information he wanted in the underbelly of the internet, known as the deep net. ‘Place was an online convention of the world’s scum. Pedophiles, contract killers, serial killers—name it and it’d be there, in all its depravity. It was in that carnival of crooks that I found out it was Culling who’d paid the Seven Mile Crew to scour my old neighborhood, and the Chief of Police who supplied the names of drug dealers living nearby. Alec was able to cut a deal for access to the files—ones he was all too happy to deliver, damn near gift-wrapped, to me.

“And?” Alex prompted.

I knew what he referred to. His offer came with one stipulation that didn’t exactly blow my fucking skirt up, though. A task that’d been added to a perfectly good plan a couple months back. “I’m to kidnap Aubree Culling,” I said. “For what?”

He nudged his head toward the window. “Look at the way he looks at her.”

Below, Culling stood beside his wife , and even at that height, it wasn’t difficult to catch the adoration in his eyes. The way he gripped the back of her neck as the two stood off from the crowd talking to the news anchorwoman. The endless glances and smiles he gave every time Aubree spoke.

He leaned in and kissed her, the gesture curling my lip in repulsion. They’d been dubbed political sweethearts by the press—how fucking perfect—an image I’d have liked to blow away with a hollow point bullet.

“Don’t you remember that feeling?” Alec’s voice cut through my thoughts. “A man who’d kill for the woman he is clearly obsessed with. That’s the real pain.” His whisper drifted through my head, fogging all the images of the two of them lying in blood-soaked clothes. “Perhaps you might agree, death would’ve been easier. Living … now, that’s where the bullet hides its poison.”

The air turned thick, suffocating. My throat tightened, begging for a shot of whiskey, but I swallowed past the dryness. “Why not kill both of them? End it. Walk away with a smile, right here, right now.”

Alec’s chuckle bounced off the wall. “You know I can’t do that, Nick. I’ve too much at stake, for one sloppy kill.” As something of a masked marauder, Alec had developed a bit of celebrity status. A genius when it came to computers, with knowledge of even the most secure computer systems , he was known amongst hackers as the infamous Achilleus X, a trouble-making hacktivist with a talent for evading the authorities. “Besides, there’s the matter of a promise you made. Or have you forgotten?”

Motherfucker. Like knives twisting in my gut, his words cut deep. I’d vowed my own death to keep the promise I’d made to my dying wife. My teeth clenched together, trapping the anger parked on the tip of my tongue.