AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dragging in a slow breath, I hurried upstairs to our bedroom.
Groot looked up from the middle of our bed, ears pricked. From our bathroom, the sound of Ronnie singing Guns and Roses’s “Welcome to the Jungle”—excellent song—wafted through the open door.
Pulling another slow breath, I crossed to the bathroom and stuck my head into the room. “Going to put out the trash, babe,” I called.
“’K,” she called back.
Putting the trash out required a long walk down the driveway to the gate, waiting for it to open, and then walking back to the house. If Ronnie heard someone in the house during the next ten minutes, she’d know it wasn’t me.
Fuck, why did she even have to be aware of something like that?
Because my old fucking life meant we were never going to be—
“Groot, stay here,” I ordered.
Groot cocked his head on the side and barked once.
“Good dog,” I said, leaving the room.
I snatched up a pair of my running shoes, yanked them on, and ran from the house.
Not because I thought I’d catch the person wearing the hoodie who’d pressed the buzzer at the gate, but because I wanted to see what they’d been doing when they bent down.
It’d been a deliberate move. They’d put something on the ground. Left it there. But what? I mean, it could be something as simple as a take-out flyer from the new Thai restaurant that’d opened up in town last week, but I’d lived enough of my life neck-deep in shit and danger to be wary now.
Gut clenching again, I increased my speed.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled as I approached the closed gate. My blood roared in my ears. Body thrumming, nerves jacked-up, muscles in the same hyper-alert state, I checked out the empty road and bushland beyond the thick steel bars.
No movement.
We were miles from another house on a dead-end road that finished at the top of a cliff overrun with wild shrubs and vines. No one drove down the road on their way to somewhere else. No one wandered down the road looking for a gate to buzz.
The only way to get onto our road was a right turn four miles away.
Whoever had pressed our gate’s buzzer had come here deliberately.
But why?
Heart thumping, I stepped up to the gate and looked through the gap between the bars.
“Fuck,” I muttered. “Not a take-out flyer.”
A small box, no bigger than a pack of playing cards, sat on the ground. Matte-black and tied with what looked like a thin black silk ribbon, it was almost comically absurd sitting there on the gravel.
Muscles coiling, ready to strike out, I keyed my security code into the control panel on the inside of the gate’s brick pillar.
The low hum of expensive machinery filled the air, and slowly the gate rolled opened. Not all the way, just enough for me to step through.
I scanned the area again.
Again, nothing.
Not even a fucking bird whistling or swooping through the air.
On edge, I picked the box up from the ground.
Light. Whatever was in it hardly weighed a thing. Which meant it couldn’t be a bomb. And really, who would deliver a bomb to my front gate? Especially one small enough to fit in a box this size?
