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Blaze was grabbing his laptop and assorted other devices off the desk, shoving them into a large satchel. “I texted you so that you could keep an eye out for danger and avoid it where you were,” he said to me, his tone dry but with a hint of frustration.
“Well, I’m happy I came back,” I retorted, “or you all could have been killed.”
He made a face, but none of them disputed that fact.
I only had a small bag of belongings that I refused to leave behind, so I rushed to the side of my bed, stepping over corpses as I went. I always kept my things ready to go at a moment’s notice anyway, so all I had to do was sling the bag over my shoulder.
“You don’t have any idea who these people are?” I asked over my shoulder.
“They’re no one I recognize,” Talon muttered.
“And they didn’t stop to introduce themselves first,” Blaze added. “Very impolite.”
“I have a hunch.” Garrison lifted a phone in the air. “Because there’s an interesting text message on this man’s home screen.”
I hurried over. “What does it say?”
Garrison cleared his throat. “Don’t touch the daughter. Who do you think that could be?”
I stopped in my tracks. Obviously I was the only person who usually hung out with the crew who could be anyone’s daughter. And the way some of the men had shied away from attacking me loomed large in my mind.
Our previous attackers had sometimes gone easier on me, but only because they’d been looking to take me captive rather than murder me. One of the men from the household’s organization had outright told me that they had permission to kill me if I proved too difficult to take alive.
This was different.
“Who would have wanted to kill all of you and not hurt me?” I said, and then the thought clicked into place in my head at the same moment as the guys’ expressions stiffened with similar realizations.
“Who would think of you foremost as being a ‘daughter’?” Julius said. “Does your father know where you’ve been staying? Has he given any indication that he knows you’ve been staying with other people or that he’s concerned about the company you’re keeping?”
I shook my head, my pulse kicking up a notch all over again. “No, I haven’t gotten any impression of that at all.” But Damien Malik did hate criminals, and he was determined to protect his long-lost daughter. Still… “It doesn’t totally make sense, though, does it? It’s pretty convenient that the guy left that text visible on his screen. Every other time we’ve been attacked, our enemies have been more careful not to have any identifying info on them.”
“That’s true,” Blaze said, but he was frowning. “Sometimes people make mistakes, though. And if these people came from Malik, they’d be a different breed from the mercenaries who took us on before.”
I rubbed my forehead. Adrenaline was still surging through my veins, making my thoughts race back and forth through my head. I didn’t know what to make of this when I could barely focus on anything at all.
“It doesn’t matter right now,” Julius said firmly. “We’ll figure this out, but we need to get out of here before someone finds this mess.”
“Where are we going to go?” Blaze asked, holding his satchel and suitcase.
Julius took a deep breath before he spoke. “We’ll want someplace more secure than a typical hotel. There’s a local group that owes us a favor. We’ll go to them and see what they can do for us.”
