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“Man down!” someone shouted as the body by the dining room was discovered.
The Blood Hunter stormed into view. “Where the hell is he? Where is that prick?”
I stepped into view, ready to leap out of range in an instant if need be. “He’s not here. He’s taking your daughter somewhere you’ll never find her again.”
“You,” the Blood Hunter said in a voice that was pure rage. The men flanking him raised their guns, but he held out his hand to stop them.
He wouldn’t want to kill me when I might have information that would bring his daughter back to him. But he couldn’t stop himself from spewing more fury at me. “I should have slaughtered you like your family did to Brittany when I first got my hands on you, you bitch. Where is she?”
I snorted. “Like I’m going to tell you. And it seems to me that you’remylittle bitch. I’ve run circles around you. Did you really think I’d choose you over my family—over the people you stole me from? You raised me to be a killer, and you assumed I’d have a problem with their little side business? You didn’t think that through too well, did you?”
“There were bodies,” he snarled, his composure disintegrating by the second. “Autopsy reports. There—”
“You should know better than anyone how easily records can be faked and bodies can be misidentified,” I interrupted with a grim smile that hid my apprehension. I was taunting a very powerful man who still had more than ten armed guards backing him up. “Of course I made sure they didn’t really die. I just gave you what you wanted to see, and you ate it up.”
A tremor ran up his arms from where his hands were clenched at his sides. His knuckles had paled to pure white.
“I’m running out of patience,” he said, and I heard the promise of death in his tone. “Where is he? Where did he take her?”
“I told you,” I replied. “Someplace you’ll never find her.”
The flick of his fingers was so swift I almost missed it. I dove for the back door just as two of his men opened fire, aiming for my lower legs. They wanted to slow me down so he could question me at his leisure, but I wasn’t giving him the opportunity.
I crashed through the door and sprang out of range, positioning myself deliberately so that the side of my sweatpants scraped against the sharp edge of a metal lawn ornament I’d positioned there for that purpose. The pocket at my hip that I’d already frayed tore completely open, and a phone I’d placed there tumbled to the ground.
I whipped around as if to try to snatch it up, but the Blood Hunter and his guards were already barreling out the door after me. “Shit!” I spat out. It was all I could do to dodge out of range around the house, leaving the phone behind.
One of the men raced into my line of sight just as I ducked behind the compost bin, and I shot him between the eyes, not worried about the noise now that the Blood Hunter’s men had made enough of a racket. But only that one guard came near me. I heard a hitch of breath as the Blood Hunter must have checked the phone I’d “lost” and seen the most recent text thread that we’d set up for him to find.
“Forget the bitch,” he hollered to the others. “We’ve got somewhere else to be. Move it, move it,now!”
Their footsteps thundered back through the house. Tires screeched as the cars they’d arrived in tore away from the curb, the thrum of the Blood Hunter’s motorcycle mingling with their engines. They roared away, the sound quickly fading into the distance.
The faint wail of a siren told me I needed to get moving too. The neighbors in this peaceful part of town wouldn’t have hesitated to report gunshots in the area.
I hopped the hedge at the back of the yard and sprinted through the streets until I reached the park where I’d meant to regroup. Hunkering down in a small glade of trees, I pulled out the phone I’d been using for my actual business and dialed Blaze’s number.
It didn’t even finish a full ring before he picked up. “Dess?”
“They’re on their way to you.”
Blaze released a deep, relieved breath. “Everything went according to plan?”
“As much as we were able to plan it,” I said. “He had fifteen men with him; I took care of five of them. They’ve got four cars between them, and he’s on his motorcycle. He kept his helmet on the whole time, and I believe they’re all in bulletproof gear.”
Blaze must have put me on speaker phone, because Garrison’s whistle carried from a little farther away. “Are you sure the phone did the trick?” he asked.
“He gave every indication that he was sure he’d figured out where to look next, and there was nothing else on there that should have given him a clue. I think he’s smart enough to put the pieces together quickly from those texts. I’d bet you’ll be seeing him in twenty minutes or less.”
“Fun times,” Blaze said cheerfully. “We’re ready for them.”
We’d set up the Blood Hunter to follow the trail to a storage facility on the edge of the city. It wasn’t a place we’d ever been before, but it’d seemed fitting when I remembered the trap he’d set for us at a similar compound of storage lockers back in the Chaos Crew’s home town. He probably wouldn’t even make the connection in his current state of agitation.
Why would he anyway? He thought he was chasing Damien Malik now, not the Chaos Crew.
“I’d better get to the next location,” I said. “Keep me updated.”
“Will do.”
