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They’d put her head on the chopping block immediately and offer her to the highest bidder.
She has no clue what kind of danger she’s in.
And with the way she’s acting—getting into a fight with one of the older girls and then going into a bathroom just so she could fuck herself while muttering my name—she’ll be on the guards’ radar in no time.
Fuck.
I never should have agreed to this.
What the fuck was I thinking?
“I don’t hear the water running anymore, so is your girl done or what?” Hale asks, bringing me out of my thoughts.
I glance over at the monitor and verify that Zoey is now fully dressed, combing what’s left of her hair. Slicked back now, the haircut actually favors her, showcasing her long neck and angelic face. Or maybe it’s just my lovesick eyes that are fooling me. She looks so fucking innocent like this, but as time goes on, innocent is the last adjective that I should use to describe my girl.
“Fuck, is that a smile on your face?” Hale suddenly asks, bringing my attention back to him.
“Who said you could open your eyes?” I growl.
“Oh, just fucking shoot me. Watching you being pussy-whipped by Al’s kid is torture enough. Put me out of my misery already,” he jokes, gripping my gun and shoving it farther into his forehead.
I mumble incoherently under my breath as I pull my gun away from his head. “Go home, Hale. I can take it from here. I’ve got this,” I grumble, hating that he’s right. I am pussy-whipped, hard.
“You don’t got shit, Ghost,” he retorts, leveling me with one of his lethal stares. To drive his point home, he points to the screen where Zoey blows a kiss to the camera before leaving the bathroom to go on her merry way. “That piece of ass has got you all twisted up inside. That’s the very definition of not having your shit together—not that you weren’t acting cagey and on edge to begin with on this job—so you either admit what the fuck is really going on, or my ass isn’t getting out of this van.”
My hand itches to grab my gun again, but with the way he’s glaring at me, I know he’d love nothing more than a shoot-out, and that shit will draw too much attention and probably blow Zoey’s cover. Instead of telling him the full story, I give him a crumb big enough to keep him subdued.
“It’s personal.” When he just raises his eyebrows, I try again. “This job is personal to me. That’s all you have to know.”
“No shit it’s personal. I got that much. I want to know why,” he demands.
I shake my head, not wanting to relive my past and cough it up to Hale, no less.
His shoulders slump in defeat, but his glower never leaves my face. “Answer me this then. Is it personal because she’s involved or because you are?”
“Both,” I confess. “Satisfied?”
He strokes his chin in thought and then nods. “No, but it’ll do for now. I don’t like getting involved in jobs where I don’t know what is really going on, but for the time being, I’ll ease up and leave you to it.”
He picks up his jacket and starts heading toward the door, but he stops when his hand is on the handle and looks over his shoulder at me.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Ghost. Do what you came here to do and then bounce. Remember that it’s not only your life that hangs in the balance. It’s Zoey’s too. And if Alaric ever finds out that you got her involved in your shit, well… there isn’t a corner in this great blue ball in the sky that you can hide from him. You’re as good as dead, you feel me?”
I give him a curt nod, biting into my cheek.
“Don’t say I never warned you,” he scoffs. “Call me when you need to sleep and shit. I’ll be here.”
My brows furrow as I watch him leave. He almost sounded like he cared, which is bullshit since Hale doesn’t care about anyone but himself. Sociopaths aren’t known for having a heart. I should know since I met many in this life of mine.
And now Zoey will too.
With my head back on the game at hand, I get comfortable and watch Zoey go downstairs into the common area where a bunch of kids are sprawled on couches either watching TV or just talking amongst themselves. Everything looks normal, or as normal as these types of places are, but as soon as night falls, my skin begins to crawl as I watch the day shift get replaced with familiar faces of my haunted past. My first instinct is to run over there and rescue Zoey, even if I have to drag her out to do it. It takes everything in me to stay rooted to my spot and just leave her there.
Don’t do anything stupid, little doe.
Please.
I’m not a religious man. Faith in prayer was swiftly extinguished out of me the first couple of nights I lived in that house of horrors. Yet here I am, praying that my girl won’t do something dumb, like put herself in harm’s way out of her senseless need to help me. Her father might go to the ends of the Earth to track down anyone who puts Zoey in danger, but I’d go to hell itself to kill anyone who laid a finger on her pretty little head.
