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I can’t see much else from my vantage point, however, I’m positive there isn’t anyone up here. Not anyone alive, anyway.
“Let’s go,” I whisper, making my way towards the room, gritting my teeth as the smell worsens.
As soon as I breach the entrance, I stop short, causing Jay to collide into my back.
On the floor is a massive pool of dried blood, a dead man lying directly in the middle of it. He’s bloated, well into the process of decomposition.
“Jesus, fuck,” Jay mutters, as we both stare down at the stranger, disgust curling our faces. Dead bodies don’t bother me, but their rot will curdle the strongest stomach.
Immediately, I notice dry bloody footprints leading from the corpse and toward the doorway we’re standing in. Grabbing my phone, I click on the light and follow the footprints down the hallway and toward the second staircase.
“Female,” he says, confirming my thoughts. I get closer, taking care not to step in the blood. “You think they’re Addie’s?”
“Most likely,” I murmur. The prints are tiny and barefoot. Unless they took other females alongside Addie, I doubt they’re anyone else’s.
I sweep the corners of the room, locating several cameras pointing in different directions.
“Cameras,” I call out, stepping around the blood and farther into the room. Those will confirm whose prints they belong to.
My heart pounds as I take in Frankenstein's lair. Several machines are set up, a long metal table with a copious amount of instruments, and a bed with a blanket laid haphazardly across it.
“He’s been dead for several days,” Jay observes. “Shot in the head. From the back.”
I listen to him prattle on about his death as I scan every inch of the room.
“Let’s follow the footprints,” I mumble, my brow pinched as I try to piece together what could’ve happened.
Following close behind, Jay and I make our way back down the hallway and up the second stairwell. The landing opens directly into a studio apartment. Straight ahead, the entire wall is all glass, giving the room incredible natural light. A massive bed is in the middle of the area to my left with a small kitchenette to the right, dishes still in the sink and now attracting flies.
In the back corner of the apartment is a white tiled partition with a shower stall behind it.
The footprints lead all the way to it, and in the corner is a bloody hospital gown, dried and wrinkled now.
I stare, trying to process what the hell happened.
“Somehow… she was involved with that man’s death. And then it looks like she walked up here and showered,” Jay concludes.
I shake my head, coming to the same conclusion. Fury is seeping into my vision, casting everything in red.
“Either she or someone else shot him from behind,” I surmise. “Most likely someone else if she was covered in his blood and then had to shower it off.”
“You think she was in front of him?” Jay questions curiously.
“Or under him,” I grunt, hands beginning to shake as images of Addie being attacked by the man downstairs flood my head. Whatever he was attempting to do to her, it was bad enough that a human trafficker had to step in and kill him for it.
My hand goes flying into the nearest wall, breaking straight through it. Like a malfunctioning robot, I cock it back and drive it through a second time. And a third, a fourth, a fifth, before Jay’s hands wrap around my arm and using my momentum, yanks me backward. I stumble, and we both come close to falling from the force.
“Snap out of it, dude,” he barks, sweat gathered across his hairline.
I growl and roughly shake my head, like a lion shaking off a hit to the head. My knuckles are split, droplets of blood dribbling on the cement floor.
“We’ll have to clean up any traces of your blood,” he mutters.
“She could’ve been hurt,” I clip, ignoring him. I’m ready to storm back downstairs and beat the shit out of a dead man. Torture him in the worst imaginable ways, despite him not being able to feel a damn thing.
Fuck. So badly, I want to tear through whatever veil separates the dead from the living, reach in, snatch his soul back out, and make him wish he never had one.
Every muscle in my body is locked tight and brimming with tension.
