AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’ll be sure to convey your sympathies,” I replied. I can play corporate polite if I have to. “Can you elaborate on the nature of the work he did for you?”
“Something with the merger, I believe.” He waved a hand. “I wasn’t all that closely involved in the process.”
“Of your merger?”
“Correct.” He smiled, and I felt like I was looking at a shark. “I have people to handle the details of those sorts of things.”
I nodded, as though I had any understanding of how business mergers worked. “I see. I don’t suppose you would have any idea who might want to harm Mr. Bazan?”
“Afraid not, Mr. Hart. I—do have a question for you, however.”
“Oh?” My heartrate went up even higher.
“Why areyouhere instead of the police?”
I smiled, and it felt sickly. “I’m afraid the Richmond Police are not the most… dedicated to their jobs. Sometimes it’s left to others—family members or friends—to provide the right… motivation to keep cases going.”
“And you intend to provide that motivation? By coming to visit me?”
“I’m just investigating, Mr. Garcia.”
“Are you.” It wasn’t a question, and that dread in the pit of my stomach started churning.
“That is my job.” I tried to keep things light. Casual. Non-threatening.
Garcia smiled at me, then flicked his hand.
Pain slammed through me.
Oh, fuck.
Fuckety, fuckety, fuck.
I really should have listened to those damn instincts that had been screaming to get the fuck out of here. Or, better yet, not fucking come at all. But noooooo. I had to be a goddamn fucking hero.
I was here because I wanted to keep Taavi safe. Because I was an arrogant, selfish asshole who decided that he was a special-ass fucking snowflake who couldn’t possibly let anybody else take care of this. Nope. He—that would be me—had to go ahead and try to somehow get the proof that Garcia was in the Culhua all by himself.
Well. Garcia was working for the Ordo, and I had the proof.
And it was probably going to fucking kill me, if the level of pain I was experiencing was any indication.
It’s weird. There’s a certain level of pain where you get kind of abstracted from your own nervous system. Where your brain keeps functioning, but you’ve lost all sense of having either limbs or control over your body.
That’s where I was. I’d almost certainly fallen out of the chair I’d been sitting in, and I had a vague sense of contracting muscles that might have been spasms, but fuck all if I could do anything about it. I had the sense that my throat hurt, which probably meant I was screaming, and I could feel cold seeping into my bones—which, thanks to the previous machinations of Richard Bazan, I now knew meant that Garcia was draining my innate magic.
Which could very well kill me.
I didn’t want to die, and I really didn’t want to die like this.
That was the last thing I thought before I passed out.
* * *
The first thingI was aware of when I started to come to was the familiar rasping, sharp, and gritty discomfort of rough-ground gravel.
My first, completely absurd, thought was that at least I wasn’t dead.
Which could happen at literally any time and was in fact highly likely, because you don’t kidnap a former homicide detective and dump him in a gravel pit if you intend to leave him alive. You do that if you need to get someone else to come clean up, probably after kicking the shit out of me for a while to find out what all I really know.
