AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It’s a twisted mental labyrinth I can understand.
* * *
Back at my apartment, I sit on the edge of my bed with a couple of my leather journals. My own sick and twisted way of repentance, I suppose, because I’ve kept the names of the dead immortalized on paper.
I know better than to think it will somehow absolve me of their murders, since that’s how all those victims were remembered. By how they were found.
Not that guilt ever comes on too strong. Most of them deserved death.
I don’t remember killing Layla’s dad David Sinclair, and his name doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t have any entries with the last name Sinclair. That means nothing in the grand scheme of things, though.
I sit up straighter and the journal slips from my grasp. Was her dad some piece of shit I picked up for another to take their place?
I’m recognizable. There are only a handful of other reapers in Empire Bay and none of them as high-profile as me. I don’t leave my victims the way David Sinclair had been found according to Jade. But I’d been messy in my early days. Maybe…
But no.
Who else worked for Broderick at the time? Who could have made the hit for him and left the lighter?
The sun breaks through the windows to the apartment and I haven’t made any more progress. On the off chance that Layla’s last name is different from his, I search again. There’s no Davids at all in my list. Which makes me sure I wasn’t involved.
Who else would have left a lighter at the scene, then, if I’m the only reaper with access to them?
EIGHT
layla
My hands shakeas I bang out the keywords for my internet search on my work laptop. “Reaper” + “Broderick Stevens” + “Black Market Syndicate.” As if something is going to magically appear this time when it did not the last time I checked five minutes ago.
Here’s crossing my mental fingers I’ll get a hit on the work database.
It’s the first time I’ve actually had the name of the drug ring running this city.
How messed up is that?
Anger is a living and breathing poison in my veins. Especially when I received no hits typing in the name I thought he claimed as his own: Gabriel Blackwell.
I don’t think he lied about it, although there’s no reason for me to actually believe him outside of a gut feeling.
I didn’t find so much as a birth certificate online for the dude. The man is a ghost.
Oh, there are plenty of people with the same name out there but none of them are him. Of course, Taney only knows him by his stage name as Dom Daddy Thor and nothing else. She only knows he’sfine.
She wasn’t able to tell me anything other than women and men line up around the corner when it’s rumored he’ll come to the club. They’re all itching for a piece of him.
It’s not the piece I want.
Rather, not theonlypiece I want.
I drum my fingers on the desktop. I’d like to carve him up for what he did to me, for making me wake up in my car with the most blindingly painful migraine of my life and my badge and ID gone. Confiscated along with Dad’s lighter as if Gabriel has some kind of right to it.
Just like he feels he has a right to warn me off of my search.
Well, fuck him. Not literally, of course. I wouldn’t touch him if his cock contained the cure for cancer.
“L, you’ve got to chill.” Devan sets a bottle of water down next to me and takes a seat across from my desk at our shared workspace. “Hydrate. You look pale and you never look pale.”
“I’m not actually hungover, but thank you. You’re the best mom a girl can ask for.” I bat my eyelashes at him but Devan knows to roll with the jokes. “What would I do without you?”
