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”Nope,” Jace said. He took a step toward me, crouching down to look into my eyes. He was the leanest of all of them, but also, somehow, the scariest one. He had sharp features, dark blond hair and bright blue eyes that became visible only as he inched his face so close to me I could see the lines under his eyes. ”But she’s pretty. Can we keep her?”
Teo pinched the bridge of his nose. ”Are you guys fucking kidding me?” he asked. ”This will be so much quicker if one of you owns up to it.”
”Look at my knuckles,” Jace said, extending his hand toward Teo’s face. Intricate tattoos curled around his skin, from the outside of his wrist to right above his clavicle. ”I’ve been doing ladies’ work all day.”
The other men laughed.
”Fine,” Teo said. ”Okay. So if none of you brought her here,howis she here?”
My gaze darted between them as I tried to figure out how each one of them would look clad in all black, chasing me around my apartment, but my mind kept going blank.
”I don’t know,” the nameless man replied. ”Seems like we have a mystery on our hands.”
”Just let me go,” I said. ”I don’t know anything, I…”
Teo brushed his hand over his short hair. ”Not possible, sweetheart,” he said. ”Unfortunately, I’m not convinced you wouldn’t immediately call the police.”
”So what? None of you kidnapped me, right?” I asked. Another mistake. I should’ve probably just said that I wouldn’t call the police.
Teo scowled.
Right…I should’vedefinitelyjust said I wouldn’t call the police.
Teo raised an eyebrow. ”We aren’t exactly the kind of people you want to mess with,” he said. ”And we can’t exactly let you go now that you’re here. You’re a liability, and we can’t have liabilities.”
My heart pounded against my chest, and I could feel sweat pooling on my forehead. The situation was spiraling out of control, and I had no idea how to get out of it.
”Please,” I said, my voice barely shaking despite my best efforts. ”I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
Teo stood up tall, crossed his muscular arms over his chest, cocked his head as if he was considering this. ”Yeah,” he said. ”I don’t believe you.”
Chapter Four: Teo
I’dalwayshatedWednesdays.
This one hadn’t started much worse than other ones. There was a large shipment coming in, and we had to be at Neon to make sure that it would be distributed to the correct people. Of course, the person who’d been tasked with bringing the product was an incompetent child–really, a teenager, barely nineteen, at the most–and so he’d ended up on the other side of town, trying to offload ecstasy to a fancy theatrical gastronomy restaurant that shared a name with the nightclub.
I’d spent the entire day managing that crisis, and by the time I walked downstairs to the storage area in the nightclub, I expected a moment of peace and quiet. At least it was enough to distract me from the frequent murders that were happening right behind the nightclub where we conducted more of our operations.
There were a million things I had to do, but they’d all taken a backburner to finding the person responsible for these killings.
No one but me would have called the storage room a tranquil oasis. It clearly needed to be redone. It felt more like a dungeon than anything else, with narrow, dark walls and metal shelves with boxes full of paperwork, guns, drugs.
It was normally empty. And it was exactly where I needed to be after an exhausting day dealing with idiots.
But the room hadn’t been empty. A woman with bruises on her face and blood running down her chin was tipped on her side in a chair someone had haphazardly tied her to.
I had to hold back the need to retch, the sight of blood almost enough to make me vomit. She was unconscious, probably–definitely–lucky that the bruise on her face didn’t look like a fracture.
My heart rate spiked as I approached her, pulling my gun out of its holster in case whoever put her here was still lurking around. In case she was a trap. I was smart but I was also susceptible to women like this.
I’m not an idiot. I just hate seeing women in danger. I knew that there was a possibility that she was going to attack me if I approached her.
She wasn’t. She didn’t. She was totally out.
And there was no one else there. Just her and the mess whoever had put her there left behind.
”Fuck,” I muttered to myself as I let go of my gun. My fingers curled around the handle of the chair, trying to get a better look at her face. She was pretty, even with the bruises. Maybe mid-to-late twenties. Naturally dark hair, the tips dyed blonde, curled around her face. Long eyelashes. No visible tattoos. Three piercings, only one extra on the cartridge of her left ear.
