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“Who?” I asked.
I heard her shuffling papers. “Detective Monroe, according to this document,” she said, then her voice dropped as she seemed to realize the seriousness of the situation. “Wait, Reyes. What is this about?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Is this why you’re calling me on my personal cell?”
“Please don’t mention this to anyone, Morgan,” I said. “Please?”
“You got it, but someone is going to figure out that I signed this evidence out to look at it.”
“It’ll take them a bit,” I said, then took a deep breath. “Actually, you know what? Use my name to sign it out. Use my signature, if you have to.”
“I’m not forging your signature.”
“Fine. Then say I threatened your job unless you helped me,” I said. “But don’t worry. It won’t get to that.”
Before she could argue, I hung up on her. I parked the car a few blocks away from a run-down motel, the kind of place where no one would think to look for me. I grabbed my duffel bag from the backseat, filled with cash, clothes, and my most essential belongings. The weight of it pressed against my side as I headed towards the motel entrance.
Inside the lobby, I approached the front desk where a tired-looking clerk glanced up from his newspaper. “Need a room?” he asked, his voice devoid of any enthusiasm.
“Yeah,” I replied, slipping a wad of cash onto the counter. “Just for a few nights.”
The clerk eyed the money before reaching below the counter and handing me a keycard. “Room 212,” he said, barely making eye contact. “Enjoy your stay.”
I didn’t answer him. I made my way to the second floor and found my room. It was small, with faded wallpaper and a dusty smell that felt it could choke me. “Protect Sofia,” that single imperative hammered in my skull. But how could I protect her from the truth that splintered our world? Confronting the man who raised us, who now threatened everything we held dear, was a path fraught with peril. He’d almost killed Teo Costa. The only reason Sof and I were still alive was because of the protection of the Mercy Blades.
But now I had to protect her from the inside. I had to find out why our own father wanted us dead. And the only way to do that was to delve deeper into the dark underworld he inhabited.
“Got to do something,” I resolved, steeling my nerve for the confrontation that awaited. There was no turning back now, not when the darkness of my father’s empire spread like a stain across the city we once loved. He might have been hiding in the Everglades all this time, but he was clearly waiting to pounce, waiting for something to happen. Except he hadn’t needed to wait because Archer Holden had come into my life and I had been so excited a detective wanted to sleep with me that I had kind of been okay with him killing people.
So maybe I wasn’t so different from my father after all.
I paced around the small room, running my fingers through my hair as I tried to calm my racing thoughts. The weight of the truth settled heavy on my shoulders, the realization that I had been blinded by desire, and worse than that, manipulated by a monster who lurked in the shadows of my own family.
If Sofia was right--and I had no reason to believe she wasn’t right--then I needed to protect her. She was the last family I had left, the last family I cared about, and if my father was going to try to hurt her, I was going to get in the way.
I reached for my phone. My first instinct was to call Sofia, to tell her that I was going to be out of touch for a little while and that I was sorry for storming out. But I needed to protect her. I took the sim card out, crushed it, and sighed as I put my phone under hot running water.
I had to do this by myself.
I needed to find my dad.
And I needed to kill him.
And if I was lucky, I might be able to survive.
Chapter Seven: Jace
The glow of my laptop screen cast an eerie shadow across the walls of my apartment, the digital labyrinth of Brady Thompson’s digital life sprawled before me like a venomous web. There it was—a string of code, innocuous to the untrained eye but lethal as a viper’s bite, meant to slither through The Blades’ defenses and strike at our heart. My fingers danced over the keyboard, tracing the contours of the hidden message that hid the dangerous virus within.
I wasn’t sure what I had been thinking, plugging this fucking USB to my main machine. I should have been more careful, but I really didn’t think that anything Grayson could tell me about Brady Thompson would surprise me very much. I had already done a deep dive on his social media; the man was a loner whose last living relative was an elderly uncle in a state facility in Minnesota. The old man was set for life and seemed happy and well-taken care of. From what I had been able to gather, Louis Thompson had stopped speaking to Brady Thompson whenBrady was sixteen. I couldn’t exactly be sure but I had a strong suspicion that it had something to do with Brady coming out.
I had been so convinced that my research was right that I had simply not paid attention to the fact that a little USB stick could do this much damage.
The sound of knocking felt like a gunshot, exploding behind my closed eyelids. I hadn’t even noticed the footsteps approaching my door. I got up, looked through the peephole, and saw a tired looking Sofia playing with a strand of curly hair. There were shadows under her eyes as I opened the door.
“Hi,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
