AllFreeNovel
Share Us
These Chaotic Thoughts
ABIGAIL DAVIES
Chapter One
LENA
“They’re late,” Ronnie said, pacing back and forth in front of the car. His hair was sticking up in different directions from the amount he’d been running his hands through it.
I raised a brow, knowing that I shouldn’t have been amused by his obvious stress, but I couldn’t help myself. “You need to chill.”
He shook his head, looking at his phone for what felt like the thousandth time. “I got a bad feeling,” he murmured. My stomach sank. He was already falling apart and it had only been a couple of hours since he’d been ordered to help me in with his crew. Chief had told me that Ronnie was one of the best paid informants at our precinct, but he’d never done anything like this before. And now it was showing.
“Jesus,” one of the men from the other car groaned. “You’ve always got a bad feeling, Ronnie, just shut the hell up and stop making us all nervous.”
Ronnie’s head dipped as he backed up a few steps, only stopping when he got to the hood of the car that I was leaning against. I didn’t want to show Ronnie that I was nervous too, especially as he was the sole reason I was here. He didn’t know the details—only a handful of people did—but that didn’t mean that he didn’t suspect who I was and why I was here.
He was anxious about tonight, but I knew it wasn’t only because the people we were meeting were late. It was because of me too. Part of me wondered if it would have been better to let him in on the entire operation, but at the end of the day, that wasn’t my call.
You see, to him, I was Lena, the woman who he was forced to include in this exchange, but to everyone else, I was Lena, the straight-talking cop who had worked her ass off to get to where she wanted.
I was only six months out of my rookie year and I’d been flung undercover with only twelve hours notice. It wasn’t unheard of for this to happen if you were at the right place at the right time. It was a dream I’d always had—to infiltrate the bad guys and take them down from the inside. And now I was getting to do just that.
The problem was, I was impatient. I wanted instant satisfaction and gratification—I didn’t want to bide my time. But I knew I had to. I had to follow all of the appropriate steps and do what I’d been taught. Protocol was there for a reason.
The longer we all stood around, waiting for the other crew to turn up, the more my brain over thought every single thing. Was I wearing the right thing? Was I being aloof enough? The only thing to keep me from overanalyzing everything was chanting my cover story over and over again in my head, trying to distract myself from the conversations happening around me.
They said to be successful at your cover story you had to keep it as close to the real you as possible. So I was still going by Lena. I was a recent college graduate working my full-time job in the city. It was all true, apart from the details. Details needed to be sketchy, but not too much as to ask questions.
Damn, I was basically reciting everything my Chief had said to me earlier today in his office. He was sure I was ready for this, but now that I was here in the thick of it, I was starting to doubt myself.
“They’re here,” Ronnie blurted out, a second before tires crunched over the gravel of the abandoned parking lot we were waiting in.
Slowly, I pushed up off the hood and widened my stance. Their lights flashed over all of us, illuminating us completely, but we had no idea how many of them there were. I probably should have asked Ronnie more questions while we’d been waiting; like just what the hell we were exchanging here.
But I hadn’t wanted to seem too eager. I hadn’t wanted to blow my cover before I’d even got to meet his boss—the real reason I was here. It was all to get to him: Theo Black.
Their car rolled to a stop about twenty feet away from ours. I sucked in a breath, my gaze fixated on it, then stared as all four of the doors opened, and four men piled out.
“It’s in the trunk,” one of them shouted as he sauntered around the car and to the trunk. Without hesitation, me, Ronnie, and the two other guys from the other car moved toward them.
I was slow at first, taking it all in, assessing for any threats, but by the time I’d gotten to the trunk, I realized that this entire thing was one big threat. I didn’t know any of these people, or what they were capable of. I’d been thrown into the lion’s den.
“Get a box,” Ronnie murmured to me, jerking his head in the direction of the remaining boxes. I did as he said, grunting at the heaviness of it while trying to hold back my intrigue to see what was inside. They were packaged like any normal package you’d get delivered off the internet, yet somehow I knew they didn’t contain random midnight shopping spree items.
I managed to get to the trunk of our car, deposit it, then head back to their car within a couple of minutes, but halfway there, a hand on my arm pulled me to a stop.
“You’re new here,” the same voice who told us to get the packages from the trunk said.
I swallowed, my gaze flitting down to his hand where he held me entirely too tight for my liking, then I looked up at his face. “And?” I asked, raising a brow at him. I had no intention of giving him more information than was needed.
His lips lifted on one side, and to some it might have been a sexy kind of smirk, but to me, it was just creepy as hell. “Fresh meat.” He licked his lips, stepping closer to me so that his front was nearly touching mine. “I like fresh meat.”
Pursing my lips, I glanced over to the car he’d come with and noticed Ronnie shutting the trunk. All of the packages were successfully transferred. Now all I needed was to get the hell out of here and away from this guy.
“All the packages are moved,” I told him, lifting my other hand and pointing over at my car, but he didn’t look away from me.
“What’s your name, beautiful?”
