Chapter 43

Animal

I knew what we did every day was dangerous. Shit, we’d been in enough fights that coming home alive wasn’t a guarantee. But this was too much. I never pictured this.

Overconfident, I guess I was. I figured we’d either kill or be killed. Seeing Nix being tortured rocked my core. Shook my brain. And it made me feel more helpless than I’d ever felt in my life.

The videotext that had come on Ember’s phone depicted Nix strapped to a chair. Electrodes were taped to his head and chest.

He was hit with voltage, and a scream ripped from his mouth that seemingly was sheer reflex.

Then the video cut out.

T’s jaw was tense, and her eyes had a wild gleam to them. She was worried.

I was worried.

“How’s Ember?”

I was trying to think of Nix’s girls because he’d want me to think of them.

“Wardon is with Ember. I have two on Christina and three on Becca.”

“Okay. That’s out of the way. Do we know where this is? Who is doing this?”

I tried to make a clear thought happen. My mind screamed.

T pulled on my forearm and led me to the basement. She went to Nix’s computer and brought up an application. She had the password. While she worked, she informed.

“Nix and I have been following Albany and Breston Pharmaceuticals. Recently, he found a split between the father and brother and Albany. Nix tapped into a warehouse that he thought belonged to her. We talked about it the other day. The place is outside of town, by the river. It has an inordinate amount of cameras.”

She pulled up the feeds that she had, but most of them were dark.

“We need to get Van over here to see if he can get these going. See if we can get a location, at least.”

Van was one of our tech guys. He’d apprenticed under Nix a time or two. Not nearly enough for me to trust him with Nix’s life, but this was what we had to deal with.

I fired off a text demanding that he show up.

“I’ve got to go. I need to leave now.” I didn’t have a plan and was too worried to make one.

“We have to make sure there’s a way to get him out. You both dead helps no one.” T had her hands on my shoulders, the fingers biting into the muscles there.

T forced me to sit in front of the other computer. She pulled up a still shot of Nix taken from Ember’s phone. “Tell me how you would get out of this. Clear your mind. How would you find him? Look at the picture. Look past Nix, see what the room has, what they are doing to him.”

I did look. And my mind crumpled. T was on the phone and typing on two other computers on the opposite side of the room. She was able to put one foot in front of the other.

But to lose Nix. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I knew he was counting on me. Even if he didn’t admit it to himself, his heart was hoping I would know what to do. I was big. I was strong. I fixed all his stuff.

T was onto a new conversation, using Google Translate to talk to a foreign person on the phone. It all seemed like a nightmare.

She pointed at my computer, and new video was air dropped in.

Okay. I had to contribute. Panicking like a little old lady wasn’t helping. I looked from the blueprints to the room and back. They had access to water. They were using some sort of mask to drown him almost to death.

I felt the pain in my lungs—sympathy pain. It would hurt so much.

Focus. They had electrodes hooked to his head, his chest. They needed to have a feeder for that. It would be specially wired. Being shocked was inhumane. Horrible.

“Tell us about Havoc?” I played the audio. There was no accent from the inquisitor.

Nix answered with a smirk, “Fuck You in the Asshole with a Cactus.”

They strapped the mask on him again. I raged at the image of the fear in his eyes. He was scared.

I made my hands into fists and slammed them on either side of the computer. I felt her hand on my shoulder, comforting me.

“We’ll get him out. You know we will.”

Sure. She was so sure. She believed in me. Refused to do anything but, actually.

She concluded the two conversations and pulled a chair up next to mine.

“I think we can do it this way. We have to get in. We don’t have time to educate an army. We’ll have them on standby. We have to sneak inside. Do we have some fuses for some timed bombs or explosives? Can you make me some that have a stretch of time on the fuse?”

I faced the blueprints and the picture again. Nix needed me to get him out. That much was for sure.

And I could do it. Implement some of the things that T was suggesting. I could maybe—maybe defeat the men in the room and get him out. I could get Nix out of the compound. The plan clicked in my mind like it had been in there the whole time.

Maybe that’s why I had to come to terms with putting it together. I could get Nix out, but when I saved him, I would be taking his place.

And that’s exactly what I had to do. I turned to this beautiful, badass woman, and I laid out my plan. She listened without judgment. She knew me that well. That I would die to save this man was a given.

I respected her more for not fighting me on it. My T. I started making a few calls of my own. I knew a guy who could get me the fuses T suggested in no time.

All I needed was a Trojan horse to get me in the front door and T in a boat out in the river behind the compound.

I’d come by water, and Nix and T would leave by it. Breston would be thrilled to have me—after I’d killed as many of those pharma heads as I could—that they would drop their interest in Nix long enough for T to get Becca, Ember, her mother, and Merck out of town. Between all of us, we had enough money to live two very lovely lifetimes. I mean, they had enough.

I would not live through the night. T nodded somberly when I told her how it was all going to go down.

The preparations took four hours. Every minute made me angsty. I had to explain to Becca that she needed to be ready to get Nix to the hospital. I had my guy drive her in my fastest car. T double-checked they both had each other’s burner numbers.

If everything went as planned, it would take me about forty-five minutes to walk through the room they were torturing Nix in. He had to make it. I had to believe in his inherent toughness. He’d taken more shit than anyone. His father had prepped him his whole childhood to handle pain.

T and I set up everything we needed. I made sure she knew where my Will was. Where my hidden funds were. The closer we got to go time, I was ready. I wanted to save my boy. I texted the attackers on Ember’s phone, after they would not pick up a phone call.

Me: I need proof of life.

I wasn’t sure they would comply. They weren’t asking for a ransom. Yet. Which was good. They’d need him alive to ask for that. Unless the entire reason they took him was to break me. They were already succeeding there.

As T and I made our final choices in the weapons room in the basement, I saw my man. The video had a man in a hazmat suit holding up an iPad with the time prominently displayed.

It was current. Nix was bruised and battered. Alive, but hanging from rubber chains. The video bounced around on purpose. I was still taking notes mentally of what I would face when I got there.

My first thought was that we were being attacked when I felt the needle slide into my neck. I swatted at it and turned. The only thing that stopped me from throwing a punch was T’s determined face. She was just finishing up pressing the plunger and pulled out the syringe.

She helped me to the floor as best she could, but I was a lot of man at the whims of gravity.

She was taking me out of the picture. As she handcuffed me, I tried to talk, but I knew the fast-acting bullshit we kept in those needles had already started their process.

I was a hostage in my body and in Nix’s house.

I wanted to holler at her. That she was going to get killed. That she was going to get Nix killed.

But she already knew that. She didn’t need my words. I watched her through a hazy focus as she pressed a kiss to my lips.

No speech. No hype up. My T was low-key going out on my suicide mission.

She threw a sniper rifle over her shoulder and walked out the door.

Then I fell into the deepest sleep of my life, filled with concern.