EIGHTEEN
MASON
Michael’s like a wraith as he flits from one bank of shadow to the next, gun already locked and loaded, held out in front of him. His lips are pressed into a tight line, his eyes glinting with fire and steel as he searches from one room to the next. Storage, mostly. Locker rooms. I don’t have a gun, so I trail behind him, keeping close just as he told me to.
After twenty minutes of searching, the sound of footsteps rings out down the oppressively narrow corridors, and Michael grabs me by the collar, spiriting me back into the room we’ve just cleared. We both hover in the darkness, the door partially cracked, and watch as a tall, curvy redheaded woman in a killer red dress saunters by. Zeth follows behind her, his expression stony.
So this is Alaska, then. She’s smoking hot, but by the look on Michael’s face you’d think she was the most repulsive creature to ever walk the planet. It’s hatred—that look on his face. He fucking hates this woman, for one reason or another. I’m guessing it’s mostly because she had the gall to kidnap his boss’s pregnant girlfriend. I know how close he is with Sloane. It’s very hard not to adore the woman; her heart’s as big as they come, and she loves Zeth with every single cell of her body. Just like Michael.
Zeth doesn’t show any sign that he knows where we are. He stares dead ahead, his gaze burning into Alaska’s back as he trails her further into the bowels of the stadium.
“We’d better wait,” Michael whispers. “If we follow too closely, she’ll notice.”
“You think she’s taking him to Sloane?” I hiss back.
Michael shrugs with one shoulder. “If she knows what’s good for her.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
The darkness that settles over Michael says enough: she’ll die. She’ll pay the price for her stupidity. The realistic, logical part of me already knows Alaska is already a dead woman. She’s courted danger itself by taking the one thing Zeth really cares about, the one thing that’s precious to him. There is no reality in which he allows her to walk away from this, woman or no. So how could she be so blasé as she strolled down the hallway in front of Zeth? How could she not realize that she’s in the shit right up to her neck? It makes no sense.
Michael bars the doorway, cutting a tall, imposing figure as we wait. Five minutes pass, then ten. He pulls open the door and then he steps out into the hallway, gun still raised, face severe and unreadable. “Come on. Let’s go.” He sets off in the direction Zeth and Alaska headed in, body moving the way a sleek predator’s would.
I follow, trying to emulate the stealth, the power, the confidence with which he moves, but compared to him I must look like a fucking bull in a china shop, tripping over it’s own size eleven feet. I’ve trained to be agile, to move swiftly, but Zeth’s right hand man almost fucking floats ahead of me as we creep toward an uncertain destination.
My hearing is also clearly not as good as Michael’s. Down the corridor, a left, and then a right, he angles his head to one side, pausing every five seconds, obviously listening, hearing things I can’t discern. I trust that he knows where the hell we’re going. I don’t have a clue.
It hits me, then, how bizarre this is. I used to work for one of the biggest crooks in Seattle. I fought tooth and nail to make sure I never aided and abetted in his illegal activities. Railed against every offer he made me for after hours work, shuttling stolen cars from one side of the city to the other, even though I desperately needed the money for Millie’s care. And here I am, helping these people potentially end lives—a far, far worse crime than driving stolen vehicles. It’s different, though. It feels vastly different. If I’d been caught doing Mac’s dirty work, I would have been on my own. He would have denied all knowledge of my very existence. He retained no records of his employees whatsoever. He paid us all in cash at the end of every week. If the cops had turned up on his doorstep and started questioning him about me, he would have claimed never to have laid eyes on me before.
With Zeth, with Michael, with Sloane…they’re a family. They don’t abandon the members of that family to the cops, or to any other hostile force. They protect each other. Care for each other. They’ve got each other’s backs. Which is why I didn’t even blink earlier when Zeth told me to go and get changed. Refusing to help simply didn’t cross my mind.
I almost walk into Michael’s back when he suddenly stops in front of me, holding up a hand, closed into a fist. “Ahead,” he hisses. “They’re in one of the rooms up ahead. On the right, I think.”
We move forward, not making a sound. It turns out he’s right. We halt in front of a heavy steel door on the right, and the low ebb and lull of voices can be heard through the thick metal. Female voices. Not one, but two. And then Zeth’s unmistakably low, rumbling tone. It makes sense that he’s angry, but fuck. I can literally feel the rage pouring out of him through the concrete wall.
I hear him perfectly the next time he speaks, can hear the pain and the torment behind his words. My heart stops dead in my chest.
“What the fuck have you done?”
Michael freezes; I can see the skin on the back of his neck, the tiny hairs that are pricked and raised. “Fuck,” he says breathlessly. “She’s hurt her. I didn’t think she’d be so fucking stupid.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” Zeth roars.
Michael rushes forward, slamming open the door, charging into the room, his arms outstretched, ready to fire. I’m right behind him, no time to think, to plan, to weigh our options. Zeth needs us, and so we go to him. The scene we find ourselves in is not what I expected, though. I survey the room from left to right, the gears catching and stumbling inside my head. What the…what the fuck?
Sloane is nowhere to be seen. Alaska is turned to us, a look of surprise on her face. Zeth stands at the far end of the room, his back to us, his hand clenched tightly around the throat of…of Denise Lowell? He’s pinned her to the wall, feet off the ground. Her face is turning blue as she scrambles, her fingers clawing at Zeth’s hand, trying to gouge his skin, to make him release her from his grip.
He does no such thing.
Michael stumbles into the room, his face falling slack. Another step forward. Another, and then another, until he’s standing in front of a metal gurney. And on the gurney…
I’m unprepared for what I see next.
The hands. The arms. The feet. The calves. The thighs. The stomach. The torso. The…the head.
Pieces. Pieces of a person, all decomposing, twisted and rented apart. The woman, whoever she was, looks like she’s been dead for some time. The only dead body I’ve ever seen before is my sister’s and it looked nothing like this. Millie’s face was still fairly flushed with the remnants of life. Her nails were still pink. Her lips were tinged with blue, but she often looked that way, even on her good days. Laid out on that cold metal slab in the morgue beneath St. Peter’s of Mercy Hospital, my sister had almost looked like she was sleeping. It had taken me touching her, feeling how cold her skin was, to finally accept that she was gone. But this woman…
There is no mistaking her condition.
Death hangs over her like shroud. The entire room is filled with the sweet, cloying stench of decay, practically humming with some ungodly electricity that bites at my skin.
I pivot on the balls of my feet, and before I know what the hell is happening I’m bending at the waist and vomiting all over the dusty bare concrete floor. My ears ring with a high pitched humming sound, my eyes momentarily blurring. A pair of patent, brightly shining, glossy red pumps come into view, and then a hand is on my back, lightly rubbing up and down.
“There, there, pet,” a cool, detached voice purrs. “There, there. That’s right. Get it all out.”
I spit, trying to rid my mouth of the foul taste, but it’s impossible. It’s in the air, snaking up my nostrils winding its way down my throat, deep into my lungs. I reel away from Alaska’s touch, trying to force the world back into focus. It takes every ounce of will power I possess to stop myself from throwing up again.
Michael remains staring down at the body, his gun now hanging by his side, his frame curved in on itself, back bowed, as if being crushed by some unseen force.
“You arrived just in time for the show,” Alaska says. She hovers next to Michael, running her hand down the front of his suit jacket, her black nail polish shining almost as brightly as her heels under the strip lighting.
Michael slaps her hand away, suddenly alert. He rips his gaze away from the woman on the gurney, fixing a look of such cold, unending fury on the redhead that I’m surprised she doesn’t freeze and shatter into a thousand pieces under the force of it.
“Why?” he snarls. “Why would you do this?”
On the other side of the room, the veins in Zeth’s neck are straining under his skin. His eyes are wild, wilder than I’ve ever seen them, and Lowell looks genuinely afraid.
Alaska laughs softly, flicking her arrow straight hair over her shoulder. “I have to admit, this wasn’t my idea. I did think it was a little in poor taste, but I deferred to Denise. She seemed to think this would get under Zeth’s skin. Looks like she was right. I don’t think she expected him to strangle the life out of her, though.”
Lowell struggles harder, kicking, nails now drawing blood from Zeth’s hands and forearms. “Help…me…” she wheezes. “Tell…him.”
Alaska pulls a face, reacting like a teenager. “Urgh. All right. All right. I’m not standing within a fifty-foot radius of that nightmare, though. Michael, you’re going to have to pull your boss off Denise. And I’d do it quickly if I were you.”
Moving painfully slowly, Michael turns his whole body so he’s facing Alaska. “And why in god’s name,” he asks coldly, “would I go and do something like that?”
Alaska beams brightly in response. “Because there is an explosive device located somewhere in the grounds of this stadium, and if Denise doesn’t check in with her partner, in…” Her eyes flicker downward, checking a watch that she isn’t wearing. “Fifteen minutes, we’re all dead. That’s you, me, Zeth, your sick little friend over there…and, of course, Sloane, too.”
Well, shit. This place is huge, and fifteen minutes isn’t a great deal of time. Definitely not enough time to scour the structure from end-to-end, looking for an incendiary device. Michael’s clearly conflicted. He looks down at the broken body lying in front of him, and his shoulders sag even further. He rushes across to Zeth then, placing a hand on his shoulder. Zeth doesn’t appear to register the contact. He’s swept away by his fury, lost in a sea of it, drowning in it as the seconds pass. Lowell’s frantic, but the fight is leaving her, her feet now dangling limply below her as she tries to pry Zeth’s fingers from around her neck.
“Zeth,” Michael says. “Zeth, let her go. We’ll deal with this another way.”
Zeth can’t, or won’t hear him, though. He pushes forward into Lowell, leaning all of his body weight against her. Her eyes roll back into her head, her face a deep crimson.
“Zeth!” Michael tries to pull him away, but the guy is a fucking mountain, huge and unmovable. Reaching back, Michael draws his fist back to his ear, and then he punches Zeth as hard as he can in the face. I can feel the rattle of the impact from where I’m standing—it has to come close to knocking Zeth out. The man reels sideways, stumbling, releasing Lowell as he tries to right himself. Lowell drops to the floor, coughing and spluttering, sinking to her knees before crawling away, putting as much space between her and Zeth as possible.
Zeth whips around, snarling at Michael like a cornered animal. There’s madness in his eyes, which are so dark they are almost fully black from pupil to iris. “Get the fuck out of my way, Michael.”
“I can’t do that.”
“It wasn’t a request.”
“If I let you kill her, Sloane dies. Is that what you want?”
Zeth growls, his hands clenching and unclenching into fists at his sides. “She’s lying,” he grinds out. “She’s fucking lying to save her own skin.”
Michael’s voice is soft when he says, “Is it worth the risk? Are you willing to call her bluff and find out?”
A seed of doubt must bloom in Zeth’s mind. He falters, the murderous look in his eyes fading just a little. “She’s planning on killing her anyway,” he snarls.
“But we can’t stop her if we’re all dead, too,” Michael reasons.
Lowell is hacking on the floor, making ragged wheezing sounds as she tries to recover herself. “You’re not going to stop it. You can’t. Not unless you want to be responsible for the deaths of your friends.”
Zeth bares his teeth. I’ve never seen him look so frustrated before. I’d heard his name before I started training at the gym. Everyone in Seattle who works below the line of the law has heard it. I know enough of from my own personal experience of him, along with his reputation, to piece together how badly he wants to tear this bitch’s head off. Both of their heads.
But he takes a step back.
“Very wise,” Lowell says. Her face is still red, and there are burst capillaries in her eyes, but she’s almost able to talk without coughing now. “Go and stand by your sister’s body,” she spits. “Go and take a long, hard fucking look at what I did to her.”
With leaden feet, Zeth complies. He drags himself over to the gurney, looking down at the pieces of the dead woman that lay there before him. The hatred that pours off him is stifling. Lowell gets to her feet, staggering sideways, then goes to stand behind him. She places a hand on his shoulder and smiles, her face utterly bloodless.
“That’s for stealing my dog.”