Mayhem (Wicked Quartet #1)

1. echo

echo

The chair squeaked every time I pushed off the edge of Samael’s desk with my boot, which meant it had squeaked often enough over the last ten minutes that he had stopped pretending he could not hear it.

I spun slowly through another circle, one heel dragging against the carpet to keep the rotation lazy while Father Three worked through a stack of files like his adult daughter discussing murder five feet away from him was an ordinary Tuesday evening.

It probably was, which said a lot about my upbringing and absolutely nothing good about my chances of ever becoming a productive member of society.

By my fourth trip around, Samael had moved his coffee farther from the edge of his desk.

A few rotations later, he had quietly removed the letter opener I had picked up and started balancing across my fingers.

He hadn’t looked at me either time, which only made it more entertaining.

Father Three had the kind of patience that made people confess things just to fill the silence, but I had been raised by him and therefore considered being annoying a love language.

“If you spin that chair one more time, I’m throwing it out the window,” he finally said, his voice flat enough to make the threat sound like a weather report.

I grinned and pushed off again, letting the leather seat carry me through another slow rotation of the office. Filing cabinets lined one wall, evidence storage took up another, and two desks were covered in the kind of organized chaos that made sense only to the people working there.

A third technically belonged to Runo who was Father number four, though calling anything in that corner organized would have been generous.

The little coffee station near the reception stayed stocked because Father One believed a functioning private investigation business required pastries, fresh coffee, and enough emergency snacks to survive a siege.

Father Two called it unnecessary. I called it the only reason I had not starved while Samael made me read financial records.

When I came back around, Samael was still staring at me, so I hooked one boot around the leg of his desk and stopped the chair just enough to give him my most reasonable expression.

“Technically, if you throw the chair through the window, you’re destroying company property, and since Father Two’s name is on the license, I think we should ask him whether that’s allowed.

Please say yes. I want to hear him explain why throwing office furniture through plate glass is inefficient. ”

Samael glared at me, his gaze walking over the leather attire I had picked up from Father Two. “I don’t know why you insist on calling us by numbers, Echo.”

“Because I can’t call you Samael. That’s weird.

Dad is worse because let’s be honest, that’s for a 16-year-old.

Father works, I guess but there’s four of you so I need to differentiate.

Hence the number!” It made perfectly logical sense when I had lived in a house of retired killers for the last nearly ten years.

I was bound to pick up some bad habits... like preparing to murder my ex-boyfriend for betraying me.

Samael went back to the file in front of him, which meant I had won enough to be irritating and not enough to be stabbed.

Tomorrow morning, I was supposed to become a respectable graduate student at Aldrich Institute, which seemed like a good reason to enjoy my last few hours as someone nobody expected to attend seminars voluntarily.

The respectable part was probably doomed before I started, but that felt like Aldrich’s problem for accepting me.

I leaned forward and grabbed the corner of the file Samael was reading. He slapped one broad hand over it before I could drag it toward me, and I gave him a wounded look that had never worked on him once. “Rude.”

“You have your copy,” he said.

“My copy is all the way over there,” I told him, pointing at the folder sitting on the desk beside my elbow. When he looked at it and then back at me, I shrugged. “Exactly. Inconvenient.”

“Read it.”

“I did.”

“All of it.”

“Mostly.”

“Echo.”

I let out an exaggerated sigh. “I know where I’m sleeping, where I’m supposed to park, where my classes are, where Nichlas’ business courses are, and which buildings have enough security to make carrying anything interesting annoying.

What else do you want from me?” I had studied the information we pulled together a thousand times.

I knew how often my ex, Nichlas, walked across the campus, where he’d be at any given time, and how to get to him. The security was its own issue which was why I was enrolling at the damn university as a student rather than just... barging in and slitting his throat. Bastard.

“For you to read the parts between the pictures,” Samael said, and I leaned back in the chair with another sigh because apparently the man who raised me believed literacy was important even in revenge work.

“You’re asking a lot from someone who intends to gut her ex before the semester gets interesting.

” I folded my hands across my stomach and watched his pen stop moving.

That was one of my favorite games: saying something perfectly reasonable in a way that made Father Three remember why other families used boarding schools and prayer.

He lifted his eyes slowly. “Take it down a notch.”

“I was being restrained.”

“You just said gut.”

“I didn’t describe how.” His dark eyes stayed on mine, so I gave him my most thoughtful expression and tapped one finger against my mouth like I was considering something academic instead of felonious. “Would you prefer kidneys? I had been thinking about the kidney situation.”

“The kidney situation,” he repeated.

“He has two. That feels greedy.”

“Echo.”

“I only need him functional for a little while.”

“You are describing organ removal in an office with a waiting room,” Samael said, and I glanced through the open doorway toward reception, where the chairs were empty, the front door was locked, and the last client had left almost half an hour ago.

I pointed that out because I was helpful, and he informed me that the absence of witnesses was not the same thing as professionalism, which sounded like quitter talk but was probably why he was in charge of paperwork and I wasn’t.

The corner of his mouth moved anyway, which meant I had almost won again.

I nudged the chair backward and let it roll toward the wall behind me, where a year’s worth of Nichlas covered most of the available space.

There were photographs from three states, printouts of old addresses, screenshots from accounts that had vanished within days of our finding them, campus maps, travel records, names connected by black marker, contacts that had led nowhere useful, and enough crossed-out possibilities to wallpaper a second office.

Some of the information had come from databases, some from surveillance, and some from people who had become remarkably cooperative after discovering that Father Three and I had different definitions of a polite follow-up.

The center of the board had changed three days ago. ALDRICH INSTITUTE sat across the top of a fresh campus map, and beneath it were a current enrollment record, a blurry photograph from outside the business annex, and Nichlas’ name without a question mark, a possible, or a maybe anywhere near it.

After a year of ghosts, false trails, burned accounts, bad addresses, and people swearing they had never heard of him while sweating through their shirts, we finally had him pinned to a place that existed.

I rolled closer until my knees nearly touched the wall and reached up to straighten the corner of the photograph even though it wasn’t crooked.

Blond hair pulled back. Glasses. That same thin face I had once known well enough to read from across a room.

He looked good, which was annoying. He looked rested, which was rude.

He also looked alive, which was a temporary administrative error I intended to correct.

“You’re staring again,” Samael said.

“I’m debating on how to separate his head from his body.” I kept looking at the photograph, because for almost a year every trail had ended with someone telling us Nichlas had been there shortly before we arrived.

He had stayed just far enough ahead to remain a name on paper instead of a throat under my hand. Every time we found a financial trail, it broke. Every address turned into an empty room or someone who had never heard of him.

Then one tuition payment had landed wrong. Whoever was protecting him normally buried educational placement behind layers of legitimate money, and Nichlas’ payment should have disappeared into the same machinery.

Instead, a secondary account had been reused by someone who had gotten lazy, and the name attached to that transaction had appeared months earlier in a housing record Samael had discarded as unrelated.

I had recognized it at two in the morning while eating cereal directly from the box at this very desk, because nothing said investigative genius like marshmallow dust on a case file and questionable posture.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” I said.

“For what?”

“Finding him.”

“You want a cookie?”

“Yes, daddy dear, I do.”

Samael grunted. “Aeron packed six in the kitchen.”

“See? That’s why Father One is my favorite.”

“You tell Runo he’s your favorite.”

“Father Four needed the reassurance,” I said, and a low cackle came from the front office before Runo leaned into the doorway with one shoulder against the frame.

Father Four looked from me to the wall behind me and then to Samael, his ocean-gray eyes bright with the kind of delight that usually meant somebody’s day was about to become legally complicated. “I heard favorite.”

“You’re nosy,” I muttered, deciding to twirl around in my chair again.