42. Cal Walker
I was feeling super fucking weird.
For the first time since I had met him, I wanted to get away from Ryan. I hadn’t expected him to react the way he had when hearing about my past, and it was making me feel all kinds of fucked up.
The way he kept staring at me like I was some broken thing was stressing me the fuck out.
He was overreacting. My past wasn’t that bad. Hadn’t he seen my house? It was really nice… it was more than a house, it was a home.
Naomi had grown up happy in that house, and that was all possible because of the work I did for Ryker.
I refused to feel bad about it or feel sorry for myself for all the things I had needed to sacrifice to make that happen. Ryan just didn’t understand.
Letting out a tense breath, I rolled my head on my neck, cracking it to release the strange uptight feeling that wouldn’t seem to go away.
It was fine. I was fine.
Ryan would forget all about this in time. I would just have to do my best to avoid bringing it up again, and then we could go back to normal.
That made me chuckle.
Normal. HA!
Whatever Ryan and I had certainly wasn’t normal, but whatever.
Shoving thoughts of my sexy, concerned redhead from my mind, I tapped the voice-to-text feature on my car phone and pulled up Vox’s thread.
Cal:
Yoooo, you at Apex?
Vox:
*Thumbs up emoji*
Perfect.
I hadn’t been lying when I told Ryan I actually had things to do. I had been slacking pretty hard on Damian’s request to hunt down that squad of killers, and if I pushed off progress anymore, there would be hell to pay.
Turning back onto the highway, I made my way to Apex and what was sure to be a night full of stalking and potentially a little bit of violence.
Just what I needed.
I found Vox in his room. Everyone who worked for Damian had a room on base. There was also a mess hall where we could eat in groups and prepare for missions when the task called for it.
Vox and I had rooms on the same floor. This entire floor used to be filled with children Damian had collected over the years.
Many of them had been taken over by hired mercs since I had worked with Damian to stop recruiting kids, but it didn’t stop this place from feeling haunted by their memories.
Damian found most of us the same way he found me. He had informants stationed in most major precincts, and they reported to him when a potential candidate came in.
He usually looked for children who had committed some form of homicide. He wasn’t picky about whether or not it was self-defense or a crime of passion. They just had to have shown some sort of potential for violence.
It made us easier to train.
Many of us didn’t make it to adulthood. The jobs we went on were dangerous, and most of us died in the field. Some kids never made it through training. Sometimes, their minds broke under the pressure. I wasn’t sure what Damian did with the kids who couldn’t handle it, but I told myself he put them back into group homes or something.
Maybe I was delusional, but I had to be sometimes, or my own mind would probably fucking break too.
I waltzed into Vox’s room to find him at his desk, typing away on some code that took up all three of his monitors. His room was essentially a cement box. There were no windows in here, but he had plastered the walls with metal posters over the years, and his electric guitar and amp were nestled in the corner.
Flopping onto his unmade double bed, I rested my elbows on my knees.
“Hey Voxy, how’s it hanging?” I asked, and he let out a silent sigh, spinning away from his screens to face me. He looked exhausted, and I suddenly felt bad for leaving him alone with this project for so long.
My gaze fell on the only other thing on his desk besides his monitors. It was a framed picture of him, me, and our friend Gavin from when we were kids.
I think we were sixteen when that photo was taken.
Gavin was smiling at me through the frame, his soft, light brown hair tumbling into his bright blue eyes. He looked like he should have been a surfer instead of a mercenary. Maybe he would have been if Damian hadn’t stolen him away.
Much like me, Damian had found Gavin in a precinct after he’d been scooped up for self-defense charges. He’d stabbed his father thirty-six times with a screwdriver after the man had beaten his twin brother to death in front of him.
Much like Vox and I, Gavin made it through the early rounds of training. It wasn’t until we were much older that he started to really fall apart.
We were in our early twenties when Gavin started talking about quitting Apex. At first, I thought he was crazy, but the more he talked about it, the more appealing the idea became.
Even Vox seemed tempted to join him.
Gavin knew Damian was holding my sisters over my head, and we had begun to plan a way to extrapolate them from his insanely complex web when suddenly, Gavin just… disappeared.
At first, I thought he had left without us, but deep down, I knew he would have never left us behind.
Vox thinks that Damian killed him.
The official story was that he died on a mission.
‘He got sloppy.’ Damian told me. ‘His mark got the drop on him and shot him in the head. He’s dead.’
Vox never really recovered from that.
Vox had never exactly been a… happy dude, but Gavin’s death really fucked him up. Vox’s hatred for Damian tripled the day he told us Gavin was never coming back, and since then, he’d really been playing with fire when it came to our boss.
Jesus, I was really taking my time strutting down fucking memory lane today…
Shaking off the painful memories of our friend, I shot Vox a grin.
“Sorry, I’ve been a little MIA.”
Vox’s lip quirked up, and he held his fist to one cheek and stuck his tongue into the side of the other, making it look like he was thrusting an imaginary dick in his mouth. I burst out laughing.
“You have nooooo idea.” I flopped back on his bed, unable to keep the dreamy smile off my face.
“He’s so fucking perfect, Vox. He has no clue how fucking hot he is. And he’s so innocent! Every single thing I do with him, it’s like it’s the first time, and he always gets this look on his face like I’m rocking the fuck out of his world. I can’t get enough of him.”
Vox grinned at me, his eyes sparkling with happiness. He really was my best fucking friend. He was a grumpy little fucker, but he was also my number-one cheerleader.
“Anyway, sorry. I’m clearly in the honeymoon phase.” I laughed, and Vox shrugged, still grinning, which I took to mean ‘No big deal.’
“Have you made progress on our marks?” I asked, and he nodded, spinning back around and gesturing for me to check out what he was pulling up on the screen.
“Wow,” I murmured. “You have been a busy lil bee, my friend.” I reached around his shoulder and took control of the mouse, clicking through several phone records and email feeds he somehow managed to obtain.
I had no idea how he had done it, but he seemed to have been able to find where Logan lived.
“This is insane… I thought this guy was a professional? How did you find him so easily? You would have thought he would have encrypted this shit.”
Vox glanced at me and took back control of his mouse. With a few clicks, he pulled up a tattoo shop and pointed to the ‘About’ page, where there was a picture of an insanely sexy dude with dead eyes and a backward ballcap smirking back at me.
“Is that one of them?” I asked, and Vox nodded. He pointed to the email form at the bottom of the site, and I nodded, understanding.
This guy probably had his tattoo shop’s email on the same network as whatever email he was using to communicate with marks. Vox likely couldn’t get into the encrypted email but used this man’s work account as a back door.
“You’re a fucking genius, my friend.”
Vox smirked at me and pretended to brush his shoulder off.
Clicking through the email threads, I grinned. There, plain as day, was Logan’s home address. He lived on an old farm property on the outskirts of Silent Hollow. He had a trailer on land owned by an elderly couple that now lived in a retirement home.
Getting the familiar rush of excitement I usually experienced when the dots started connecting, I clicked through some more of Logan’s files.
“Jesus. This guy is going after some really nasty dudes,” I muttered. “I high-key don’t even want to kill them.”
Vox glanced at me, raising an eyebrow.
“I know, I know. We have to do it… just… look at this, he’s already killed like four pedophiles whose charges were pleaded down.” I frowned. This guy was hunting the same kind of people I hunted.
His most recent kill was a judge, just like Kyle, who was involved in several cases where the pedo wasn’t charged, despite the copious amounts of evidence against them. I could understand why Damian wanted him gone. He relied on the system being corrupt. I just had a really fucking soft spot for kids.
Judges had all kinds of cases that came across their desks. They were bound to have a couple that involved minors that didn’t go well.
Still, something about all this just wasn’t sitting right with me.
I tongued my lip ring.
“Let’s pay this guy a visit,” I muttered, and Vox gave me one of his dangerous little smirks that I took to say ‘Way ahead of you.’
He pulled open an app on his phone and showed me a location pin.
I grinned. “Well damn, Daniel .” Vox let out a silent chuckle at my dated meme reference. “Let’s get to fucken work.”