Chapter 13
Casey
“Come on, you lazy asses. Wake up!” I sat up and gasped in surprise at the rude awakening to find Vail rummaging in his dresser.
Beside me, Shaw grumbled and rolled over while I rubbed my eyes, trying to come to.
Why was it that napping in the middle of the day made me feel like I’ve slept for ten years straight?
I woke up having no idea what day it was, time, where I was…
I looked up just as Vail stripped off his sweater to pull on a grey t-shirt, choosing to keep his dark sweats on.
Again, I got a glimpse of his stomach and that glorious V.
Because I was already out of it, I zoned out as I stared at him, mouth hanging open slightly as I drank up the glorious sight of his body.
“Casey!”
“What!” I jumped in surprise as Vail chuckled, and I realized he caught me staring at him like an idiot.
Instead of saying anything else about it, he leaned over the bed, his fists planted on either side of my thighs, and gave me a long, lingering kiss.
I melted against him, always finding it easy to get sucked into Vail’s orbit.
He pulled back to side-eye Shaw, who had fallen back asleep, and half-shouted, “Hey! Asswipe! Get up! I need you to grab the first aid supplies and bring them downstairs for Lee.”
“What?” I instantly straightened, almost hitting him in the chin. “Why does Lee need first aid?”
“It’s just for his knuckles. Don’t worry about it,” Vail gave me another kiss before straightening up to head back downstairs.
Shaw was up, too, and immediately headed into the washroom, digging under the sink of a giant tub filled with gauze, adhesive bandages, antiseptic ointments, tape, Q-tips, antibiotic treatments, elastic wraps, and more.
He hurried down the stairs with me hot on his heels to find Lee sitting on the couch in the living room, his hands soaking in two silver mixing bowls of ice water.
“What did you do?” I practically screeched at the sight of him sitting there, his face screwed up in pain as he forced his hands to remain under the freezing water.
“It’s fine,” he hissed between clenched teeth as Shaw moved around the couch, reaching in for things from the bin.
“This is not fine!” I stood opposite him on the other side of the coffee table, my hands on my hips, and glared at him. “What the hell did you do? What happened? Who do I need to knock out?”
“Calm down, darling.” Vail came back into the room from the kitchen, phone in hand, typing furiously away on it as he said, “We had a little run-in on our way back from your dad’s.”
“A run-in?” I narrowed my eyes, my thoughts immediately thinking of Hunter. “With who?”
“Who do you think?” Lee muttered, confirming my suspicions.
“Casey, this happens to us all the time,” Vail said, finally setting his phone aside. “Why do you think we’ve stocked up on medical supplies?”
I stared between the three of them, thinking about the fact they were in some crew called Vendetta, and as far as I could tell, they didn’t like the Jackals. I had my suspicions on what the hell it was exactly they got up to, but I wanted to hear the truth now. All the facts. But first…
I moved around and sat on Lee’s other side, reaching over him for some hydrogen peroxide solution, bandages, and paper towel.
When he finally pulled his hands free, sucking a sharp breath in between his teeth, I gasped at the sight of his knuckles.
They were angry and red, the first layer of skin gone on a few, while others were bleeding a bit, like the middle ones.
“What in the fuck happened?” I whispered as I took his hands and carefully dabbed at the spots.
To his credit, he didn’t flinch away, but I was betting it hurt like a bitch.
“Normally, I’d have my brass knuckles with me… but I wasn’t anticipating needing them just by talking to your old man.”
“Which, by the way, is all settled,” Vail interjected, turning on a laptop that’s sitting on the kitchen table.
“What… how? ”
“Lucky for us, we work closely with some people who have the means to hack into people’s accounts to look at their activity.
Your dad was paying off Social Services.
Gave them about thirty thousand dollars from the money you’ll get from your mom’s life insurance.
Looks like he was planning something more with that money, too…
” he added, going quiet as he typed away on the laptop.
“It seems like daddy has a new hobby… he likes to gamble.”
For fucks sake. Why did this not surprise me? But then I replayed what he said over again in my head. “Your… friends … they hacked into his computer?”
“They did,” he said casually, like this was no big thing.
“Wh-when? How the hell did they do that?”
“Casey, we’ve been keeping tabs on you since we found out you moved back here,” he said and cast a, Duh, sort of look.
I, however, raised my brows and accidentally pressed a little harder on Lee’s knuckles than I had meant to, making him grunt a little from the sting.
“Sorry! Sorry!” I said, fumbling a little as I took in this information.
I grabbed the antiseptic and went about cleaning his wounds.
“You fuckers were spying on me?” I asked, a little taken aback.
“Of course,” Vail said easily, like it was a totally normal thing to do. “For example, why do you think Lee accompanied you home that one time?”
“Bunch of psychos…” I muttered under my breath, deciding it wasn’t worth the battle.
It was over now, and thanks to them, I was no longer living with that sad excuse for a dad.
“Okay, so what’s the deal, you guys?” I worked carefully on Lee’s hands, hating the sight of him like this.
But I was betting anything that the guys he fought against were way worse off, which gave me a satisfying sense of pleasure.
“What exactly is it that you guys are doing here? Because obviously, Vendetta is more than just a high school crew that has cafeteria fights with childhood rivals.”
Vail stopped what he was doing and strode over to the rest of us, taking a seat on the easy chair closest to me, and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and asked, “How much do you know about the Faceless?”
“The Faceless? You mean that mob, or gang, or whatever, in the city?” I instantly thought of Phillip Bryant and how stressed he was as of late with his job.
Nylah’s father worked tirelessly for years trying to end the corruption that the Faceless had created in City Hall.
They run this city. Them and their biker goons, the Celtic Beasts.
He nodded. “You’ve seen the news articles, I’m sure. Even on The Hill,” he smirked at that jab, and I chose to just roll my eyes at him.
“Yes, I wasn’t that sheltered, fuck-face,” I said to him, and his eyes sparkled at my insult, as though he found it more endearing than insulting.
“What did you read?”
“Stuff about bodies of rival bikers popping up around the border towns and drug dealers going missing, then turning up in the morgue. Fights between the Beasts and the street thugs, drugs, the usual bullshit you get with a group like them running the place...” My voice trailed off when I noticed how Vail was slowly shaking his head at me.
“No?” I asked, arching a brow. Beside me, Lee shifted a little, and I quickly applied some ointment over the gashes before I started to carefully wrap his hands.
“Here’s the deal, Casey.” Vail watched as I tended to Lee.
“Harley has always been the shit-pit of Ashland. When we were kids, we saw break-ins and addicts and learned what it was like to hear our neighbors beat the shit out of their spouses and their kids. Fuck, I mean… we all dealt with…” His voice trailed off, glancing at Shaw, who was still sitting on the other end of the couch.
He sat motionless and silent this entire time, his eyes on me, and his expression void of any sort of emotion.
“Things are different now. The Faceless, their leader, have been taking advantage of the fact that Ashland has neglected this community and the people for years.”
“In what way?” I asked, as I finished bandaging Lee’s knuckles, but I didn’t move away from him.
Instead, I lounged back into the couch, holding his injured hands in my lap as my thumbs stroked over the skin that was visible on the backs.
Lee sank further in against me while Shaw shifted the tiniest bit on the other end, his focus still entirely on me.
Vail’s eyes shadowed over, all signs of humour gone. “Girls have been disappearing,” he said, finally.
“What?” I furrowed my brow, the conversation I’d overheard at Meredith’s and Haldon’s place now coming back to me.
“Girls have been disappearing in the community, most from Harley Institute. One girl vanished about a week before you arrived, Heather Mackie. Two others before her at the end of September. Then another girl at the beginning of the school year. Over the summer, it had amped up, with four other girls vanishing. At first, people around here thought some psychopath serial killer was on the loose, but then… everyone just shut up about it.” Vail’s nostrils flared slightly in anger, and I could feel the rage from the injustice rolling off of him.
“Even before, girls from Harley Public are nowhere to be seen, but no one has done shit. No one asks any questions. Only the parents are begging for answers, and the police stonewall them. Why? Because they’re in the Faceless’ pockets… Elias’s .”
Elias. They’d mentioned his name several times last night and this morning. “Elias is… he’s the leader of The Faceless?”