Chapter Eleven – Abby
Turns out, when Hawthorne mentioned me leaving the house with Ezra and Royal on a hunt, he literally meant the actual night it would happen.
The guys had been working behind the scenes so much while I was completely unaware, which just goes to show I don’t know a thing about the effort they put into this, so when another week passes and I’m told it’s time to hop in the car and get going, I’m pretty damn shocked.
Shocked, but stupidly excited.
Hawthorne walks us to the garage. While Ezra and Royal go on without me, he stops me just inside the house.
“You are getting a taste of what we do tonight,” he reminds me, as if I need him to say it aloud.
Please. “They’ll be watching you, and in case you forgot—” He points at his own wrist to remind me of the tracking device.
Yeah, yeah. Don’t need that reminder, either.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I won’t go running off.
I’ll be a fly on the wall. Everything will be hunky dory, okay?
” Even as I try to assure him, it becomes clear to me he still doesn’t quite trust me, but unless we go on forever the way we were before, something’s gotta give. Might as well put me to use, right?
What’s better than a serial-killing trio? A serial-killing quad.
“Everything you’ve said has so far proven to be truthful,” Hawthorne admits, “but we’ll see if that continues.”
“So skeptical,” I say. Though I hold his stare, he can easily hide under his wavy black hair. It’s long enough that it’s starting to cover his eyes now. “How about when we get back, I give you a haircut?”
Out of everything I could’ve said, that must’ve been the last thing he’s expecting, because the look he gives me is full of confusion as his brows furrow and he asks, “Excuse me?”
“Your hair is getting long. It’s covering your eyes. I know you hide in your office all the time, so it might not matter to you, but still, you have nice eyes. You shouldn’t hide them.” The more I say, the more I must make him uncomfortable, because he averts his gaze.
“That’s not… that’s not something you should be concerned with.”
“And yet it is.” I grin up at him and do something else he doesn’t expect: I grab him by the collar of his shirt, tug him down, and place a kiss on his cheek.
“Don’t worry, I’ll behave, I promise.” Before he can say anything else, I move around him and slip out of the door, catching up with Royal and Ezra in the garage.
Again, it is way too easy to get under these guys’ skin. And the way Hawthorne blushes? I freaking love it.
It’s a bit of a drive. We leave at five-thirty in the late afternoon and don’t arrive at our destination until after midnight.
We definitely cross state lines. I sit in the backseat by myself, while Royal drives and Ezra sits in the passenger’s seat.
Near my feet are black duffel bags, with what I’m assuming is their killing attire: the black ensemble, gloves, and masks.
We listen to the radio the entire time, ads and all, which drives me nuts but hey, if that’s what they do, then who am I to suggest paying for an ad-free experience?
There is nothing worse than being advertised to constantly. Well, almost nothing worse.
It’s after midnight when we pull into the back of a large parking lot of a big box store. We’re far enough away from cameras and the parking lot lights that no one’s around. It’s so late it’s empty and totally eerie.
Royal turns the lights off on the car, then puts it in park. He reaches in the back to grab one of the duffel bags, and he pulls what he needs out of it before handing it to Ezra.
They already wear black pants, but the rest of their clothes? They change. I don’t get nearly enough of an eyeful from the backseat as they do it, sadly. The last things they pull out are gloves and their old-fashioned hockey masks.
They put the gloves on and set the hockey masks atop their heads. It’s Ezra who glances back at me and says, “There’s another bag back there for you, so you can… change.” He says it like his tongue is tied.
And me? I didn’t even realize one of the bags tucked near theirs was for me. I’m giddy as hell as I unbuckle my seatbelt and reach for it. After unzipping it, I pull out clothes that match theirs.
I wore all black, of course, trying to fit the theme of the night, but hey, I’ll play along.
“No peeking,” I tease them, well aware all it’d take for them to peek would be a quick glance in the rearview mirror and there’d be nothing I can do about it—but you know what? I’d be okay with a little peeking. “Okay, maybe some peeking, if you really want to.”
I don’t know if they peek or not, but regardless, soon enough I’m changed and wearing a tight, long-sleeve black shirt, along with leather gloves. I even have a mask of my own, although it’s much newer-looking than theirs. Less stained, one might say.
“All right, I’m ready for action,” I say, the mask resting atop my head, much like theirs do. If someone were to take a look at us, they’d see a trio of all-black-wearing people with masks like it’s Halloween.
It’s not, but that’s what makes it fun.
Royal turns on the lights to the car, gets us out of park, and we get going.
Our destination isn’t too far from where we changed, a measly fifteen more minutes.
It’s not a very well-to-do neighborhood, either.
A thirty or forty-year-old development, you know the ones.
The kind where the electrical grid is underground and the trees are more established on the tree lawns, but also the kind where the houses haven’t really been kept up on for a few decades, so they’ve all seen better days, minus the one or two in the area that have been bought and flipped recently.
The streets are empty, so as we near our house, Royal turns off the lights of the car again, only this time we’re still moving. We creep to our destination: a house at the end of a roundabout in the far back of the development.
We hesitate on the roundabout, and Ezra pulls something else out of their bag. I know there’s rope and saws in there, too, but what he pulls out right then is something I’ve never seen before.
A little device. Small. Some kind of electronic thing. I sit in the middle of the backseat, leaning forward to watch him turn the device on and hit a few buttons on its screen. After a moment or two, I can’t handle the curiosity anymore, and I ask, “What’s that?”
“A wireless jammer,” Ezra says. “The Benefactor’s own model. It freezes any cameras within a couple hundred for a few hours, and when the feeds come back up, no one’s the wiser.”
Makes sense they’d have something. Everybody and their brother has cameras these days. Doorbell cameras, cameras built into their lights; honestly, it’s why I chose who I did. They didn’t have cameras on their houses, so I didn’t have to worry about anything like that.
As Ezra stuffs the device away, we pull into the driveway, parking just beyond the garage. We pull down our masks and get out. Ezra keeps hold of the bag with the necessary tools of the night, while Royal reaches into his pocket and pulls out a lockpicking kit.
Your girl learned to lockpick while watching videos on the internet. You’d be surprised at the kinds of skills you can learn when you do a deep-dive online. People put everything out there, and I mean everything.
We go to the side door of the garage, and Royal gets to work while Ezra’s masked face is constantly swinging around, surveying the area. We are cloaked in darkness and shadows where we are, so even if someone happened to walk by on the sidewalk, they wouldn’t see us.
But it’s late. Anyone walking on the sidewalks right now would probably be up to no good, like us.
Royal’s handiwork unlocks the door, but before we go in, he says, “Ezra and I will take the lead. Don’t get in the way.”
I hold up a hand in the air and place my other over my heart, mimicking what I think is a scout’s honor pose—although I was never a scout, so I guess I wouldn’t really know. Still, I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and that means I’m not going to get in the way tonight.
This is their thing. I’m here to watch, to implicate myself. To dig myself even deeper in this hole.
Before we enter the house, Ezra hands Royal something from the bag. A quick glance tells me it’s a small white cloth. He must’ve splashed it with chloroform while I was busy watching the other lockpick our way inside.
Royal goes first, chloroformed rag in hand. I’m the meat in the breaking-and-entering sandwich, which means Ezra is behind me.
A good thing, too, because I have no idea where I’m going. It seems like Royal and Ezra know, though, like they already know the layout of the house. They must’ve gotten blueprints or something? Part of their process, the part of the process I wasn’t privy to just yet.
Again, makes sense. You don’t want to walk into a place and not know where you’re going. Every second matters when you have to get in, cut someone up, and get out.
We walk silent as mice as we move through the darkness of the house. My eyes have long since adjusted to the darkness, so I keep a good focus on Royal’s wide back as we go. He leads us to a stairwell, and then we traverse upwards, ascending to the top floor of the house.
The house isn’t too huge. It’s modest in size. Means it’s all too easy to stumble upon the bedroom we’re looking for once we’re on the second floor.
Rag in one hand, Royal is slow to grip the door handle, even slower to crack open the door.
He turns to look at me, reminding me of what we discussed on the drive here.
Only one of us goes into the room until the victim is out.
You know, in case he somehow overpowers Royal and runs out of the room, and then we’re ready for him.