Chapter 17 Victor
VICTOR
I flick my eyes to the steering wheel as Malice pulls our car away from the museum and starts to follow Galvin’s vehicle. He keeps a close enough distance that we won’t lose our mark, but he doesn’t get so close that Galvin or his driver will notice being followed.
In my head, I think that there should be another car length between us, but I bite my tongue, saying nothing.
Whenever we all go somewhere together, I prefer to be the one driving. Ransom and Malice can drive fine, but I hate being in the car with one of them behind the wheel. They’re too imprecise, and it grates on me.
Malice drives with his emotions, flooring it when he’s angry and braking hard when he’s feeling spiteful, and Ransom is just a thrill seeker, pushing the boundaries of the speed limits, but without the careful control that I have when I drive.
But for now, it makes the most sense for Malice to be the one behind the wheel. I have to use my tech skills to tune into the recording device that we planted on Galvin, making sure we get everything he says for the next several hours, like X told us to.
Ransom is in the backseat, and he’s taken his tie off and undone the first couple of buttons of his shirt. His brown hair is messy, like he’s been running his hands through it.
“So what the hell happened tonight, Mal?” Ransom asks, and Malice grumbles something under his breath. “Don’t give me that,” Ransom presses. “I saw you and Willow up there on the second floor. Did you really think some fancy-ass museum wing opening was the right place for that?”
“No one saw anything,” Malice counters.
“Maybe not, but you might as well have bent her over and fucked her right there for how intense you were being.”
“Don’t think I didn’t consider it.”
Ransom snorts. “Of course you did. Look, you’re gonna scare her off if you keep pushing her too hard. It’s obvious she’s not in the right headspace to be fucking around with us in public, especially with her grandma right there.”
Malice just grunts, taking a turn too fast. “Willow is strong as hell,” he shoots back. “She can take it.”
“I know she’s strong. But she’s been through a lot of shit lately. You don’t know—”
“Quiet,” I say, cutting into their argument. “I’m getting a signal.”
I clutch the receiver in my hand, not liking the unsettled feeling in my stomach.
It’s irritation, but it’s tinged with something like jealousy.
Malice wanted Willow tonight. He wanted to touch her and rile her up, to make sure that she can’t forget him and what he does to her.
So he took what he wanted because that’s what he does.
And that’s not something I can do. I have too many… issues. Too much shit piled on my shoulders, holding me back. So no matter how much I wanted to touch Willow or see her fall apart tonight, I wouldn’t have been able to.
Static crackles over the receiver, and I shake those thoughts out of my head.
Focus.
We have a job to do.
The fingers of one hand drum on my leg, and I count the space between my breaths as we listen in on Galvin’s conversation, sticking close to his car as it drives through the city.
He has a driver, because of course he does, and he’s in the back seat talking about some deal he’s working on.
“If we can close this, it will be big,” he says, his voice coming through the receiver. “Big enough to start shaking things up. I just need to get some signatures on the forms so we can start making progress with things. Their accountants are holding things up for some goddamned reason.”
It’s all boring business talk, nothing that interests me, but that doesn’t matter. This is what X wants, so obviously it means something to him.
We merge onto an empty road, picking up speed, and the signal starts to fade out, the sound of Galvin’s voice going crackly with static, like a badly tuned radio.
“We need to be closer,” I tell Malice.
“On it,” he says. He pulls into the lane right behind Galvin’s car, still keeping some space between us, but inching closer.
I turn the dial on the receiver a bit, and then nod once Galvin’s voice comes back through, strong and clear.
He’s berating accountants in general now, it seems, so it doesn’t appear that we missed much.
We need to get a better signal so that we can fall back a little and not risk him noticing us tailing him. I start to fiddle with the device X gave us when all of a sudden, something flares inside Galvin’s car, bright enough that we can clearly see it through the tinted windows.
Smoke starts to fill the interior of the car, and the vehicle swerves sharply.
“What the—”
“Oh, shit—”
Shouts burst through the receiver, and then the recording cuts out.
Galvin’s car swerves again, veering to the left and smashing into the median. It flips and rolls over, landing right back in our lane.
“Fuck!” Malice slams on the brake as he curses, but it’s too late. We were going too fast, and it all happened in what felt like an instant.
The sounds of crunching metal and breaking glass fill my ears as we smash right into the wreck of Galvin’s car.
We hit with a jolting impact, and my body jerks against the seat belt as it goes tight across my torso. For a moment, I feel dazed and stunned, blinking hard as my head swims.
It almost feels like when my dad used to hold my head underwater, his voice muted and muffled as he talked to me about finding the strength to endure pain. There’s a buzzing in my ears, and I hear someone talking, but it has that same muffled quality, out of reach.
For just a moment, I’m that kid again, lungs burning, fighting the need to gasp for air, my head held down by someone bigger and stronger than me. Just counting the seconds and the wild beat of my heart until I’ll be allowed to breathe again.
Then a hand lands on my shoulder, shaking me urgently.
“Vic? Vic! Victor!”
It’s Ransom, shouting my name. I blink, shaking myself out of the daze, even though my ears are still ringing.
“Get out of the fucking car!” Ransom yells, and I nod, shoving my dented door open so I can slide out.
“Mal?” Ransom calls, pushing his way out as well.
“Yeah.” Malice’s voice is strained. “I fuckin’—need a little help.”
Ransom yanks the driver’s side door open, and then curses. “Shit. Fuck, Mal.”
I come around to look, seeing Malice half slumped in the driver’s seat. The whole front of the car is crumpled in on itself, and a piece of metal from the dash is stuck through Malice’s side.
It doesn’t look too deep, but it’s definitely going to need medical attention, or he’ll bleed out.
Between the two of us, we get Malice out of the car. The white of his dress shirt is liberally stained with spreading blood, and he leans on me as Ransom goes to check Galvin’s car quickly.
I glance around, adjusting my grip on Malice as I evaluate our surroundings. The road we’re on is empty at the moment, but I don’t know how long it will stay that way. My best guess is that Galvin’s driver took this route so he could speed down the mostly deserted street.
“They’re dead,” Ransom says as he returns to us, scrubbing a hand down his face and leaving a streak of red on his cheek.
Dead.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad yet, but it means one less thing for us to deal with in the short term, at least.
“We can’t let this be traced back to us,” I tell Ransom, and he nods.
Moving quickly with Malice shuffling along at my side, I grab the laptop I brought with me just in case we needed it for the job, then pull out the small container of accelerant we keep in the trunk.
It’s not hard to make sure our car will go up in flames, and that will be enough to hide the fingerprints and anything else that could ID us.
The car already doesn’t have a VIN, and the plates are fake, so this is just covering the bases.
Ransom grabs the first aid kit we keep in the car and then pulls out a lighter and ignites a blaze. The three of us limp away from the crash site as smoke starts to billow up into the night sky.
We’re lucky that this road was pretty deserted when we got here, but we need to get out of sight before anyone sees us.
Instead of following the road, we pick our way down the grassy, tree lined slope in the darkness. It’s not easy, especially with Malice supported between us, but we make it, getting out of eye line of the road.
“Goddammit,” Ransom says once we’re a good enough distance away. “We’re nowhere near home. We can’t call a cab looking like this either. It’s gonna be a long-ass walk, and we need to get Malice looked at.”
He’s right. We don’t have a lot of options, and judging from the way Malice is gritting his teeth, just the walk down the hill has already put stress on his wound.
“We’re not that far from Willow’s apartment,” I tell them.
We all share a look at that. As much as we’ve wanted to keep her out of things, it seems like we have to keep turning to her for help.
Ransom chews his lip for a second, then nods. “So we go there, then. It’s our best bet right now.”
With Malice out of commission, gritting his teeth through the pain and not offering much by way of an opinion, Ransom takes the lead. We stick to the side streets and alleyways, keeping to the shadows. The last thing we need is for someone to see us like this and start asking questions.
It takes longer to get to Willow’s place than it would normally, since we’re moving slowly, but we manage to make it.
More blood has soaked into Malice’s shirt, and Ransom is trying to keep pressure on it.
It would be easy to let myself spin out right now, to let the chaos and unpredictability of what happened drag me to a dark place, but I take a deep breath and shove my demons down.
I count the steps up to the front door of Willow’s building, letting that simple act calm me a little.
Unlike her last apartment, this place isn’t the kind of building where people prop the front door open with a rock to just let anyone come walking in off the street. Here, you have to be buzzed in by someone inside, unless you have a keycard for the door.
I find the number for Willow’s apartment and hit the buzzer.
Tapping my fingers lightly, I count the seconds that pass until she buzzes back.
“Hello?” she asks, sounding confused.
“Willow.” I lean closer to the intercom, my chest tightening strangely at the sound of her voice. “It’s us. We need to come up.”
“Victor? I… what are you—”
She sounds hesitant, but we don’t have time for that, so I cut right to the only thing that matters.
“Malice is hurt,” I tell her. “We don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Oh god. Fuck. Okay. Come up.”
She buzzes us into the building, and we slip inside. Fortunately, there’s an elevator, and we manage to get Malice into it without dripping blood all over the place. I’ll have to erase any security footage that’s capturing us, but that should be easy enough to do.
“Almost there,” Ransom says, like he’s giving my twin a pep talk.
Malice just keeps clenching his jaw, breathing heavily through his nose. It’s clear he’s in pain, although he’s got a much higher tolerance for it than most people.
Willow is waiting for us at the door, and we’ve barely knocked before she’s letting us inside.
I’ve seen her new place before, through the cameras Malice set up that day he went to see her, before she found out about them and took them down.
But this is the first time I’ve been inside it physically.
It smells like her. Like the unique floral scent of her preferred shampoo, combined with something else that I can’t name but that I recognize as distinctly Willow.
I got used to having that scent around when she lived with us, and I still feel the absence of it in our warehouse.
“Holy shit,” Willow breathes, her voice shaking a little.
She looks us over, taking in the cuts and scrapes on me and Ransom, and when her eyes land on Malice, she sucks in a sharp breath.