Chapter 21 Malice #2
“Think about it. All we knew from X was that we had to put the device on Galvin and then stick close so we could record what he said. The device was rigged to explode, and X knew that we’d be in range of that explosion.”
Vic nods along with that, his eyes narrowing as he thinks. “The crash would kill Galvin, but it would also take us out as well. We did just barely avoid crashing worse than we did, and if things had gone just a bit worse, or we’d been driving faster, or our car had caught fire to begin with…”
He trails off, but neither of us need him to finish that sentence to know what he means. We wouldn’t have walked away from it.
Ransom makes a face. “Well, I guess it’s safe to say that X is more pissed off than we thought about us not delivering Willow to him as a virgin. Now he’s just fucking with us. Getting us to do jobs that are either designed to kill us or to be so dangerous that we’ll be lucky to get out alive.”
We all take a minute to process that, caught in the seriousness of this shit.
It’s not like we can tell X to go fuck himself.
Not when he has this kind of leverage over us.
We have to keep doing his goddamned jobs, even if it means he gets to keep taking shots at us to try to take us out because he’s pissed.
Fuck.
A pinging noise cuts through the silence of the kitchen, and Vic pulls out his phone and checks it.
“We’ve got a message,” he says, giving us a significant look.
“Great. Can’t wait to see who that’s from,” Ransom mutters wryly, and we head upstairs so we can pull it up on Vic’s main computer.
Tension coils in my muscles all over again as we wait for Vic to decrypt the message. I hate this shit. Feeling helpless. Feeling like I’m at the whims of someone else—especially a mysterious psycho like X who holds my fucking life in his hands.
Of course that’s exactly who the message is from, and once it’s fully decrypted, we lean in to read it on Vic’s screen. X gets right to the point, telling us that we did good work on the job last night and arranging a drop for the file we recorded from the listening device before the crash.
At the end of the message, there’s a final sentence telling us he has another job ready for us.
“What the fuck?” I snap, hot fury rising inside me. I curl my hands into tight fists, my knuckles aching from the strain. Usually, X gives us jobs every few months, not every few days. Not one right after the other like this.
Ransom scowls. “Yeah, this is bad. He’s basically fucking with us now, and if we keep doing jobs for him, we’re going to end up dead sooner or later.”
Vic nods, looking a little distant, like he’s calculating something in his head.
“He plans to run us down,” he says quietly.
“To tire us out or keep throwing us at shit until we fuck up somewhere along the way. He’ll use us until one of his jobs gets us killed.
It’s a win-win for him, but we lose no matter what. This needs to end.”
His eyes slide to me as he finishes speaking, and I clench my jaw.
My twin is right, but I don’t know how the hell we’re going to do that. We’ve tried to figure out X’s identity before and failed. He has everything over us, and we don’t even know who the fuck he is.
I give Vic a look that conveys all of that, heaving a sigh. “How the fuck are we going to end it? We don’t know shit about him. We don’t know how he gets his information or even how he’s keeping tabs on us.”
“I don’t know,” Vic murmurs, his expression tight.
That’s a big admission for him. Usually, he at least has some kind of a plan for this type of shit. But X has evaded Vic’s best hacking work from the first time he contacted us, so it makes sense.
“We’ll figure out a way, though,” Ransom says, sounding a bit more optimistic. Or maybe it’s just determination I’m picking up in his voice. “We’ll find out who he is and take him out so he can’t keep forcing us into this shit. So he can’t keep manipulating and fucking with us.”
I take a deep breath and let it out in a long rush before nodding. “Yeah, okay. We’ll try.”
We all share a grim look.
It’s pretty damned easy to see what the stakes are here. We have to get X off our backs if we’re ever going to be free of his bullshit.
But it feels like a long shot, and that worries me.
Despite the fact that we don’t know his identity, it’s clear that X has power and resources, and enough favors to pull in that he was able to get me out of prison years before my sentence should’ve ended.
And he could send me back just as easily.
He could have me thrown back behind bars and then fuck up the lives of my brothers, and I wouldn’t be able to do shit about it.
On top of that, Willow is involved now too, and I can’t help but worry about her.
Maybe I should never have told her X exists.
I couldn’t stand her hating us, couldn’t stomach the idea that she thought we saw her as trash. But maybe telling her the truth was a mistake, an ultimately selfish action that will ruin more than it fixed.
It was different when she was here, living under our roof, and we could keep an eye on her and make sure she was safe. But now she’s out there living her own life, doing her own shit, and we can’t protect her the same way.
I fucking hate that.