Chapter 5 Malice
MALICE
I hurl a chair across the room, watching with dissatisfaction as it doesn’t splinter into a thousand pieces the way I really fucking want it to. The way I feel like I’m splintering, coming apart at the seams the longer this shit goes on.
“God fucking dammit!” I snarl at nothing in particular, curling my hands into fists hard enough that my nails bite into my skin. I drag in a deep breath and then shake out some of the tension in my body, dragging a hand over the scruff on my face.
I haven’t had time to shave in a while, but none of that shit matters now.
We just lost another thread. Another lead that didn’t pan out. It’s been several days since we got back from Mexico, and it feels like we’re not any closer to finding out where Willow is. Every fucking day that passes with no news and no resolution just makes it worse.
Ransom’s jaw is tight, a muscle in the side of his face jumping until he lets out a breath himself.
“We’ll just… keep looking,” he says, his voice strained.
Victor doesn’t even say anything. His eyes are glued to his computer, and his fingers are flying across the keyboard as he searches for something new. All he does these days is search, sifting through information to try to find a lead buried under all the fucking nothing we keep coming up with.
He hasn’t torn himself away from his computer for more than a couple hours here and there to sleep, and that’s usually only when Ransom or I make him. His face is gaunt, his blue eyes bloodshot, but he still keeps going.
And even with all of that, we haven’t found her.
If I feel like I’m about to lose the last shred of my sanity, I know my brothers feel the same. Whatever shit I said to Vic when we first got to the hotel, whatever reassurances I gave him, I’ve lost sight of them now. I feel like I’ve got a monster inside me, tearing me apart from the inside out.
All I can think about is how we’re failing her. Willow was depending on us to keep her safe, to keep this shit from happening, and we fucking failed. And now we can’t even fucking find her.
She could be going through all kinds of horrible shit, and we’re sitting here in this goddamned hotel room, helpless to do anything about it.
I slam my fist into the wall hard enough to send a jolt up my arm, and then I drop my forehead to rest against the shitty wallpaper, breathing hard.
“How the fuck can that asshole go underground like this? How can we just… lose to him? To him?”
“Money and resources go a long way,” Vic mutters tiredly. “He can pay to cover his tracks.”
“Are we sure he actually brought Willow back here?” Ransom asks. “Maybe he just passed through Detroit and went somewhere else. Maybe we’re looking in the wrong places.”
I can see Vic’s hackles go up, his shoulders stiffening.
“Yes, I’m sure,” he snaps, sounding tense and frustrated. “He’s here somewhere. I just—I can’t make the last connections I need to. I can’t track him the rest of the way. He’s covered his shit too well.”
“Fuck it.” I shake my head sharply. “We should go interrogate Olivia. Beat it out of her if we have to. She has to know where Willow is. It’s not like she’d let Troy take Willow somewhere without her knowledge.”
“We don’t know that for sure. And she’ll have us arrested if we go anywhere near her,” Ransom points out.
“Remember, she’s got warrants out for all of us now, not just you.
Lying low in an ask-no-questions hotel while we search for Willow is one thing, but going after Olivia flat-out would be too risky. ”
Irritation simmers under my skin. On our drive back to Detroit, Vic alerted us that there are now outstanding warrants for all three of us, proving that Olivia followed through on the threat she made all those weeks ago.
She probably knew it would make it harder for us to go after Willow, and it makes me fucking furious that she can throw roadblocks like this in our way from her goddamned ivory tower.
“Well, what the fuck else can we do?” I growl. “Just sit here?”
Ransom grimaces, shoving a hand through his messy brown hair. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Mal. I’d love to give Olivia a piece of my mind—with my fucking fists. But if we get thrown in jail, we can’t help Willow at all.”
“Fuck!”
I punch the wall again, because I know he’s right. But I hate it.
“Let’s just… start at the beginning again,” Ransom suggests, even though he sounds as exhausted as the rest of us. We’ve gone over it so many times, and we’re no closer to knowing anything. But it’s not like we can just give up. “What do we know?”
“We know Troy came to Detroit,” Vic responds automatically. “I’ve tracked him to the city, but no farther than that. The only contact he had with his family was telling them he’d be away for a while. He hasn’t been to the offices of their corporation either. He’s basically vanished.”
“And taken Willow with him,” I mutter. “There are only so many places he could be fucking hiding.”
Vic spares me a glance. “It’s a big city, Malice. And like I keep saying, he has the money to stay completely under the radar. I’m sure he has the resources to cover his tracks and hire a team of bodyguards who’d help him hide a captive.”
He says the last word like it tastes sour in his mouth, and it makes my stomach turn just hearing it. My Solnyshka is too damned strong to just be some fucker’s captive, but right now that’s basically what she is.
I pace the room, feeling pent up and caged in. I’m ready to leave this fucking hotel and tear this whole goddamned city apart if I have to, destroying it from the ground up to find Willow.
Every second that passes is like a knife in my heart, twisting deeper and deeper. The more I think about what she might be going through, how she might be suffering, the sharper that knife becomes and the more viciously it cuts.
I open my mouth to say something, but then Vic suddenly sits up straighter. There’s something sharp about his posture, an edge of alertness that wasn’t there a moment ago.
“Wait,” he says.
Ransom is at Vic’s side in a heartbeat, and I’m right there on his heels, energy and adrenaline churning inside me. We peer over Vic’s shoulder, not quite sure what he’s found yet. His fingers move across the keys, typing even more furiously, and then he sits back.
“Here,” he says, his voice shaking slightly. “I found something. It’s a property I think Troy bought a while ago. Fuck, he hid his tracks well. He went through a shell company to purchase it, and there’s almost no connection between him and this house. But it’s his. I’m sure of it.”
“What does this mean?” I ask, getting right to the point.
“It means it’s a place he has that we didn’t know about before. I’m almost certain it belongs to him.”
We all tense at that, spinning out on the implications.
“Can you get footage surrounding the area?” I ask Vic, gripping the back of his chair. “We’ve gotta know if it’s his. If he’s there.”
Vic is already working on it as I speak, his eyes narrowed.
“It’s remote, outside of the city,” he says, speaking slowly as he follows the trail of information he’s digging up in real-time.
“Looks like some kind of cabin in the woods. Maybe he bought it as a sort of safe house in case he ever needed to lie low. Or as someplace where he could do shady shit without being seen. Let me see what I can piece together.”
It’s another tense few minutes as we watch my twin work. Rushing him isn’t going to help anything, I know that. But at the same time, I feel like I’m champing at the bit, wanting him to hurry up, desperate for this to be something.
Finally, Vic pulls up some blurry footage.
“This is from about a week ago,” he says. A couple of cars with tinted windows are driving up a twisting road, which I assume leads to the cabin he found.
“There’s not a lot of traffic in this area,” Vic explains. “Almost no cars use this road. And the timing works out right. So—”
“So that’s probably her,” Ransom finishes.
“It’s as solid of a lead as we’ve got,” Vic agrees.
My muscles tense, ready for action. I can’t fucking wait any longer.
“It’s good enough to act on,” I tell them, clapping my hands on the back of Vic’s chair and stepping back. “Let’s go.”
Ransom gives me a look, although he’s already moving toward the cabinet where we’ve stashed the weapons we bought over the past few days.
“You know this isn’t going to be easy, right?
Troy’s going to have security with him. And considering how well-trained the crew who came after us in Mexico was, he’s probably not taking any chances. ”
I shoot him a dark smile, cracking my knuckles. “Good. I’m in the mood to kill more than one motherfucker tonight.”