23. Chapter 23
Chapter 23
Sylvie
I peeked through the yellow curtains and looked down to the parking lot. Not a police car in sight. I thought about texting Kilian to see if he’d had better luck, but I remembered my phone was out in the hall acting as a camera.
Drakos caught my eye and nodded toward his screen where the feed showed two figures in jeans and patched vests coming down the corridor. I took a breath and let it out slowly, working to steady my nerves. My hand drifted down to one of my holsters, and I palmed a gun.
“Ready?” he murmured, his voice eerily calm as he watched the screen.
“Yeah.” My heart ricocheted against my ribs. Someone must have told them which apartment Trina and Camilla lived in because they walked right to her door.
“You take the man on the left, I’ll take the one on the right.”
“Got it.”
The first kick to the door didn’t break the lock, but it was enough to send my heart racing. So they weren’t going to bother knocking first. Then another, harder thump sounded, shaking the door in its frame. The thud of a boot rattled the door again, and on the third kick, the doorframe started to splinter.
Drakos jerked his chin, his eyes laser-focused on his phone. “Your man is standing about eighteen inches to the left of the door handle, average height,” he told me quietly.
I nodded. The door splintered with another kick. One more would probably do it. I aimed and let off two quick and precise shots through the drywall. I hoped they found their target. Drakos shot through the door with an eerie calm. The blast of gunfire and the thuds of bodies hitting the floor were grotesquely intimate in the confined space, and the acrid, smoky smell of gunpowder filled my nose.
“They’re both down,” Drakos murmured, checking his phone.
I lowered my weapon as he tucked his phone in his pocket. An eerie silence followed, a stark contrast to the loud shots just seconds ago. Taking in deep breaths, I tried to shake off the adrenaline.
Drakos held his gun out and pulled the battered, bullet-ridden door open as we both cautiously looked outside. Two bodies lay on the floor in the hallway. The barrel-chested man with faded tattoos on his forearms had a small chunk missing out of his skull. It hadn’t been a clean headshot, but the bastard was dead, so I’d take it. The younger man clutched his gut and breathed heavily as he bled out onto the hallway carpet. Drakos had shot him in the stomach and shoulder. From the amount of blood pooling underneath him, he’d probably bleed out before medical assistance arrived unless we intervened.
Drakos walked back into the apartment and hit speed dial on his phone. “Gideon, I need Dedra Holdaway here ASAP. We’re on the third floor of an apartment building in North Las Vegas. Use my phone tracker to get the location. If she’s not available, call Dickson. He’s the next best criminal defense attorney. We killed a biker and critically wounded another.”
I heard Gideon’s long sigh over the phone as I half-listened to their conversation. Holstering my gun, I walked out into the hallway to retrieve my phone when the door to the main stairwell banged open. Another man in a leather vest stopped and looked around, taking in his two fellow bikers lying on the ground.
“What the fuck’s goin’ on?” he snarled. His stringy gray hair was tied back in a ponytail, showing off the open sores on his face. I couldn’t see his teeth, but he had the gaunt, hollow look of a meth user. He stared down at his two fallen friends, then his eyes slid to me as if trying to figure out how I fit into this mess.
I blinked up at him as my hand slowly inched to the gun I’d just holstered. He brought his arm up, his hand wrapped around what looked like an old Colt midnight special. Well, fuck. That would teach me to stay alert and not holster my fucking weapon until I knew we were in the clear.
“Who’re you?” he asked.
My shoulders hunched up and I gave him my best wide-eyed, innocent stare. “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on either. I’m just a tenant.” I could still hear Drakos talking on the phone inside Trina’s apartment. Shit, this was not good.
The man’s eyes squinted at my holstered guns. “Then why are you armed?”
That was a good question, and I scrambled to come up with an answer. It was too bad this guy wasn’t further along in his meth addiction and had fewer working brain cells.
“Because I work for Bolter Gaming in security. They make me wear a gun. My boss thinks I’m not intimidating enough without one.” I gave him my best “aw-shucks” smile.
The meth-head biker started lowering his gun when the younger injured man on the floor spouted off his mouth. “She’s a fuckin’ Spade, Buzz. Shoot her ass,” he gasped.
Before I could even duck, Kilian stepped into the hallway and deftly whacked Buzz in the back of his head with the butt of his gun. Then he delivered a brutal kick to Buzz’s knee. The man’s leg buckled with a sickening crunch, and Kilian followed it up with a merciless stomp to the man’s gun-wielding hand. Drakos walked out of Trina’s apartment and stopped short when he saw Kilian standing over the meth-head biker. Kilian nodded at Drakos and casually leaned down to handcuff Buzz.
As he collected the gun, Fennick strode into the hallway behind him and looked around. “You couldn’t save one for me?” He glanced down at Buzz who lay on the ground, moaning loudly in pain. Fenn nudged him with his foot. “I would have just shot you in the head. Shut up and be grateful.”
“Good timing.” My casual tone belied my galloping heart. Christ on a cracker, that had been close.
The younger man with the wound in his belly lay moaning and cursing in the hallway, looking gray and waxy. I walked over and looked down at him. He watched us with hate-filled eyes as Drakos knelt beside him and peeled off his jacket, applying pressure to the man’s wound. “Why is Terrance LeBaron doing this?”
“Fuck you,” he rasped.
Leaning forward, Drakos got close to his ear. “You probably won’t make it, especially if I stop applying pressure to your wound. You’ve got one chance to live. Talk to me. Besides, what fun is it to keep something like that a secret? Don’t you want to rub it in a little?”
The man suddenly looked young and scared as he lay there in a puddle of his own blood and piss. I wondered about his mother and if he had a girlfriend or any kids. Then he laughed, and my misplaced sympathy dissipated. “Alright, you stupid fuckers, I’ll tell you.”
“Shut the fuck up, Branson,” Buzz groaned.
Branson ignored him and kept talking. “Her old man who’s sittin’ in prison is one of the biggest drug traffickers around. He’s workin’ with the Stacks and he supplies OutKast. The fucker makes more money in prison than he ever did outside, and he asked LeBaron for a favor.” Branson coughed and groaned in pain.
My insides froze over. “What favor?”
“To fuck with the Spades and make his cunt of a daughter suffer.”
I kept my face neutral as something cracked inside me. My mind flashed back to when Luna and I bonded in elementary school, commiserating about our fathers as we ate soggy sandwiches and squished Oreo cookies under the metal slide at recess. We knew they weren’t like other fathers back then, but neither of us knew just how evil they were.
“Why does he want Sylvie to suffer?” Drakos asked calmly.
“He wants her dead for putting him in prison. Eventually.” The man tried to grin but ended up grimacing. Blood leaked from his nose and covered his teeth. I didn’t think he had long.
Sirens blared outside, and I crouched next to him. “What does LeBaron want? He wouldn’t go up against the House of Spades for nothing. What’s he getting out of this?”
“You’re gonna get us killed, you dumb little fucker!” Buzz yelled.
Branson stopped talking, and Drakos pushed into his wound, making him cry out. “What does he want?” he asked, his voice deadly quiet.
Then Drakos started to pull his jacket off the wound, and the young man lost his cockiness. “LeBaron plans to take over OutKast, and he wants a bigger cut of the drug trade.” Then he started crying.
I shook my head. “Oh, quit blubbering. You can’t come after a grandmother and a kid and not expect to get hurt.” Emergency personnel spilled out into the hallway and one knelt down beside the injured man. Drakos stepped back when one of the EMTs took over.
An older cop with a wrinkled face spotted Fennick and Drakos and grimaced. “Why am I not surprised to see you here? What the fuck happened now?”
Fenn grinned obnoxiously and finger waved. “Hello, Detective Reiner.”
The police officer turned to Drakos. “I have two months and three weeks. Can’t you keep a damn lid on it?”
While Drakos and Kilian dealt with the emergency personnel, I walked back into the apartment and got Trina and Camilla out of the bathroom. We went into Trina’s bedroom and they sat at the end of her bed.
“One is dead, and the other two are injured,” I told them. “We’re sending a cleanup crew to fix your door and take care of the, uh, mess we left in your hallway. I’m sorry about that.”
Trina held up her hand, and I walked over and took it, sitting down next to her.
“Thank you for coming to help us,” she whispered.
Sick guilt roiled in my stomach. “I need to tell you something, but you can’t breathe a word of it. It might get me killed or put you both in danger, but you have a right to know.”
They glanced at each other, and Trina nodded. “Okay.”
I exhaled and gazed at Camilla. “The man who attacked you is dead. I also think there were others involved, and I’m going to find them and make them fucking pay .” I winced. “Sorry.” Trina didn’t like the f-bomb.
Camilla turned her face away as Trina patted my hand. “I am glad he is dead. Esta bien , you don’t know any better after growing up with those cousins of yours.”
My lip curled up. “That’s right, all my bad habits came from my cousins. Especially Fennick.” I gazed at Camilla. “This doesn’t change anything. I’m still coming back and dragging you to school and out of this apartment if you don’t do it on your own first. Let me know what you decide.”
A small spark of life lit in her eyes. “You can always try.”
I grinned at her. “I’ll do more than try.” Her sass gave me a little hope.
A couple of hours later, after we’d given statements to the police, we sat in Drakos’s loft, eating lunch and discussing our problem. Kilian called a crew in to replace Trina’s door and fix the bullet holes. They’d also need to clean up the blood in the hallway after the police investigation.
We ordered sandwiches for lunch while we decompressed and strategized. I picked up a cold French fry from my takeout container and pointed it at Fennick. “It feels like we've been playing whack-a-mole with those bastards. Every time we think we've beaten them off, another one pops up. This defensive crap isn't cutting it. Who knows what they'll try next?”
Drakos leaned back. “You need to deal with the source of your problem.”
Shit, he was right. I threw the fry down. “My fucking father. I hate that psychotic bastard.” He’d gotten more unstable and dangerous over the years as his drug use and bitterness ate away at the man he used to be.
Kilian folded his arms and leaned back. “Drakos is right. We need to take out Sylvie’s father and send a message. I have a few ideas.”
Fenn smirked. “I have a few too.”
I sighed, already knowing I’d like Kilian’s ideas better.
“Tell me what happened when you were fifteen,” Drakos murmured on the way back to the mortuary. We’d been riding in silence as thoughts of my father swam through my head. Drakos’s blue eyes flicked to me.
I let out a long, shaky breath. “I guess you have a right to know if we’re going to continue committing multiple felonies together. My biological father’s name is Jeffery Whitlock,” I began, watching the palm trees and desert landscape blur past my window. “He has the moral compass of a serial killer, and if he were ever shipwrecked on a desert island, he’d be the first to resort to cannibalism. When my mother died, I inherited some money and her interest in the funeral home.”
“Let me guess," Drakos shook his head. “Whitlock saw you as his golden ticket.”
“More like his personal ATM.” The memories still burned me. I’d been a young teenager and my mother had just died, but the fucker came to me and demanded money.
Drakos pulled up to the mortuary and turned to me. “Did you give him any?”
“Hell, no. I’d just buried my mother, and I was a mess. But Ezra and my cousins made sure I wasn’t an idiot. I told him to get away from me. He was stoned out of his goddamned mind at the time and cornered me outside of a chess meet. He looked like complete shit.”
Drakos growled. “It seems greed runs thicker than water in the Whitlock bloodline.”
I spent half my life afraid that I inherited my father’s psychopathic tendencies and cruelty, so his comment stung. “I’m not like him,” I muttered as I got out of the car and headed up to the apartment.
Drakos followed me inside and took my hand before I could escape him, pulling me over to the couch. “I wasn’t implying you were. If our parents determine who we are or what we’ll become, then I’m fucked. You mentioned your father tried to kill you. What happened?”
My leg started bouncing, and I pulled my hand from his, tucking my palms under my thighs. God, I hated remembering that day. “My parents separated when I was maybe three or four. I have a few hazy memories of my father at the beach or playing in the yard with me, but that’s it. Drugs and hatred twisted his brain, and when I inherited money and my mother died, he tried to bully me. When that didn’t work, he figured I probably didn’t have a will.”
Drakos nodded, instantly getting it. “So through intestacy laws, he’d be the one to inherit if you died.”
“Exactly. He’s like a vulture, always circling.”
“What about your mother? Luna briefly mentioned her too.”
I rubbed my sternum, a muted pain flowing through me. “She battled severe depression, and it was like an invisible parasite every day. Sometimes, she’d shake it off and decide we should go ‘make a memory.’ So we’d throw together a trip to a national park, the beach, or maybe a concert. For all her faults, she made sure I knew I was loved. I still miss her.”
He took my hand. “There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in grief.”
“That’s from… Aeschylus?” I guessed.
His eyebrow lifted. “I’m impressed. My grandfather liked to quote him. So why is your father in prison?”
“A few months after Luna came to live with us in Phoenix, Mom had a psychotic episode. A few weeks prior to that, my stepfather had finally left, and I couldn’t blame him. I don’t think he could stand watching her suffer anymore and not be able to do anything about it.” I fell silent.
“Who found her?” His voice was quiet.
“I did. She hung herself in her closet.”
He gently lifted me onto his lap, and I curled into him. In the shadows of my mind, I could still hear the silk tie creaking on the metal rod as her body swayed when I’d touched her.
She kept lavender sachets in her closet, and the smell could still trigger the trauma of that day. “I fell apart, and Luna and Ezra took care of me until I could put myself back together.”
Stroking my hair, he pulled me closer to him. “I’m sorry. Your mother obviously loved you.”
His voice held a faint wistfulness, and I suddenly wondered if Drakos ever felt that from his own mother. “Yeah, she did. She had such a funny, braying laugh, and always cheered for the underdog.”
“Something she obviously passed down to her daughter.”
“The braying laugh?”
“That too.”
I smiled a little. “I got the deluxe package from mom. A strange laugh, a nasty temper, and a knack for finding trouble.”
“Or maybe trouble has a knack for finding you. Tell me about Jeffery.”
I stared ahead, unseeing. “It was late afternoon and the school was pretty much deserted. We were getting our stuff to head home. As I shut my locker, I saw him standing there in the dark hallway.”
“What’d you do?”
That familiar shame rose within me. “Nothing at first. I froze like a stupid, scared child. Fenn didn’t let me hear the end of it when he found out. We were trapped at the end of a hallway, and when he started toward us, I saw the gun in his hand. I turned and screamed at Luna to run, then heaved my backpack at him.” I still had nightmares about his terrifying grin.
The dark, quiet corridor echoed sharply when I slammed my locker shut that day. The janitors hadn’t begun their nightly cleaning routine, leaving us alone in the late afternoon shadows with my worst nightmare, who stood there with a gun, staring at me with lifeless eyes.
“Alexa is the one who saved us. She was practically invisible at school, a year younger than us, and she wore the same outfit almost every single day. She saw him walk into the school and spotted the gun.”
“How’d she get him?”
Smiling grimly, I remembered the sound echoing in the hallway. “She played softball, and practice had just ended. Lex still had her gear with her—including her old, dented softball bat. Without missing a beat, she came up behind him and swung like she was aiming for a home run right as he pulled the trigger. His shot went wide, but hers didn’t. She knocked him on his ass.” I smiled faintly, remembering her swing and the gleam in her eye.
Drakos raised an eyebrow. “Alexa plays softball?”
“Yes, and she’s good. After she hit him, chaos erupted. Luna called nine-one-one while Alexa kept searching for an opportunity to swing again. She broke his arm and bruised his kidney. She’s the true Harley Quinn, and we were her clumsy suicide squad.”
It had been a complete shitshow. My arm had gone numb, but adrenaline and hate kept me going. I bled like a stuck pig, and Luna was screaming and crying into her phone as she talked to the dispatcher.
“You have a strange look in your eyes. What happened?” he asked carefully.
“He winged my arm,” I admitted. It’d been a little more than a graze, but the bullet missed bones.
He leaned back and dragged me to him, squeezing me hard. “Good Christ. You three are… something.”
“After that, things changed. I mean, how could they not? I grew up, I guess.” My voice wavered slightly, and I cleared my throat. “My own father, who was supposed to protect and love me, tried to kill me over money. All three of us have at least one evil, shitty parent who made our lives hell. No wonder we bonded.”
Drakos brushed a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I know a little something about that.” He did. His own family had sent him to Bitter Creek Ranch, and our backgrounds were eerily similar in many ways. No wonder I was drawn to him.
His understanding was there in his fingers as he trailed them along my jawline. I found myself leaning closer, drawn into his gravity. He gazed at me with his own demons stirring in his eyes, and in that moment, the truth hit me. I loved this gorgeous, sinful man, and he was probably going to break me in ways my father never had.