5. Torus
Rage was a bloody red curtain drawn down over Torus’s eyes. He stopped only once on the way to the Docking Bay. He made a quick detour to the Information terminal to look up the home address of Zach Wyndham.
A score of articles popped up and he read through them quickly. Most of them talked about what a “tech genius” the male was and how millions of humans were delighted with his computer apps and games. There were also mentions of how rich he was and how he had several domiciles in various parts of the world.
Torus made a note of all of them and used the Kindred-to-human database to get addresses for each one. This male was not escaping him—he would fly around the entire fucking Earth if he had to in order to find him!
As it turned out, the very first address yielded results. Torus set his shuttle—which was built to Jorgen size and so was much larger than a regular Kindred ship—down on the perfectly manicured front lawn of a mansion located in the state called Virginia. As he swung out of the shuttle, a man in a black suit came rushing out, waving his arms.
“Hey, you can’t park there! Nobody parks on the lawn!” he exclaimed. Then he seemed to get a really good look at Torus. “You can’t…” he began again and then trailed off.
Torus stepped up to him. The man was a pretty good size for a human, but Torus still towered head and shoulders above him.
“Is Zachary Wyndham at home?” he demanded, glaring down at the man.
“Uh, yeah but you can’t…I mean, nobody meets with the boss without an appointment,” the man stammered. “I’m his bodyguard and even I don’t see him without a fuckin’ appointment, ya know?”
“He’s going to make an exception for me,” Torus said grimly. “Do you remember his ex-Mate?”
“His what?” The man frowned, clearly confused.
“Wife,” Torus said, finding the correct word. “Do you remember his ex-wife?”
“Molly? Sure—pretty little thing. Kinda too plump for my taste, but you know, I’m not the one who pays the bills around here.” The man laughed nervously.
“And do you know what Zachary Wyndham did to his ex-wife?” Torus demanded. “Do you know how he treated her? How he continues to harass her?”
The man in the black suit looked distinctly uneasy.
“Oh, man—come on. You know you can’t come between a man and his wife! Especially if he’s your fucking boss!”
“So you knew,” Torus said flatly. “And you did nothing.”
“What could I do?” the man whined, taking a step back. “I mean, their business is their business—you know?”
“I know you’re a coward,” Torus growled. He leaned down, putting his face right in the human’s. “I’m going to give you one chance. Run!” he growled.
The man went completely pale and then he turned and ran as fast as he could away from the mansion. Torus let him go—he had other matters to deal with.
He walked right through the open door and into the sprawling house. He was just about to conduct a room-to-room search when he heard a human male’s voice call,
“Bronc, is that you? Who was that outside?”
Torus stalked to the back of the house and found an open door. Inside, the room looked like a vast, expensive library. Leather-bound books lined the walls, which were three stories high at least. There was a fireplace and a comfortable and expensive-looking leather couch with a fur throw over the back of it.
On the floor were several animal pelts that had been turned into carpets—Torus recognized a lion and a rare white rhinoceros hide as he walked into the room.
Sitting at a desk filled with human computer equipment was the man Torus had seen over and over in his dreams. His dark brown hair was expensively styled and his eyes went wide when he looked up and saw Torus standing there.
“Hey, who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“Your retribution.” Torus was beside him in a heartbeat.
Zachary Wyndham fumbled in his desk drawer and suddenly he was holding a human weapon—a gun, Torus thought it was called. He pointed it shakily at Torus’s chest.
“Get back, man! I know how to use this!”
Before Torus could answer, he fired. There was a loud bang! and a piercing pain went through his upper arm.
It didn’t stop him.
Contemptuously, he plucked the gun from Zachary Wyndham’s trembling hand and threw it across the room.
“Only someone with extremely poor aim could have missed hitting a vital organ at this distance,” he remarked, as the gun landed on an expensive looking carpet with a thunk!
“What the fuck, man? I shot you!” Wyndham exclaimed querulously, as though they were playing a game and Torus was cheating.
“Not very well,” Torus told him. He was barely holding onto his temper—the Rage was telling him to kill, maim, and rend this bastard limb-from-limb, but that wouldn’t solve Molly’s problems. So instead, he reached out with his right arm—the one that wasn’t currently bleeding—and picked Zach Wyndham up by his throat.
“What…the…fuck?” the human male gurgled, kicking helplessly as Torus raised him high in the air. “What…do…you want?” he gasped out.
“I want every file you have of Molly, your ex-wife,” Torus told him. He squeezed, his fingers digging into the human male’s windpipe. “Now.”