Chapter 46 - Dove
Two years later
The air smells like steaming shit in this part of Fresno. Feels like it, too.
By the time I finish sweeping out the bays at the mechanic shop, the heat eases enough that I don’t feel like I’m inhaling buttholes.
I zip my backpack and start the long walk back to my foster house.
The neighborhood is too quiet at night. The held-breath kind of quiet. The don’t-blink kind. My shoes scrape along the sidewalk as I keep to the streetlights. I’m not scared. I’m also not stupid.
Halfway down the block, my spine prickles.
It’s not a noise or a shadow that unsettles me. It’s that other thing, the instinct I picked up from living on the streets for seven years.
I keep walking. My heartbeat doesn’t change. My breath stays even. That’s another thing street life taught me. Don’t show fear before my brain figures out what to do with it.
I turn casually, pretending to adjust a twisted backpack strap, and peek behind me.
Empty sidewalk.
But the danger’s here, pressed against my skin, whispering, Pay attention.
I scan the rooftops, parked cars, gaps between houses, and the busted streetlight on the corner that creates a pocket of dark.
Not Jag.
My throat closes. He’s never been gone this long. Not even when he’s angry. We fight about school and money and boys, and sometimes he storms off for a day or two to cool down.
But a month without him? He vanished out of thin air without a fight or a pinky promise.
Something’s wrong.
I grip the switchblade in my pocket and continue along the sidewalk, awareness stretched wide, every sense open, my vision sweeping side to side.
Fifteen-year-olds with normal lives don’t process danger the way I do. Then again, they weren’t raised by Jag Rath.
Crossing the street, I veer left. Two blocks ahead sits a mini-mart with a busted security mirror. As I approach it, I angle myself to see the reflection behind me.
There. A shape. A man keeping pace with me. Too close to be innocent. Too far to be loud about it.
Okay. So I’m being tailed.
I don’t speed up. I don’t look back again. I do what Jag taught me long ago.
Don’t freeze. Don’t fold. Show them why they picked the wrong girl.
The mini-mart is too open, too many windows. If I go inside, he follows. If I stay outside, he corners me.
But three streets over, there’s a yard with a broken gate and a huge pit bull. The dog knows me. I give him jerky sometimes.
I turn left at the next intersection, quick but not panicked. The man mirrors me. Another left. He mirrors that, too.
Now I know two things. He’s not a random creep. He’s good at this.
Reaching the yard, I squeeze through the loose panel in the fence. The pit bull lifts his head, wags once, and settles back down.
Good boy.
I crouch low and wait.
The man steps into view. He pauses and looks both ways, searching for where I went, but he doesn’t check the ground for footprints. Amateur move.
He approaches the fence, and the pit bull surges to his feet. Kill switch activated. He gives a warning growl before erupting in loud, snarling barks that send the man stumbling back.
Such a good boy. I’m bringing him two pieces of jerky tomorrow.
The man shakes out his shoulders as if annoyed he got spooked. As he moves away, I slip out silently behind him and match my footsteps to the rhythm of his strides so our sounds overlap.
When his pace quickens, I fade into the shadows, angling around him and staying low. Then I dart forward.
My shoulder slams into his ribs as I hook my foot behind his ankle, taking him down. We hit the ground in a burst of dust, and before he can recover, I press the switchblade under his jaw, right against the soft place that bleeds fast.
“Whoa!” His hands shoot up in surrender. “Okay, okay, hang on!”
“Why the hell are you following me?”
“You don’t know?” His eyes widen, darting across my face. “You’re wanted by—”
A crunch splits the air, wet and heavy, as a hunting knife slams through his skull. His body goes slack beneath me.
My breath stops, and my gaze locks onto the hand holding the knife’s hilt. Then the muscled arm. The bulging shoulder. I shove off the body, fall onto my back, and stare up at beautiful, hooded, amber eyes.
I don’t know who lunges first, but we collide in a tangle of arms and legs, hugging and stumbling until Jag lifts me off the ground. Whirling, he carries me off the street, into a narrow alley, and presses a finger to my lips.
With a nod, I keep quiet as he hauls the body into one of the abandoned houses across the street.
Minutes later, he returns, wiping the blade on his jeans. But his movements look wrong, too tense, like he knows we’re not out of trouble.
“We gotta go.” He scans the perimeter. “Now.”
“Who was he?”
“A problem with more to follow.” He clasps my wrist and walks fast, not running, but at a pace that says we’re being watched and he’s not telling me how bad it is.
We cut through side streets and down several blocks until we reach a squat one-story house with peeling paint and Christmas lights still stapled to the roof from who-knows-when.
“Where are we?” My hand feels clammy in his. “What is this?”
Before we step onto the porch, the door cracks open.
A bald man in a terry-cloth robe, boxers, and cowboy boots peers out with a revolver leveled through the gap.
His eyes shift to me. “You can’t bring a kid here.”
“I got nowhere else to go with her.” Jag straightens to his full, imposing height.
“Is she—?”
“My daughter.”
The lie shocks me so hard I almost choke. Daughter? He’s never called me anything but his little bird.
“As if I can say no to you.” The man sighs, lowers the gun, and opens the door. “She stays in the bedroom.”
Jag drags me inside.
The moment we cross the threshold, the reek of cigarette smoke, bleach, and mold invades my nose.
A single lamp with no shade throws a sickly glow over a sagging brown couch.
Two women lounge there, one in a tank top and panties, the other wrapped in a leopard-print blanket with nothing underneath.
Their eyes track us with that slow, unfocused drift that comes from whatever they snorted, smoked, or swallowed.
The coffee table is cluttered with bent spoons, glass pipes, foil squares, disposable lighters, a razor blade, a credit card dusted with powder, and a half-eaten pizza slice stuck to the cardboard. Empty beer cans rattle when someone shifts their leg.
“I’m running a business here.” The man joins the women on the couch. “Not a daycare.”
Jag keeps me glued to his hip as we move through the room.
We pass a kitchen with yellow walls and a table covered in Solo cups, pill bottles, and a digital scale that probably hasn’t been cleaned since the last raid. Someone left a pot on the stove, and its contents emit a burnt smell that makes me gag.
“This way.” He moves fast, eyes forward, steering me down the hall and into a bathroom.
He shuts the door behind us, turns on the faucet, and scrubs the blood off his hands. His reflection in the mirror looks too pale under the grime.
“We have to move again.” I watch the blood swirl down the sink.
“Not yet.”
“But—”
“No.” He washes my hands next. Then he grips my elbow and leads me into a room at the end of the hall.
I stop short.
This… This is not where Jag lives.
My brother lives in cardboard forts, tents under bridges, and abandoned buildings with no running water.
But this room?
It’s spotless. A real bed. Multiple desks with towers of hardware. High-end monitors. Servers stacked like black bricks. Cables braided in neat coils. All of it creates a low, humming heartbeat under the floor.
“What the—?” I drop my backpack and stare with a slackened jaw. “How?”
He slides the bolt on the door and sits at the desk, fingers moving fast.
The screens bloom to life with camera feeds, street views, and angles from places I recognize. The alley we were just in. The house with the pit bull. The mechanic shop where I work. Intersections. Streetlights.
“Holy shit.” I lean against his chair, looping an arm around his neck.
“Watch your mouth.”
“You can see all that? All the time?”
“I see everything, anytime I want.” He types faster.
The feeds rewind, and he filters through different time stamps until two figures appear on the street. Me and the man walking behind me.
With a few commands, the images disappear. Frame by frame, they vanish. Erased.
“How?” I turn to him.
“I’m good at this.” His eyes finally lift to mine. “When they find the body, there won’t be a trace of us on any camera within a mile of it.”
“You can do that?”
“Just did.” He leans back, breathless from the rush of it. “I can control the investigation from here and keep our tracks clean.”
“Who was he? Why did he say I was wanted?”
“I’ll find out.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wallet.
“That’s his.” My stomach knots.
“Yeah.” He tosses it onto a tray with other wallets that don’t belong to him.
“There have been others? Were they all following me?”
He nods, eyes stony.
How many times has he taken out a bad guy on my tail while I was just walking along, completely oblivious? God, I’m so stupid.
“Why is this happening?” My panic rises. “What do they want?”
“Lower your voice.” He pulls me to stand between his spread legs and studies me from head to toe, taking in the condition of my clothes, the scrapes on my arms, and the tattered ends of my hair where it hangs on my shoulders.
Then he rests his hands on my hips and stares at my stomach. “You’re in danger, Little Bird.”
“From who?”
“I have enemies.”
“Because of the computer stuff?”
“When you can do things other people can’t, dangerous people take notice.”
“So you just… What? Hack bad guys?”
“I accept jobs that use my skills. Sometimes those jobs make enemies.”
“Then stop. Just stop doing it.”
“I can’t.” He says it fast, final, slamming a door on my concern. “Drop it.”
“No.” Anger climbs up my throat. “This is our lives. You disappear for a month, and I’m supposed to just wait around—”
“Dove.”