Chapter 25 Sheldon
SHELDON
Listening to Forest talk to Winnie warmed me. He was nice to all the guards, but Winnie and he were growing close. Forest invited her in every morning for breakfast. He’d make eggs or pancakes. A couple of days ago, he asked Vail to help him make quiche.
Forest wasn’t complaining about being stuck in the building. He was getting bored though. Not with work. He had enough of that to keep him busy. Keith even sent more over for him to do. It was the scenery he’d had enough of. I didn’t consider myself that, just my apartment.
Winnie being here helped. Technically, she wasn’t needed to guard him in here, but with nothing else for her to do around the building, she hung out with Forest.
There was no question I was the type to get jealous. However, Winnie spoke a lot about her boyfriend, the man she met in high school and had been with for the past fifteen years. It was obvious how much she loved him. When she wasn’t on duty, she was home with him. Not every guard lived here.
Micah lived in the building, which made it easy to call on him if needed. Although, we didn’t need him with Forest staying in. Jordan did on occasion.
For some reason, Forest didn’t connect with him as easily.
They got along but weren’t overly friendly.
It was natural not to like everyone in your life.
I sure as hell didn’t. There were some guards here I couldn’t stand.
Jordan wouldn’t let me kill them though.
He said they served a purpose, so they got to live.
They also hadn’t double-crossed him. It was a shame, really. I had so many ways I could end them.
“Do you like peanut butter cold or at room temperature?” Forest asked Winnie.
“Cold. I buy the kind that has peanuts as the only ingredient. If it’s not cold, it’s not firm enough for me. It drips from the knife instead of being more formed.”
“Interesting. I didn’t know that about peanut butter. I usually buy the store brand and keep it in the cabinet.”
“Next time I go out, I’m going to buy you a jar of the good stuff. You’ll never go back.”
“Sunflower butter is good too,” I chimed in.
Both of their heads turned my way and Forest scrunched his nose. “Ewww, why? You don’t have food allergies.”
I shrugged. “Colleen eats it and the soy kind. I like them.”
“Okay, that doesn’t surprise me.” He turned back to Winnie. “You have to meet Colleen. She’s Oleander’s mom and the sweetest woman. She cooks like you would not believe.”
“I wonder if she’d teach me some of her recipes,” Winnie said.
“I bet she would,” I told her. “She’s very nice.”
They kept talking, moving on to other things. Winnie surprised me. I knew she was tough, but she had a soft side too. I didn’t doubt her ability to protect Forest. Watching her in the gym assured me of her capabilities. The other side showed she was human.
My phone vibrated, so I picked it up and looked at the screen. Jordan wanted me to meet him in a conference room downstairs.
“I have to go.” I bent to give Forest a quick kiss and was out the door, taking the elevator down.
Jordan, Vincent, and Lane waited for me.
“This is ominous,” I said before taking a seat.
Lane worked closely with Jordan, but not always leaving together. Lane did a lot without him, due to being Jordan’s second-in-command.
The door opened, Raiden slipping in. “Sorry. I was showering.”
Lane grinned. “You should see him wet. Very sexy.”
“Not now,” Jordan growled.
“What? Sometimes a little levity is good. If we were serious all the time, we’d need more than what Arden can provide in therapy. Al would have to give us the heavy-duty meds.”
“What happened?” I asked, getting right to the point. I would rather be upstairs listening to Forest talk about the best meals to put in a slow cooker than be here. God, I’d really changed a lot. I used to live for anything to happen. That was before I had Forest in my arms every night.
Jordan slid a pink polka-dotted box across the table toward me.
“I’m touched. You shouldn’t have.” It was donuts from a bakery a few blocks down. They had the kind that made my mouth water and had me craving them for days.
“Open it.”
I cocked an eyebrow when I noticed my name on the label on the side. “Have you been going through my deliveries? If the Boston cream is missing, we’re having words.” Lifting the top, my breath froze in my lungs. “What in the ever-loving fuck?”
Inside was a clear bag of what I assumed were organs from an animal. I’d seen enough human ones to know what size they should be. Also, when I was younger, I worked at a butcher shop. It was too much for me at the time. I didn’t last long.
“Is that what you pull out of a turkey before you roast it?” Lane asked. “And before you tell me to be serious, I am. Who the hell has a bag of organs sitting around? I wasn’t here when Jordan got a peek at it first.”
My phone began to ring. I removed it from my pocket to see Colleen’s name on the screen.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you’re doing, but you need to stop before you do something you shouldn’t.”
“I haven’t. It’s still bagged.”
“Good. I don’t want to know what it is.”
“Thank you.”
“Love you. Call me later. You need to meditate.”
“I will.”
This was one of the few times Jordan didn’t chastise someone for being on the phone. Anyone else, and he would have ripped it out of their hand and thrown it across the room.
“Why does he get to take personal calls and I don’t?” Lane asked.
“No one calls you who doesn’t live here,” Barrett stated.
“I could have friends. You don’t know.”
“Enough, Lane,” Jordan growled. “Sheldon, what did she say?”
“To stop what I’m doing. I think we should test it though. It can’t be just this?” I took a pen from the table and started poking the bag. That was when I saw something silver inside. “What the hell?” I muttered.
Standing to get a better look, I picked up another pen and started moving stuff around until what looked like a name appeared. “My love?”
“If this is a declaration, it’s fucked up,” Lane stated.
A knock on the door interrupted us. Rory stuck his head in. “This just came.” He handed me a letter and said it was a courier who dropped it off, much like I’d guessed with the box. Otherwise, Jordan would already have someone strung from the ceiling.
“Because putting it with the organs was too much to ask,” I said. I opened the envelope and withdrew a single sheet of paper.
You didn’t just kill him. You disemboweled him. He was the love of my life, and you gutted him and me in the process. I’m going to do the same to the man you love.
I re-read it, aloud this time then put my phone on speaker and called Forest.
He answered on the second ring. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Are you still in the apartment?” I asked.
“Yes, where else would I be? I haven’t left since I moved in.”
“Good. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” I hung up. I knew he was there, but had to hear it from him.
Jordan pulled his phone out and called Lawson on speaker.
“Yes?” Lawson asked.
“I need a list of people within the past decade who have been disemboweled on the coroner’s report.
Look for any language around that.” I liked where he was going with that.
Bodies were staged all the time by people on Jordan’s payroll.
If we ripped someone apart, we didn’t try to put them together.
Instead, they were placed in a made-up scene to coordinate with what we did.
“On it.”
Jordan ended the call, his eyes settling on me. “You need to go home and think really fucking hard about the people you’ve killed. I need a list of those you’ve ripped open.”
“Do you know how many men we’ve filleted?
Even if I wasn’t the one to shred their guts, there’s no way this person knows that.
It’s not like we kept a detailed report of who hacked what off or who pulled out an intestine.
” We couldn’t either. In the wrong hands, we’d all be fucked.
The less paper and digital trail, the better.
I tuned them out while I started racking my brain, trying to figure out who I’d done that too. I wasn’t lying when I said there were a lot of possibilities. Unless that person was in the room or had eyes on us, how would they know?
“Oh fuck,” I whispered. “The cameras. Did someone hack our video footage?” We kept archives but it was heavily encrypted and we got rid of it after a week, unless there was a reason to hang on to it, like to bribe a cop or an elected official.
“Jesus Christ,” Jordan bit out. He called Barry and started barking orders into the phone. Everything had to be locked down, with only essential people allowed access.
“We don’t know how far back this happened,” Barrett stated. “They could have hacked into it years ago and been spying since. They could have fucking worked here.”
We all froze, stopped breathing, and stared at Barrett. No one would be left alive if they were fucking Jordan over. Moreover, no one had a spouse that we cut up.
“No,” Jordan shook his head. “We’d know. There has to be another way.”
“There’s no widow here,” I added. “It would have been found in the background check. Were we sloppy? Sometimes shit gets out of control, and we have to act fast. That means killing people on the spot or dragging them to a warehouse. We could have had a tail on us and didn’t realize it.
” That went for more than this problem. We’d been doing this for a long time.
At any point, someone could have been hiding in the shadows, watching us, waiting for the right moment to fuck us over.
Barry was still on the phone. “I’m freezing everything. No new clearances. No new anything. We have to go through each employee and look for what we could have missed.”
“Or that’s just what they want us to do,” Barrett said. “What if they want us focusing on internal operations to draw away from who this really is? Fuck up the organization from the inside out. If we topple in here, it’ll domino.”
Lane dropped his head into his hands. “There’s no way to know. It could be anyone.”
“We trust those in this room, along with Barry, Reghan, Vail, Hartley, and Forest. Everyone else has to be checked thoroughly.”
“Even Irene?” I asked. She was Jordan’s personal housekeeper and cook. She’d been with him forever.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jordan seethed. “Next, you’ll suggest Ava.” She was the girl Vail had custody of and who lived in Jordan’s home.
“That’s too far.”
“So’s Irene! There’s no way she has anything to do with this.”
I put my hands up. “I don’t want to argue with you. I’m not the one who made the trust list.”
“Enough,” Barrett said loudly to cut through Jordan and me. “Arguing won’t get us anywhere. I’m going to take that bag of bits and have it tested. My money is on there not being anything interesting in here.”
Jordan nodded. “Lane, work with Barry to begin going through my employees. Start from the top down. Whoever sent this knows more than they should. Raiden, you and Vincent make a list of guards and start interviewing them. I need to know if they had anyone in their life they’d die for, who wasn’t disclosed and we missed during the background checks.
Barrett, handle the bag and box. Sheldon, start thinking.
We have to put our heads together. Sheldon doesn’t usually kill alone.
He’s there because I take him along. There’s more than him and Forest at risk here. ”
We stood from the table, each of us with our tasks. At this point, I just wanted to get back to my apartment and pull Forest close so I knew he was safe.