Chapter 2
CADE
Home
The apartment light is entirely too bright. A flat, blinding white that mocks the blood on Lex’s skin. It’s an insult the way the sun has the audacity to keep shining while we’re all bleeding from the inside out.
Lex is a damn blur of motion. He reaches the sink and hammers the faucet on. The water violently roars against the porcelain, splashing against his forearm and soaking the bandage so much it begins to sag.
He’s clawing at his skin and trying to peel the rust-colored stains from his knuckles. Needing more than anything to scrub the last few hours away.
“Lex,” I whisper, but he’s lost in the friction.
He lets out a frustrated breath but won’t stop.
“Babe.” I reach out and cover his wrists with my hands. “Let me do it.”
He’s a vibrating, live wire ready to snap at any moment. I take the soap. The white foam turning a sickening, pale-pink as I work it over his hands and wrists, careful to not get any more water on the gauze. I trace the lines of blood caught in the creases of his palms.
It’s everywhere.
Lex goes still. His jaw is set like a hard, tectonic ridge on his face. He won’t look at me. Those eyes, once a beautiful icy-blue, are now washed out and empty as they stare deep into the drain.
“We never should have let her go,” he says through a sigh. “We should have gone with her. We should have—fuck, Cade! We should have been there.”
“I know,” I whisper, lathering more soap on his palms. “I know.”
We stand in silence as I try to cleanse his skin, the scent of copper filling the space between us.
“Clock’s ticking, baby.”
“What?” I ask, trying to pick blood out from underneath his fingernails.
“Clock’s fucking ticking,” he repeats, louder this time. “It’s the last thing I said to her, Cade. What if? What if that’s the last—”
“Stop,” I warn, but his reasoning is long gone.
“I’m going to kill him,” Lex chokes out, his hands twitching under mine. “Zeke’s gonna fucking die for this.”
“Zeke?”
He nods. “It’s him. I swear to God, it’s him.”
“Lex,” I cut in quickly, trying to steady him the best I can. “You can’t possibly know that for sure. We can’t just jump to—”
“I’m not jumping,” he snaps, his eyes exploding with heat as he finally looks down at me. “I’ve been thinking about it since the damn masquerade. Luca is Zeke.”
I grip his wrist tighter, my hands slipping in the suds. “If he is…” My voice barely cooperates.
“He is,” he grits. “Luca is Zeke… or Zeke and Luca are partners. I-I-I don’t know. What I do know is he’s involved in this shit. Somehow.”
“If he is, then we will get him. Together. But when Roman…” I stop, swallowing hard as the realization hits me like a ton of bricks. “Wait, wait, Lex. Roman! Roman saw him.”
He raises a brow. “Yeah I know he saw him.”
“No, no.” I shake my head. “You don’t understand. Roman saw him. Physically saw him.”
“Your point?”
“Luca isn’t Zeke,” I continue.
He keeps staring at me like I’m speaking in tongues.
I scoff. “Babe, he can’t be.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Think about it. Roman saw his shooter face to face,” I say as the scent of lemongrass finally overpowers the coppery tinge in the air. “What did Roman keep saying over and over?”
“Luca.”
“Exactly.” I turn off the water and reach across Lex for a towel. “Roman knew Zeke’s parents. Hell, he knew Zeke as a child. If it were him, he would have said, Zeke. Not Luca.”
“Roman knows who Luca is,” Lex whispers, his shoulders dropping.
“Roman knows who Luca is,” I repeat, drying his palms.
“There’s only one problem now, Cade.”
“What?”
“Look at this,” he says, holding up his still faintly blood-stained hands. “No one loses this much blood and just walks away.”
???
Home
Later that night.
The hours crawl by as we wait for the guys to arrive from Roman’s office.
Outside the frosted glass, the sun sinks behind the Manhattan skyline, turning the whole city into a watercolor smear of gold and violet.
Inside, the fire crackles. It curls around the logs and paints our living room in copper and shadows.
Lex is sitting beside me on the couch, staring off into the flames. His fingers violently tapping against his bouncing knee.
“Ugh!” he gripes, slamming his fist into the leather. “Where the hell are they?”
“They’ll be here.”
He starts picking at the fresh bandage I just wrapped moments ago.
“Leave it alone.” I slap the back of his hand. “We’re almost out of gauze.”
Beep. Beep.
Beep. Beep.
The front door unlocks as the guys finally show up. Tex steps in first. Nate follows, clutching an armful of folders. Knox brings up the rear, backpack slung over his shoulders.
“Alright,” Nate begins, dropping the mountain of files on the table. “We finished cleaning up at The Obsidian.”
“Problem is,” Knox adds, ripping a laptop out of his bag.
“All the feeds at NOX have been wiped clean. Every last one. There’s no footage of anything at all from today.
Not you guys in the lobby, not Bella in Roman’s office, nothing.
” He lets out a weary sigh. “It’s like the entire day never happened. Not digitally anyway.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Lex scoffs. “That’s because that fucker, Zeke, erased it for his best buddy, Luca.”
“Lex,” I say. “Stop.”
“I’m serious!” He turns to me, blue eyes burning with fury and fear braided together.
He’s breathing like a bull. The adrenaline still rolling in his chest. “Luca may be real. Fine. I’ll accept that.
But that fuckface, Zeke, is still involved in this.
And that puts him at enemy number one on my damn hit-list.”
“Barinov.” Tex steps in. “Pull it back.”
Lex snaps his head toward him. “Don’t tell me what to fucking do.”
His voice has that hoarse, splintering bite to it. The one that means he’s one breath away from breaking. Or worse, igniting into a wildfire only Bella can seem to extinguish these days.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “This is not going to end well,” I mumble to Knox under my breath.
Knox’s fingers freeze over the keys, the machine-gun clatter cutting to a sudden silence as he looks up at Lex. “You didn’t know him,” he says. “We did. I promise, Zeke would never willingly hurt her, Lex.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Lex fires right back.
“And,” Tex adds. “You don’t know the kind of hell he crawled through just to keep her breathing all those years. So don’t twist him into someone he’s not because you’re scared.”
“I’m pissed. Not scared. There’s a big difference.”
Nate’s focus shifts between them. His eyes are calculating which one he’s going to have to drag off the other first.
“Enough,” he warns.
But the two of them are way past listening.
“He wiped the feeds,” Lex seethes, shoving a pointed finger toward the laptop. “That shit doesn’t happen by accident.”
“It also doesn’t mean he took her,” Tex snaps.
“Well, it sure as hell doesn’t mean he didn’t.”
Nate slams his fists on the table. “EVERYBODY STOP!”
The sound ricochets through my ribs, freezing everyone in the room in an instant.
“We are not turning on each other, you understand?” Nate says with that low and terrifyingly lethal calm of his. “Not tonight. Not over maybes and unknowns. And especially not when Bella needs every single one of us focused and on the same damn page.”
I step into Lex’s space and gently place my hand on his twitching bicep. “Babe, he’s right. Being at each other’s throats isn’t going to help her.”
Lex stares at me like he wants to punch something. Tex, the wall, me, or maybe even the damn world. His blood-shot eyes are burning hotter than I’ve ever seen.
My grip tightens as I dig my long fingers into rock-hard muscle. “Just breathe.”
Our eyes lock for a few seconds before he finally stops seething.
“You’re right,” he exhales, placing a hand over mine.
“So.” I look back over to Nate. “What’s the plan?”
“Well,” Nate says as he closes one of the folders. “For starters, everyone needs to sit down and breathe for a minute.”
We all take our seats at the table. The silence between us grows thicker with each passing second.
“Lex,” Knox pipes up first. He doesn’t even look up from the screen as he extends his hand. “Let me see your phone again.”
Lex hands it over without question. Knox attaches it to a red cord and plugs it into his laptop. Lines of code and images fill the screen. He clicks through some windows before stopping on a picture.
“Shit,” Knox mutters.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Guys, does this look like the…” He trails off, angling the screen toward Nate.
Nate’s eyes widen, his pupils swallowing the iris. “No way,” he breathes. He begins rifling through some papers in one of the files.
Knox slides the laptop across the table.
Tex takes one look at it and grips the screen so hard it almost shatters at the edges. “How in the hell did he get it from—”
“What are you guys talking about?!” Lex cuts in, his deep voice cracking under the strain. “Someone start explaining.”
Knox turns the laptop toward us, revealing the image Luca sent to Lex a few hours ago. Bella’s limp body, bruised and bleeding in the backseat of a stranger’s car like some sort of a discarded doll.
“You see this?” Knox says, pointing at a black-and-white device cinched around Bella’s neck. “Right here? We have a much bigger problem.”
I lean forward, narrowing my eyes on the grainy image. “What is that thing?”
“That,” Knox answers, gathering his breath before continuing, “is a device Project Dylan uses.”
My pulse quivers. “For what, exactly?”
“Okay,” Tex jumps in, bracing his forearms on the table. “So you guys remember one of the first rules of Project Dylan and why the age of nine is so important to us?”
“Yes,” I say immediately.
“Yeah,” Lex echoes. “Dylan’s age when he died.”
“Right.” Tex nods grimly. “So you know how if there’s any children under the age of nine at a scene, the buyer and seller both get one quick shot to the temple. For Dylan.”
We both nod.