33. Thorne
Chapter 33
Thorne
I have Lucian and the campus security scouring the grounds for that motherfucking fuck.
If he’s here I’ll find him, but I know in my heart that monster is gone.
I won’t even bother to question how he got on campus without anyone seeing him. All Knights know about the secret tunnels. And if you’re tech savvy, you’d know how to rig the cameras to your advantage.
I want to join the men but right now I have to take care of Ivy. She’s a nervous mess.
We’ve just arrived back at my place. I’m in the kitchen making her some herbal tea that Caspian’s mom used to make for us to calm us down.
When I’m done, I take it out to the living room to Ivy.
She looks worse in the few minutes that I’ve been gone.
“Drink this. It will help with the shock.” I hand the tea to her and she takes it with trembling hands. Her hands are shaking so much I fear the tea might spill in her lap.
It nearly does, so she sets the cup down on the coffee table.
“I’m sorry. I just need… a moment,” her voice rattles out in a stammer.
“Of course. Drink it in a few minutes.” I sit next to her and pull her into my chest.
“I can’t believe it, Thorne. I can’t believe it. He knows me.”
“This is my fault.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It has to be. Someone must have reported back to the man that I’m looking for him.” And he came after her because of me.
But does he actually know her?
I’ve never told her secret to anyone except Lucian. She doesn’t even know that he knows. I didn’t tell her because I didn’t want her to worry. She doesn’t know Lucian like I do, so there’s no basis for trust.
Outside of him, I’ve been careful with my words.
“I wish I could say I imagined that man, but I didn’t. He was right there in the bathroom with me. Then he was gone.”
It seems that he used the side door. I checked the bathroom myself after Ivy told me she saw him.
“He was on campus, Thorne. Right here on campus.”
“That means I smoked him out and he’s in Boston. We can find him and get to the bottom of everything.”
Terror fills her eyes, but I also read hope. She knows I’m right, and as bad as this incident was, it means I’m on the right track.
The motherfucker is part of that mercenary group, and now he’s on my turf.
“What are you going to do?”
“Don’t worry about me. Drink the tea, then I want you to get some sleep. You hear me?”
She nods and picks up the cup again to drink the tea.
An hour later, I get her to sleep, and I talk with Lucian. He and the men found evidence that someone had been in the secret tunnels and the cameras were tampered with, but the trail has run cold.
No surprise there. That’s okay. I won’t stop looking for him.
Now that the scar-faced man has presented himself, vengeance is rippling through me.
I just have to backtrack my activities over the past week to who I spoke to. One of them alerted the scar-faced man about me.
When I get off the phone with Lucian I fire off a message to Kai.
Although I have him watching Aleksander, I talked to him about the scar-faced man, too. He was helpful in giving me intel about the mercenary group, as were Lucian’s people. It was them who found the reports of the other incidents.
Kai messages back confirming he’ll look into this on his side, then another message comes through from an unknown number.
Thinking it’s campus security, I open it and my blood heats when I read the words:
If you don’t stop searching for the scar-faced man death will follow.
My entire body goes rigid. I stare at the message for a few seconds until it disappears from the screen.
The fucking message is gone. I search the phone’s inbox and deleted files, but it’s not there. It’s vanished.
“The fucking message was sent in vanish mode,” I explain to Lucian as we walk across the docks.
We’re heading to Kai’s. He might have some information for us. The sort we needed to meet in person to get. He called me a few hours after the cryptic message came through.
“Did they just send it as a text to your number, or was it in an app?”
“It was a text. Whoever sent it has some elaborate encryption wrapped around the source code so I can’t track the number. Every time I unlock the encryption it recreates another code that’s harder to unlock.”
Lucian frowns and bites the inside of his lip. “Let me have a go at it. It sounds like you need to find a way to isolate the encryption with a virus or something.”
“I fucking tried that. It didn’t work. Their code also has some sophisticated antivirus code protecting it.”
“I might still be able to find a way around it. My viruses are a little more whacked up than yours. Also, you’re not yourself.”
I don’t argue because I’m not myself at all and I’m thinking straight at all. Right now, I feel like shit run over by a speeding rocket. Of course I’m not thinking straight. Everything is all over the place in a colossal mess, so I’m taking longer than I usually would to accomplish things.
“Okay, see what you can do.” I nod.
“Did you tell Ivy about the message?”
“No. She was still asleep when I left.” My guards are with her. I have men inside and outside the apartment. “I’m not telling her.”
“That’s perhaps for the best.”
“I want to see if I can wrap this up without involving her. Today was too much, and now that I have whoever this person is warning me, I feel like I need to find that fucker even faster.”
Lucian casts me a wary glance. “This has gotten crazy, Thorne. Obviously I’ll help you with whatever you need, but are you sure you shouldn’t tell Caspian? And maybe take precautions because of the warning?”
I’m already shaking my head before he can finish the sentence. “Not yet. Not until I absolutely have to. Caspian mustn’t know Ivy’s secret. And as for the warning…” My voice trails off as I think about it. “I might be a fool for not heeding it, but I need the truth.”
“Okay, I just wanted to check.”
“Finding this guy means retribution for me. He’ll lead me to whoever hired him to kill my family, and I’ll be able to free Ivy’s dad, too. But I can’t just involve Caspian right now because things are too complicated.”
“Okay. We also have to figure out who sent the message, because they know what we’re up to, which means we’re being watched.”
“I know.” The hard truth that I had eyes on me hit the moment Ivy told me she saw the man in the bathroom.
We continue down the path to Kai’s club. Everything is like it was weeks ago when I brought Caspian here.
Kai’s men search us and when they're done, Kai smiles.
“You owe me, Ivanov. I have a little treat for you. My little bird found a spider in the garden.”
“You found a spy.”
“I certainly did.” He nods. “Follow me.”
I glance at Lucian, feeling hopeful.
Kai leads us through the doors. Instead of heading to the room he took us to last time, we descend a set of stairs into a dungeon.
There’s a man tied to a lone chair in the middle of the room. The man is beaten so badly blood has turned his shirt red.
His face is a battered mess and there are bald spots on his head where his hair has been ripped out.
“This is a spy for The Hand.” Kai points to the man. “The cameras picked him up in here the other day when you came by. My allies also found footage of him at other places you’d visited. We realized the culprit who told The Hand you were looking for one of their assassins had to be him.”
Kai, Lucian and I walk around to face the man. He lifts his head to stare at us. When his eyes lock on mine, he smiles, revealing missing teeth.
Yes, this is definitely the motherfucker who ratted me out.
“What the fuck are you smiling at?” I get up in his face.
“You being here. You don’t even realize that you’ve already lost.”
I throw a fist in his face and he howls with pain. “Don’t stop there. Why don’t you tell me just how I’ve lost.”
“We’ll kill you and turn your little girlfriend into a whore. We’ll pass her around so the men can take turns fucking her.”
I knock the rest of his front teeth down his throat. The man spits blood and shouts from the pain. I ball my fist to punch him again but Lucian grabs my arm. Had he not done so, the man would be dead.
“We need him alive, Thorne.” Lucian tightens his grip on my arm.
“You won’t get shit from me.” The man laughs.
I try to calm the fuck down so I can ask him my questions. “Who is the man with the scar? And where is he?”
“Fuck you.”
“Wrong answer.” Another punch lands in his face, but it’s nowhere as hard as it could have been.
“Perhaps this will give him some encouragement.” Kai taps my shoulder and presents me with my gun. I had to hand it over when we were searched. I take it and nod my thanks. “You may also want this. This is our guest’s father.” He shows me a picture of an elderly man in a wheelchair.
On seeing the picture the man’s eyes bulge like they might leap out of his head. “No. Please. Not my father.”
“Not so cocky now, are you?” I give him a maddening smile. “Ready to tell me what I want to know?”
“They’ll kill me.”
“I’ll kill you and your father. How about that?”
“Okay, okay. But please don’t hurt my father.”
“Start talking, motherfucker.” I slap his face with the back of my gun, making him shout out again.
“The man with the scar is called Salvatore. I don’t know where he is, but I last saw him at the Grunge Club. He knows the owner. It’s possible he’s staying there.”
“How the fuck did he know I was looking for him?”
“The Hand gets an alert when people start digging around for them. It could have been something as simple as a Google search notification. They know even if you have firewalls up.”
So, they knew from the moment Lucian and I started searching, but it would have been easy to narrow things down because they would have known about me. Maybe they always had their eye on me.
“How many men does our scar-faced friend have with him?”
“I don’t know information like that.”
“How do you contact him?”
“I don’t. He contacts me when he needs me.” He coughs.
“Where does he think you are now?”
“My hotel. I told him I was going to be there all night.”
“Perfect, so he doesn’t know you’re here.” I raise a brow, and the man stares back at me, his eyes pleading.
“No… he doesn’t.”
“All the better.” I flip my gun and shoot him between his eyes just as he’s taking a breath. Now he will never take another. I never promised to spare his life. If I'd let him go he’d only raise the alarm again.
“We can get a head start without the scar-face knowing now.” I stand straighter and wipe blood off me.
“The Hand are not people to mess with, young one,” Kai warns, looking from me to the dead man in the chair.
“Neither am I.” I shove my gun back in my pocket. “Keep your eyes open for me and I'll make sure you get whatever you want. This is a big deal.”
“Of course.”
I pray I’ve bought us some time. Anything is better than not knowing where to turn next. Now we have a lead.
Or not…
The Grunge Club is closed and cleared out by the time we get there. Someone must have been watching our dead friend back at Kai’s.
I can tell people must have left in a hurry. There are half-empty beer bottles and half-eaten food on the tables in the restaurant section.
I head back to my apartment with a heavy heart. Thankfully, Ivy is still asleep and sleeps through the night.
I wake up before her the next morning and make her breakfast. When she walks into the kitchen wearing my miles-too-big shirt, she looks like a little forest creature. She has that doe-eyed look when she stares at me that makes her appear more vulnerable.
She smiles at me and the color returns to her cheeks when she notices the food on the table.
“Oh, wow. This looks delicious.”
“I hope it tastes as good as it looks.” I pull her into my arms and kiss her. “How are you feeling?”
“Just… I’m still shaken. I slept through the night, though, so I guess your tea must have worked.”
“Good. Get something to eat and I’ll take you out. I thought we could drive into the city and go for a walk in the park.” I’m trying to take her mind off the situation, but truthfully, I need the distraction, too.
I’m supposed to be in a computer science class in an hour but there’s no way I can deal with seeing Aiden today. Since I removed myself as his competition in the company he hasn’t bothered me, but he still reminds me of the messy situation with my uncle.
Caspian was livid about the whole thing. Not because I chose Ivy but because I essentially allowed his father to win. I assured him that I hadn’t given up and choosing Ivy was my win.
Ivy gives me a weak smile and stands on her tiptoes to kiss my chin. “I’d love to go to the park. Are you sure we can?”
“Yes. We just need to be back for later. I’m meeting Lucian.” He’s working on finding out where the warning message came from. I’ll join him later. Hopefully he’ll crack the code. It will be one less thing to solve and possibly another lead. “We can leave as soon as we’re done here.”
“Great. A walk in the park is just the thing I need.”
“Perfect.”
We eat breakfast, get ready, and leave.
Within the hour we’re walking through the public gardens hand in hand. Like this, we feel like a normal couple. A couple like the others here enjoying the day.
My mind, however, is a battlefield. Last night’s disaster has left me in a state of flux. The only information I got from last night was the scar-faced man’s name.
I glance at Ivy and take in the trouble in her expression. She looks like she’s doing her best not to be terrified.
“I’d like us to join Caspian and Willow for Thanksgiving.” The holiday is three weeks away.
Ivy snaps her attention to me with her eyes wide. “You would?”
“Yeah. It would be fun. Don’t worry, my uncle won’t be there. He’s going to be away.” Her parents are going to be away, too, which is why I thought I’d ask her to join us.
“I’ll join you. I’ve hung out with Willow a few times with Eilish and the girls. She seems cool. Not that Caspian isn’t. I just mean?—”
“I know what you mean.” I chuckle.
“I want to tell my parents about us. But my mom… she’s...”
“Wary of the Ivanovs,” I fill in.
“How did you know?”
“I just did.” I remember when I first met Ivy and told her my name she was more scared than most people to hear it. When I learned the truth about her, I figured her mother would have warned her about my family.
The sound of a speeding car turns my attention to the path across from us. This is part of the park so there aren't supposed to be any cars down here, but a black Ferrari is speeding toward us as if it’s competing in the Grand Prix.
My senses kick into overdrive, so I pull Ivy closer to me as we continue walking.
The car gets close and the blacked-out window of the driver’s side rolls down, then all I see is a gun pointing at us.
As the spray of bullets flies I grab Ivy. She screams and the sound fuels the terror in my soul.
A bullet rips through my arm, but I hold on to her as I propel us over the side of the bridge.
There are screams from the people around us as we land in the water. Then we’re going down.
I don’t know how deep the water goes, but I manage to gain control of our momentum and swim back up to the surface.
As Ivy and I emerge, I realize she’s unconscious.
“Ivy.” I frantically check her to see if any of the bullets hit her, and that’s when I find the blood trickling down the side of her head.