Chapter 7 #2
“To have retrieved my gun, you had to have gotten into our vehicle. The dog that’s in there, is he okay? You better not have hurt him.”
“We didn’t. We sent Emma in there, and that girl can convince a grizzly to like her.”
“Good.”
Ned smiles at me as he leans back in his chair. “So… Tonio, or Antonio, as you call him, is out of the business and you’re a bodyguard. Who are these other two?”
“My friends,” Antonio says. “I met Felix when he was dancing at the place I work at. He helped my boyfriend out with some… questionable family issues. We really are quite thrilled to have met up with all of you. We will not say a word and will be out of your hair lickety-split.”
“So you’re a bodyguard for hire?” Ned asks me.
“I am,” I say.
“Then I have a job for you, and if you do that job, I’ll let you all leave. Got it? Antonio, you too. These two will stay here as a guarantee that you’ll do as I ask.”
The pig comes over and Ned looks down at him as I question if he’s going to do something to the pig before I see him discreetly slip his hand under the desk to pet him. I can tell by the way Brigs’s tail is wiggling that he’s pleased.
“I really don’t think we should drag others into this,” Grayson says.
“I’ll do it!” I agree with far too much enthusiasm and I don’t even know why. Is it to piss Grayson off? Is it so I can figure out what’s happening here? Grayson gives me a look that makes me want to do it even more. “Anything you want, I’m your man. But I don’t come cheap.”
“No, you’re not cheap. You get to do it in exchange for their lives,” Ned says as he points to Felix and Lane.
“Fine. Tell me what I’m doing, then, and I will do it with perfection.”
“Antonio will be making a delivery for us. You and Blake here will just make sure he doesn’t run into any issues.”
“Fine,” I repeat. “Give me my gun.”
He gestures for his buddies to take hold of Lane and Felix before handing my rifle to Grayson. “If he needs it, you can think about giving it to him.”
I hesitate as I realize that I don’t know who the fuck Blake is, but the way he just handed the gun to Grayson makes me extremely concerned. Slowly, I look up at Ned. “And who is Blake?”
He waves right at Grayson.
Fuck my life.
But if I go, “Anyone but him!” it’ll become quite obvious that I know Grayson. So I just have to grin and bear it. I give him a wave. “Lead the way.”
“I feel like maybe I didn’t agree to this,” Antonio whispers. “I feel like maybe you could have just like… you know… let us go home? Maybe we could go out for brunch if you’d like. Maybe we can just find something delightfully fun that doesn’t include this… and no one is listening to me.”
Ned simply smiles and I head out the door, very aware that this whole thing is going to hell.
“You guys alright?” I ask Felix.
“It’s questionable,” he says.
“Please don’t take any risks. It seems like they know Antonio’s family, which should work in our favor. Just be careful and listen to what they say.”
“He’s looking at you too, Lane! Don’t just assume he’s only speaking to me!”
“I can’t see him, so I have to assume he’s speaking to you.”
I sigh, hoping they can stay out of trouble long enough for us to get back. It really is a big ask. And hell, I have no idea what they actually are planning for us.
We’re led away from Felix and Lane and told to stay still near a greenhouse.
Grayson silently watches us, and I can’t help but question what I’m going to say to him when we get in the vehicle.
Like… if I push him out of the car on some deserted back road and leave him there, will anyone notice or care?
I have to assume they won’t. As long as we come back having accomplished what they’d asked for, they likely won’t even notice he’s missing.
After about forty minutes, during which Antonio sighs at least four hundred and fifty-two times, we are beckoned over to an SUV.
Antonio stares at it like he’s never seen one before grudgingly getting into the driver’s seat where he stares at the steering wheel like he’s never seen one of those either.
“What am I even doing?” Antonio asks the man who led him to the car.
“Blake will show you,” he says with a smile as he shuts the door. I get into the passenger seat before Grayson can even look at it.
“Just go before he can get in,” I say.
“Where are we going to go? A leisurely trek around the block? You know that will gain us nothing.”
“I’m aware,” I say, feeling rather disgruntled about the whole thing. Honestly, they should just let me be miserable alone.
Grayson gets into the back seat and off we go.
“You realize we’re just cannon fodder, right?” Antonio asks. “There’s no fucking way they’re sending us off to do something important just because they suddenly trust us. Hell no, they’re sending us out to get murdered.”
“Oh, one hundred percent,” I agree.
Antonio still has the ability to look shocked over this even though he said it. “He knows my mother! How dare he happily murder me off!”
“Evidently, not well enough… or maybe he doesn’t like her,” I say.
The SUV crawls down the lane while Antonio questions life in general… or maybe he’s trying to prolong our lives by driving so slowly.
“Cal,” Grayson says.
Oh? So he’s going to grovel and try to get me to like him again? Tough shit. That’s never going to happen. “Do you hear something? It sounded like a dying cockroach,” I comment.
“Uh… yeah,” Antonio says.
“Cal, what the absolute fuck are you doing here?” Grayson growls.
I whip around in my seat to face him, ready to fight. So much for groveling; a fight must be what he wants. “What the fuck am I doing here? I was trying to sleep when you sent me a shitty fucking text about picking up your dog that wasn’t there!”
“He wasn’t… fuck. I asked the neighbor girl to take him out.
I told her I was going to be gone for a bit…
I bet she took him home with her. Sometimes she takes him home to play with when I’m out.
I didn’t clarify that you’d be there to pick him up.
She probably assumed when I got home, I’d swing over and grab him. ”
I unbuckle my seat belt as Antonio looks over at me.
“Cal, what are you doing?”
I leap into the back seat and grab him in a headlock.
“I fucking drove three hours in the middle of the goddamn night absolutely fired up about the idea that I might run into your irritating face. Only to show up and you aren’t there and the dog isn’t there and you forgot to tell the neighbor girl I was picking him up?
And then I end up having to see your face anyway!
” He quickly breaks through my hold and tries to pin my arms down.
“Why are you so angry? You know I didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Yet you fucking left me! You listened to him!”
I smack his pretty face two times before he pins my arms down.
With some struggle, I’m confident I could get out of the hold, but why bother when my legs work perfectly fine?
I swing my leg up and try to wrap it around his neck.
He’s a bit surprised by this and can’t seem to get out of it as the car stops and the window rolls down.
“Everything alright back there, Blake?” a woman asks as she peeks in to where I’m trying to strangle the irritating man with my leg.
“Why the fuck did you stop?” I ask Antonio.
“She waved for me to!”
“We’re good,” Grayson calls as he gives her a friendly wave. When she doesn’t look overly convinced, he pushes me off him. The only reason he can is because I willingly let him do so. “Just a… fun little tussle. I was testing him to see if he really was a bodyguard. Looks like he is. Funny, huh?”
“Hilarious,” she says. “I’m supposed to take the guide dog to the one guy. He’s such a sweet doggy. Looks like I got the better job. Have fun now. Hey, strange bodyguard, if you do murder him, you might be better off pretending someone else did it, alright? Ned seems to like this one.”
“Got it.”
“Thank you, Emma. That’s just… phenomenal advice,” Grayson says while I climb back into the front seat. I make sure to kick him a little as I go until he grabs my ankle, causing me to fall face-first into the passenger seat.
“I will murder you,” I snarl.
“I really don’t think you will.”
Antonio starts driving, clearly not caring at all that the vehicle might soon only have two occupants.
“Sit down and put your seat belt on,” Grayson says. “It’s not safe.”
“Oh, you care now?”
“I’ve always cared. This whole thing… all of it… was such a fucking mess. I fucked up. I’ve told you again and again that I fucked up, but you refuse to listen.”
Buckling my seat belt, I snap, “Just tell us where we’re going, and then we’re getting out of here. And I’m getting out of your life.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he says.
“I can’t. I can’t deal with you.”
My chest is tight and I feel like I can’t breathe. I feel like I’m crashing. When I look down, my hands are shaking, and I can see that blood spray out. I can hear the sound the round makes when it goes through the skull and into his brain.
Suddenly, there’s a hand on me, and I look down as Antonio squeezes my thigh.
“Hey, stay with me. Yeah? We’re just going to do this thing and then snatch up Lane and Felix and get the fuck out of here, yeah?
I’m going to call my mom, and she can deal with Ned.
Okay? Let’s do that. That’ll be fun. You’ll like my mom. She’s a delight for sure.”
My chest is so tight that I can’t figure out if it’s going to stop working or realize that I really do need to breathe to live.
A phone appears on my lap and I assume it’s to call Antonio’s mom, since we don’t have our phones any longer, but when I pick it up, I see it’s a compilation of Traveler doing doggy things. He’s such a goofy dog.
My fingers are shaking so much that I struggle to flip to the next picture, but somehow I accomplish it.
“I really didn’t mean to draw you into this. You were supposed to take Traveler and go home. I don’t even know how you ended up here,” Grayson says.