Death's Familiar Bite

Chapter 1

The Muffin Man crushed into me. His weight threatened to crack my already bruised ribs as he pressed down, down, restricting my ability to breathe. My spine pinned against the floor, I couldn’t move, couldn’t fight. And from the look in his eyes, he had me right where he wanted me.

Perhaps I misjudged. Maybe he wasn’t part of Leslie’s Pies.

Which would mean I’d gotten everything completely and utterly wrong.

In all the commotion, the hem of my shirt lifted to reveal the fading blues, yellows, and browns from the beating I’d received while undercover with the Almeidas—bruises that would no doubt darken later.

With the Muffin Man straddling me, and the grind, pop, click from his weight on my chest, the bruising was the least of my concerns.

According to Todd, my ribs were more than likely broken.

If I got out of this in one piece, I’d be in for a stern talking-to for aggravating my existing injuries.

But I’d deal with that later, after I dealt with the Muffin Man.

“You’re crushing me,” I rasped, tapping the ground. Tapping out.

“Shit. Sorry.” The Muffin Man raised his sandy blonde eyebrows. “I’m gonna let go, and we’re gonna talk. No fighting. No funny business. Got it?”

Without air in my lungs, I wasn’t in a position to argue. I wasn’t exactly in a position to move either, so I nodded. Anything to get him off of me. Anything to get rid of the pain that threatened to swallow me whole.

“Good.” The Muffin Man placed his hands on either side of my face, lowering himself so we were eye-to-eye, his face so close to mine I felt his breath lapse over my lips and cheeks before he pushed himself upright.

Ugh. I gasped, rolling onto my side coughing between breaths, careful not to take my eyes off the stalker who had forced his way into my home.

To be fair, he didn’t take his eyes off me either. In a sudden reversal of roles, he backed his way into my living room.

“I’d hate to see the other guy.” The Muffin Man gestured to my bruises, my split lip, like we were lifelong friends, and he hadn’t just broken into my apartment and tackled me to the ground.

Throat tight, body aching, I got to my feet and strode towards him in two wide, intentionally intimidating, steps. My real feelings—the discomfort—didn’t matter, so long as I looked the part. “What do you want?”

Raising his hands in defense, he took another step away from me, towards the only exit. “I come in peace, Delilah.”

“You pinned me to the ground. I wouldn’t call that peace.”

“You attacked me first.” True, but it didn’t make me any less angry, he’d done his fair share before this confrontation.

“You roofied me!”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.” He scratched his head. “I’m usually very good… but I was a little out of practice. Didn’t take the large tattooed guy for someone who’d order a Shirley Temple.”

I’d known the Muffin Man was responsible for roofying both Jack and me at the Jackalope. But it was sounding awfully like he had intended to roofie Jack and Todd, and had accidentally drugged me instead.

At least it made sense.

If the Muffin Man had been trying to talk to me, alone, why not drug the two FBI agents shadowing my every move, and then talk to me in a public space?

Speaking in public would have been a lot less invasive than cornering me in my own home.

Even if that meant Jack and Todd would have been passed out at our booth.

Either way, I was livid. “You roofied me by mistake?”

“Don’t blame me. Blame your brother.”

“I’m not in the habit of blaming the dead.”

“And I said sorry. Wrote it in your mirror. Remember?” The exact message he left in the mirror was: Sorry about the drugs.

We need to talk. Alone. And that was exactly what we were doing.

Well, he was trying to, but my adrenaline, and anger, pumped freely in my veins.

I didn’t rein it in. Not in my own home.

Not when… I looked to the bathroom door. Shit.

It was wide open.

If the Muffin Man took a couple steps to his left, he’d be able to see the counter, and what was waiting for me. I wasn’t prepared for what I’d find, and I sure as hell didn’t want to explain it to a stranger. A stranger with boundary issues no less.

“You gonna turn off that alarm?” He gestured to my phone lying a couple feet away on the floor as a result of our scuffle.

When the chiming loop started again, I made a point of not doing what I was told.

Cocking a brow, I let the alarm continue to ring as I leisurely made my way over to shut the washroom door.

Once I was sure he got the message—that despite his intrusion, I was the one in control—I grabbed my phone to silence it.

My test was ready. For when I dared to look. The Muffin Man’s timing couldn’t have been worse.

“When I took the tape off the window, I didn’t expect you to break into my home five minutes later.”

“Didn’t want to risk being shut out again before we had a chance to speak.

Came over as soon as I saw the tape gone.

” It sounded like he had been waiting outside my window for the entire month I’d spent with the Almeidas.

Which was altogether unsettling. Stalker-level unsettling.

“I have something for you. Something you’re gonna want to see. ”

The Muffin Man reached into his back pocket.

He could have been reaching for anything. My mind had been so preoccupied on … other matters… that I’d failed to search him for weapons. For all I knew, he could have been reaching for a gun.

“Slowly,” I warned. There wasn’t much I could do against a gun, but I could handle a knife. If he planned to stab me, at the very least, I’d be able to grab one of the pillows off my couch to absorb the blade. Then I could knock him senseless. In theory.

But the Muffin Man didn’t pull a weapon. He pulled an envelope.

My chest tightening, blood pounding in my ears, I inhaled a short breath. The envelope was addressed to me, and the handwriting—I checked once, twice, three times—belonged to Lawrence.

“Your brother said to give this to you, if something ever happened to him.” Even though Lawrence had died over two and a half years ago, the Muffin Man seemed… apologetic, almost sad. “I held onto it while you were in prison. Figured it best to give it to you in person.”

Trying to hide the tremble in my hands, I tentatively closed the distance and took ahold of the letter. Lawrence had left something for me.

My fingers itched with the urge to peel back the paper, but I was not going to open Lawrence’s last words to me in front of a stranger. I’d do that in private. Just me. And what was left of my brother.

I tucked the envelope into my back pocket.

“You’re not gonna read it?” The Muffin Man stared at me like I had two heads. “Do you even know what kind of case he was working when he died?”

Of course, I did. “You said you needed to talk?”

“Jesus. You in a rush, Delilah?”

I was actually. But first I needed answers, so I wanted the freckled man to hurry up and get to the point. My body responded in kind, by crossing my arms and cocking my hip out to the side, waiting for him to get on with it.

“I waited over a month to speak with you. You can spare five minutes.”

“Is that so?”

“Don’t you want to know why I have a letter from your brother? Don’t you want to know that he was assigned a Seal?”

Before his ‘suicide’, Lawrence had been working undercover with Solomon’s Seal.

A cult that had been a no-go zone for years.

And for some reason, Leslie’s Pies assigned him to the case alone, when everyone knew that new cases should never be worked solo.

But I wasn’t going to reveal what I knew to the stranger before me.

I trusted him about as far as I could throw him, and given that he had at least a hundred pounds on me, that wasn’t very far.

“What I’d like to know is if I can trust you. To know that what you are saying is the truth, otherwise, this conversation is of no interest to me.” That was a lie, but I wanted to drive the point home that he was very much unwelcome.

He made a cross over his heart. “I’m telling the truth. I swear on my life.”

“Then say what you came to say. Answer my questions. Then leave.”

“Fuck, Lawrence said you’d be rough around the edges but I didn’t expect so much hostility.” Even if his tone suggested that he was pleased, something about the way he said “rough around the edges” caught my attention. “Mind if I sit?”

I gestured to the armchair. Sitting in it would put him in prime position for the security cameras I set up in response to his previous unauthorized visits.

Though I didn’t hold out much hope. With Todd living in the apartment across the hall, there was no going in or out without getting caught on his doorbell camera, but somehow the Muffin Man had been able to slip by completely undetected each and every time.

I was hoping this would be different.

Taking me in, the Muffin Man sat. He leaned his elbows on his knees, then straightened, drumming his fingers on the armrest. Finally, he said, “You just gonna stand there? Or can we have a nice sit-down conversation?” His hands shot up, palms out.

“Sorry. Sorry. You don’t know me. I get that.

I do. But I know you, Delilah. Shit, that sounded—”

I raised my brows. His mouth wasn’t doing him any favors, and there was no way I going to make myself any more vulnerable by sitting.

The FBI had let me know that the Muffin Man had been on my tail for a few years. Keeping his distance. But they didn’t know why.

What they did know, was that the Muffin Man and Lawrence had been in contact, so I steered the conversation there. “You knew my brother. Tell me how, then we can get into why you’ve been keeping tabs on me.”