Chapter 39 Roman
ROMAN
“So, you stopped watching her when she ended it with you?” Jarrid asked from across the training room as he threw mats onto the already padded floor.
I’d told him everything after Hana broke up with me.
I thought he’d be shocked, but he told me it explained a lot about my level of obsession with her, and then we went about our day, like I hadn’t just admitted to stalking Hana for six years because her brother asked me moments before he was murdered.
“No,” I scoffed. “But I’ve not contacted her, not seen her face to face since.
That’s space, isn’t it? That’s what she wanted when she ended it with me.
” Even talking about her safe wording me ripped my heart open once again.
I’d been a shell of my former self since she’d walked out of my life, which meant I was watching her even more than usual.
I pointed to the floor. “What are you doing?”
“Lacy needs to burn off some shit, and I offered to help. I’m trying to make sure she doesn’t make the back injury she refuses to talk about any worse if she decides she wants to try and take me down.”
My laugh was soft. “Are you sure Amber won’t mind you wrestling with another woman?”
His expression darkened, his lips turning down. “We can just add it onto the list of things I’m omitting to tell her.”
“Still not told her about your job?”
He turned his back on me as he heaved another massive padded mat from where it rested against the wall and tossed it onto the ground like it weighed nothing.
“Nope. And it’s eating me alive. She keeps asking me what’s wrong, so it’s probably obvious I’m hiding something.
” He turned. “And the longer I leave it, the worse telling her feels.”
“Drinks after work? We can drown our sorrows and work out how to keep the girls we’re in love with.”
He kicked the pad into place. “As long as it doesn’t involve locking them in a cabin in the woods until they forgive us, then I’m down.” Before I could reply, Lacy appeared looking breathless, waving a card in the air like a fan. She came to a stop in front of us.
“Why did you tell Wren this was a dog?”
I glanced at Jarrid, who looked as confused as me. “Isn’t it?”
She scrunched her face up like I was an idiot and she couldn’t believe my stupidity. “This is a dog.” She pointed to one of the two animals standing next to the lobster. “This is a wolf.”
“Okay, Lacy,” I said slowly. “It’s a wolf.”
She turned and started walking, leaving Jarrid and me in her wake. She glanced back, her eyes pleading. “Come on. You’re going to want to see this.”
We hurried back into the tech room, where Wren stood under the wall of monitors, clicker in hand, so he could change the images displayed.
I shut the door, and the two of us waited for someone to explain.
Lacy took a seat, her lip twitching with what I imagined was pain as she did, but she sucked in a breath and began,
“Wren and Lev cross-referenced everything on the tarot card with the banking information they took off Preston’s hard drive, but some numnut claimed these were dogs, so they didn’t find anything.
But it’s a wolf.” She shook the card at me again, like I should be fully versed in tarot symbolism. “And he got a hit.”
Just then, a mugshot popped up on the screen.
“This is Jean Wolf. Was a high roller in a gang until just over six years ago, when the police received an anonymous tip-off that landed him in prison for a twelve-to-eighteen-year stretch. Mr Wolf appears in this group in a number of ways—he was particularly close with Larson, and we think he trafficked guns and drugs through his buildings, using them for storage or drop off points. Wolf was also associated with a number of missing people that, knowing what we now know, probably ended up as part of the foundation in Larson’s buildings.
Then there are a number of large payments from him to Preston, but also from Preston to him, which makes me think he was on the payroll.
” Lacy clapped her hands. “And, Wren, tell them the rest.”
Wren blew out a breath. “He’s dead.” The glimmer of hope I was feeling about cracking this case was immediately doused. “I’m not sure why Lacy is so excited about this fact,” he added.
Lacy huffed, shuffling back in her seat. “Because it’s too good to be a coincidence. He dies—stabbed in the exercise yard earlier this month—and then all the others in this little crime ring die too.”
“We don’t know how many were in the crime ring, so we don’t know if they’re all dead,” I reminded her.
“We’re already checking anyone in the prison who got out recently to see if they’re our killer, and we’re also looking at visitors, phone calls, emails, letters Wolf sent or received. We’ll know more in a couple of hours.”
Before I could thank Lacy for her wolf insight, alarms pierced the air.
Jarrid snapped into protector mode, storming past me and ripping open the door.
“Ladies and gents, please leave via the stairs,” he yelled along the corridor, “but be aware. Nothing good ever happens when an alarm goes off around here. Motherfuckers.” His last word was muttered like he hadn’t meant for us to hear it.
Jarrid pulled his gun from the holster on his side. “I’m not wrong. Last time the alarm went off here, I shot the windows out to get someone to help me with Sean after some fucker shot him with a weaponised drone.”
“Woah, shit. Okay, well, you’re in charge of making sure I don’t get shot. Thank you very much,” I declared.
Jarrid chuckled as we made our way to the stairs to get out of the building, wondering what the hell was going on.
“False alarm,” Sean muttered as we walked back into the tech room. The alarms had brought him and Thomas rushing back here because, like Jarrid, they were suspicious when they went off.
“Nothing is ever a false alarm around here,” Thomas replied, his voice tinged with anger.
“Yeah, well, whatever it was, no one’s getting in here,” Jarrid countered as I stopped in front of my desk, where my bag was still slung over the back of my chair, trying to work out what I was seeing.
“What’s this?” I asked, reaching for a pen I’d discarded earlier and using it to pick up the black material draped across my keyboard because I didn’t want to touch it until I knew what it was.
It was instantly recognisable. “It’s a skeleton mask,” I said as horror overtook me.
“The same one the burglar at Preston’s house was wearing. ”
“You’re sure?” Thomas asked, appearing at my side.
I tossed it down onto my desk like it had burnt me. “The image is etched into my brain; it’s the last thing I saw before I took a tumble down the stairs, with a helping hand from the little fucker who kicked me.”
Thomas spun around, his eyes scanning the space. “How the hell did it get in here? Shut this place down. Someone used that alarm to break in here and leave this. I want to know who and how.” And there was my deadly boss, the one I’d heard about over the years but never seen fully in action.
“Boss,” Sean replied on instinct, given he was in charge these days, but I guessed these two had their roles ingrained into them, just like I did.
I opened my computer and flicked through the video footage of the basement floors until I found what I was looking for: the same small figure walking through the locked halls of the basement with a hood pulled up so I couldn’t see their face.
“Here,” I called, and Thomas and Jarrid gathered behind me, Sean currently scouring the building to see if our visitor was still here.
We watched as the intruder used a keycard to unlock the doors, moving through the space like they knew where they were going. Then, to make matters worse, they pressed their finger to the biometric scanner, and the fucking door to the tech room opened.
“They work here?” Thomas said through gritted teeth as I pulled up the log that told us exactly who had entered and when.
The silence that descended as we read the file was deafening because it didn’t make any sense.
“It was me?” I said when I finally found the words to explain the information we were seeing. “That’s impossible. It doesn’t even look like me, and I was outside with you guys.” I twisted and looked up, knowing that neither man would think the short, skinny guy on the screen was me.
We all watched as the person left the mask on my desk before walking into the armoury and coming out with a handgun and ammo, managing to evade their face being caught by a single camera as they moved through the building, back out to the stairwell.
“Ooo, goody, they’re now armed as well. More reason for me to fucking end them. Question is, how the hell did that guy walk into a building that should have been locked down tighter than Fort Knox, and why?” Thomas hissed.
No one replied because we had no idea, but I was determined to find out because this was starting to feel personal.