Chapter 14
fourteen
EZRA
I’m trying my best not to fidget. Jason’s place is modest, especially if you consider the mansion Cal probably tried to buy him, but the living room is large.
The couch in front of where I’m standing seats everyone.
Kai, Belle, Willa, Declan, Maverick, and Jo in that order.
My eyes keep snagging on where Maverick has his arm around Jo, keeping her pressed firmly into his side.
I don’t like that. Maverick is mine.
But he’s not. I don’t have a right to claim him like I once did. Are they together? Does she make him as happy as I did? Does he see a future with her that he once planned with me?
“Can we get started? This place has a pool, and it’s so hot right now my balls are sticking to my leg,” Cal says from the laptop screen Declan is holding in his lap.
“Fucking disgusting,” Willa mutters.
“Language,” Cal yells.
“Cora is asleep, Cal,” Harlow says with a laugh.
“Subliminal messaging,” he argues.
“That doesn’t mean what you think it means, dude,” Kai says.
I don’t bother holding back my smile. I missed this. Even the pointless arguments and bickering.
“Alright,” Jo says, clapping her hands. I focus on her, her dark eyes meeting mine, almost as if in a challenge.
She’s objectively beautiful. Dark brown eyes, long blonde hair, and a killer body that looks like it’s probably been shaped by yoga or Pilates.
Add that to the fact that she’s been the one to take care of Maverick and make him happy, and I fucking hate her.
At the end of this, I fully intend to shake her hand, thank her for taking care of my man, and send her on her way.
“We’re all here, Ez,” Kai says, giving me a small smile in support.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, centering myself.
“Let’s start at the beginning.”
“This is so fucking stupid,” I whisper to myself.
I had this brilliant idea to follow Maverick’s mother in the middle of the night.
He has this idea that his dad is some evil guy.
Which, he’s not great. His mother though .
. . I’ve never seen eyes that evil. I thought if I followed her, I could get a video of her doing her evil things and use it to blackmail her into leaving Maverick alone.
I overheard her speaking on the phone last week as I was sneaking out of Maverick’s bed.
She was negotiating a trade. Maverick for the use of some port.
Obviously, if she was bringing things in legally, she wouldn’t need to marry off her son to get it.
The same phone call also mentioned needing to get rid of “a little problem.”
So here I am, three hours from home in the middle of the woods at two in the morning.
I borrowed a camera my dad uses to record at night when we go camping.
It won’t have a bright screen like my phone does.
My shoes are wet from the mud I’ve been trekking through for the last twenty minutes.
Eva has been easy to follow. She’s using a golf cart, so she’s pretty far ahead of me, but the wet ground left tracks for me to follow.
“I’m so getting a thank-you blow job if this works,” I mutter to myself.
I only take a few more steps before I hear a scream. Running towards the sound, I have the brief thought that I should be running from it instead but dismiss it. This is why I’m here. To get something on Eva that frees Maverick from her manicured claws.
I skid to a halt as I come to a small clearing with a dilapidated barn. The door is cracked open and light spills out. Giving the barn a wide berth, I make my way slowly around the side, trying to find somewhere to look inside that isn’t walking through the front door.
Eventually, I find a board missing in the side of the barn. I crouch down next to it and peek inside. Eva’s back is to me, and she’s talking to a tall guy in a Jason mask from Friday the 13th.
That’s not fucking terrifying.
I can’t figure out where the scream came from, and I’m about to move to find out when I hear steps coming towards me.
Shit. Shoving the camera into the space as quickly and quietly as I can, I make a break back to the tree line.
Hopefully, they don’t notice it there. Walking pretty much only on my tiptoes until I’m out of sight of the barn, I stop and sit on a rock to wait.
I don’t think I left any tracks that would make Eva’s goons think someone else was at the barn. I’m also assuming the steps I heard were a person and not an animal.
I am not cut out for this secret agent life. This is going to be my one and done mission. Take down the bad guy and get the boy, then retire.
How long do you have to wait for a bad guy to finish up bad guy things? Sitting in the dark of the woods is unnerving. I still don’t know who screamed, but I haven’t heard a sound since. Maybe I’m too far away. I should’ve brought a gun.
Not that I have a gun . . . or know how to use one.
I sit there so long that my ass is numb, and the sun is starting to break through the dense trees.
Since I’m pretty sure evil things need to be back in their coffins by sunrise, I make my way back to the barn.
It takes me almost an hour to find it. I didn’t walk in as straight of a line as I thought I did.
Eva’s golf cart is gone, and I don’t hear any voices.
I still take my time and remain as quiet as possible.
The camera is where I left it, still recording the inside of the empty barn.
I grab it, turn it off, and make my way back to where I parked my car.
Which, unfortunately for my wet and sore feet, was two miles from the edge of the woods.
“I’m getting two blow jobs for this.”
“Oh god oh god oh god.”
I try not to vomit everywhere. Or pass out. Or scream.
The video footage I got is worse than I thought. So much worse. Like I’m frozen and don’t know what to do worse.
There’s a woman tied to a pole in that old barn, her black hair matted and hanging around her face. She’s naked and her skin is dirty, like maybe she’s been there for a while. The masked guy asks her questions, followed by a poke with a cattle prod when she doesn’t answer.
I don’t want to keep watching this. I want to turn it off and hand it over to the police, but I also feel like I owe it to this woman. I was right there, and I didn’t try to save her. She must have been the one who screamed.
Fuck. What if she’s still in that barn?
I take a deep breath and keep watching. I watch her fade, stirring less and less after each painful electric shock is delivered. Eventually, Eva decides it’s enough, and the masked man slits the woman’s throat. My ears ring as I watch the blood spill onto the barn floor.
I barely make it to the bathroom where I immediately lose my breakfast. I’m not stupid enough to think I could’ve taken on Eva’s masked man or the goon she had prowling the barn, but the feeling of failure is still there.
I failed that woman, and I’ve failed Maverick. There’s no way I can save him from this. And if Eva finds out I was there, I’ve doomed us both.