Chapter 31
Piper
Present Day
“Well, here we go again,” I mutter, sliding my visitor’s badge over the screen, and the elevator button glows bright orange.
Josh is at the front desk, distracting the receptionist with the biggest bonsai tree I’ve ever seen. I have no idea where he found that monster, but he slid it straight onto the counter, shielding me as I crouched toward the elevator door behind them.
“You’re in a whole lot of trouble, mister,” sniffs the receptionist. “I got yelled at for those visitor badges.”
“I know,” smiles Josh. “I felt so bad when I found it in my pocket. Here you go.” He slides the badge on the counter. “And this is to make up for that.”
She eyes the tree in confusion. “What the hell…”
“I want you to take it as a token of my appreciation,” he insists. “Here you go. Oh, crap!”
Pushing the tree over to her, he lets it fall, and a mountain of dirt tumbles into her lap.
“Fuck!” she screams. “Fuck, my dress! It’s a fucking designer dress! Hey!”
In the moment it takes for her to react to the dirt now coating every inch of her, Josh has joined me, and the elevator doors open just as she turns toward the front door. She must think Josh left that way.
“Hey, come back, asshole! And bring me back the other badge! I’m still missing another badge!”
Reassured she hasn’t seen either of us, we collapse into the elevator, laughing.
“That actually did feel like a sketch straight out of Nancy Drew,” I declare, wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes. “So ridiculous. Where did you even get that bonsai thing?”
“My mom collects them,” he chuckles.
“Your mom… what?”
I’m gasping, my sides hurting from laughing, as I imagine his mom with hundreds of massive potted trees in her house.
Fuck, it feels so good to laugh. I can’t think of the last time I did.
The weight in my chest has eased, and though I know it’s temporary, I cling to that feeling as the doors slide open onto the executive floor.
“I can’t believe the badge works up here,” I whisper, my sides back to clenching from nerves, instead of laughter.
Josh nods. “It’s insane how badly protected this whole place is.”
We kept my badge—Jen Potter—and I grasp it, my palm coating the plastic object with my sweat as we step out of the elevator and look around.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find up here, but it definitely wasn’t this. A perfectly normal, boring executive-looking floor, with a large, glass-walled conference room and a number of doors lining a long, carpeted hallway.
Not the kind of place you’d imagine the state’s most powerful people to work in. The kind of powerful people who are friends with the President, while also having an army of killers at their disposal.
The only thing that isn’t normal is how deserted this place is.
I gulp nervously. I really had no idea what I was expecting when we decided to try to sneak up here.
Well, I guess what I was expecting was that it wouldn’t work.
Even if we managed to get past the receptionist, there was just no way in hell our badges would still work, let alone bring us up here.
It would’ve been Security 101 for there to be different levels of access for different floors. And these badges aren’t old-fashioned, either. One click on the computer would have disabled them, so I can’t understand why they’re still working.
How the hell can you rise to the most powerful position on the East Coast and not have basic security?
But now we’re here, and I realize this place isn’t the kind you can hide in. We literally could have walked straight out onto Logan Colt, and then what?
My stomach twists and I can tell Josh is just as nervous and uncertain as me.
Even though he didn’t grow up with the larger-than-life legend of Devil looming over him, he knows of them, just like everyone does.
And right now, standing in a deserted, quiet-as-death hallway, we’re both silently freaking out.
Then suddenly, he grabs my arm and dives toward the door to his left, just as two pairs of feet pad toward us.
It takes me a second to realize we’re in a kitchen.
Then Josh pulls me down lower, and I’m crouching beside him under a counter, barely concealed by a garbage can and a random stool.
We’re in a kitchen. A fucking kitchen. The criminal, all-powerful founders of Devil have a kitchen on their executive floor.
I don’t know why that strikes me as funny.
I mean, everyone has to eat, even bloodthirsty criminals.
But there’s just such a dissonance about the coffee machine in the corner that’s not even some fancy namebrand—just Keurig—the stack of cups in the corner, an unopened bag of chips and some pastries haphazardly placed on a tray.
This is all so… normal.
It reminds me that they didn’t grow up in incredible wealth. They’re from the slums south of Astley, a little town called Oakley that Astley folks avoid like the plague. In fact, even I’ve never set foot there, though I’d probably fit in better there than in snooty Astley.
But it’s so pummeled into your brain when you’re growing up that if you place even one foot into Oakley, you’ll get shot or stabbed, that I’ve never even been tempted to go visit it.
I hear Josh swallow beside me as the door suddenly swings open, and the footsteps follow us in.
I grow so tense my joints hurt. I draw back until my body’s pressed against the far wall under the counter, which, by the smell of it, doesn’t get cleaned all that often.
I’m terrifyingly aware, just as I was the last time we were in sub-sub basement level, that it would take just one glance in our direction to see us.
But like with Liam and Dane, neither person now looks around. I guess it makes sense, if they’re not used to people intruding. Though I can’t think how they’re not used to it, with the insane lack of security there is.
For a while they talk about boring business matters, pressing a button on the Keurig machine to make coffee, and I relax just a bit, glancing up at them to see if I recognize them.
I do.
One of them is the blond, blue-eyed Devil founder—Everest Grant—and the other is Vincent Murilla, the youngest Devil, who joined after the tragic death of Vale Jennings, one of the original founders.
Well, tragic death is the way it was called in the news—I personally don’t have an opinion about it.
The local news always fawns over Devil, and it’s strange to reconcile that idyllic vision of them with what I inadvertently learned from Quill.
But right now, all I care about is why the hell my dad asked if I knew who Logan Colt was, and how the hell it relates to me and to my name being in big block letters on some paper on Bob Nelson’s desk.
So my ears perk up and I’m back to tensing when I suddenly hear my name on their tongue.
I can’t help but shiver as Everest Grant says, “That Day girl, now.”
“Yeah.” Vincent Murilla downs his coffee and pours himself another one.
“Seriously, man, you’re gonna stay up all night. It’s after six p.m., and you’re still guzzling coffee?”
It feels like I can actually hear Vincent Murilla’s eye roll.
“What about the Day girl?”
“Huh? Oh yeah. Call me naive, but I just don’t understand how Damien could ever live with himself if he killed her.”
The shiver coursing down my back turns into a full-body spasm, and Josh’s hand crushing mine is the only thing preventing me from crying out.
“You’re naive, man,” chortles Vincent, drinking the second cup and helping himself to a pastry.
“Yeah, I guess I am.” Everest sighs while passing a hand through his hair. “Still, I know Damien has guilty men killed. Even women, occasionally. But that girl didn’t do a single thing.”
“She’s curious,” shrugs Vincent, tearing off a hunk of Danish pastry, then swearing when the filling gets on his collar. “And you know what he said—curiosity killed the cat, and it’s going to kill Piper Day.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” groans Everest. “I know Damien is Damien and all that, but I don’t think he’s gotten to the point where we should be quoting him like he’s a demi-god or whatever. You’re such a suck-up, I swear you’re going to make his head explode with how swollen it’s been getting.”
Vincent snorts. “I’m just saying, that’s why she’ll be dead soon. She’s an inconvenience.”
I’m trying to find enough saliva in my mouth to swallow, but it feels impossible.
“Yeah, well,” argues Everest, “if we went around killing people because they’re inconvenient, Seraphina would have been dead a long time ago.
I frown. Who?
“That’s different. He was obsessed with her, remember? Still is, by the way. I’ve never met a guy whose whole world turns around one person like that.”
“That’s not the excuse he used, though, to save her,” grumbles Everest. “He said we have a moral code. We don’t kill people just because they’re inconvenient.”
“No offense, man, but you’re so naive.” By now, Vincent’s finished the pastry, and he’s dabbing at his collar with a napkin, his nose wrinkled in disgust because the stain is only getting bigger.
“We kill people for every reason under the sun. Because they deserve it. Because they’re a risk.
Because they’re inconvenient. Sometimes even, just because. ”
Everest hisses. “I wish we could focus on acquisitions and that kind of shit.”
“Go right ahead and do that,” says Vincent. “The rest of us have an innocent girl to kill.”
My head is slumped against my one free hand—the other one still being crushed by Josh—as I try to understand everything they’re saying.
Devil wants me dead.
Not just the organization. Not just its soldiers. The actual founders. Damien Wells, the most powerful man on the East Coast, knows who I am, and he wants me dead. Me, talkative, annoying, glasses-wearing Piper Day.
What the hell?
Everest’s voice has dropped to a whisper. “And what does Logan have to say about all this?”