12 Kit #3
Castiel rubbed his lips together and flipped the image over, knowing his life needed to honor the debt it owed. From his side of the bar, he managed to grab a pen and scribbled something on the back of the image. “Lucky for you, I always have information.”
I took the paper from him and read the address he wrote down, knowing it was in the woods. “Is this his home address?”
“I did you one better. This is where he was talking to several men about meeting to get a job done. Now, I’m not sure what type of job they were talking about, but I heard the address and time. They’re meeting in four days there.”
“Thank you,” I told them both and stood from my place.
Castiel grabbed the rag from his brother’s shoulder and began wiping down the spot we sat at. Even though we hadn’t ordered anything, he liked a clean surface. “I have something else that might interest you.”
He always played this game because he wanted me to do him a favor. “I’m good.”
“You might be, but I think your female Beta might be interested. Send her my way because I think I found someone she might be looking for.”
“I’ll pass that along,” I retorted before making my way to the door. Ryatt was wise enough to follow right behind me as we made our exit.
Deep in thought, he moved forward on the sidewalk like he fell into a trance.
I watched him for a second as he went around the corpse we passed previously.
Stopping on the other side, he waited for me to join.
I stepped right over the girl again to show him I wasn’t as kind as him.
He didn’t like that, but he knew better than to bring it up.
“That felt too easy,” he murmured, not leaving the sidewalk.
“It only felt easy to you because you didn’t have to do the task that got the favor.”
“What the hell did you do?”
“I’m not a canary, so I won’t sing my secrets.” Shrugging, I made my way forward thinking he’d follow.
It wasn’t like Ryatt to be so slow, so when I got halfway to the car, I turned back around to look at him. He still stood by the dead woman underneath a streetlight, but his eyes were looking up the road at something else.
“What are you doing?” I couldn’t help the annoyance that came out in my voice. Ryatt was someone who often frustrated me, but I remembered what it used to lead to in the bedroom.
“There’s another dead body over there,” he pointed out. My eyes followed his finger to see another whore was dead. Under the lamppost, he studied the one below him before heading over to the other corpse.
Rolling my eyes, I hated playing this game with him. “Ryatt, whores die over here all the time. They always lay in the streets until the city cleanup crews remove them in the morning. We both know how it works.”
“Our little friend over there was foaming out of the mouth with blood and other fluid. Her pupils were like needle points.”
“And? It sounds like she overdosed. Most whores in this area of town do.”
“Kit, I know you’re not an Alpha, but I need you to use your eyes right now. How many dead whores do you see in our area?”
Letting my eyes scan the neighborhood, I finally saw what he was. While it was common for a whore to die on the streets, there were at least six bodies on our short street alone, so he’d been right to pay attention.
“And what are you hoping to find by studying these dead bodies?”
“My family runs the drugs into the city, so if drugs killed them, I know they’re not mine.”
“And how would you know that?”
Ryatt met my stare with an icy glare as we moved to the next corpse.
She had similar signs of overdosing like the woman we just observed.
Opening her eye with the flashlight from his phone, he let me see how tiny the pupils were.
“Fentanyl does this, and when it’s cut wrong, it kills.
We don’t put fentanyl in our drugs to keep them clean. ”
“So you’re saying someone else is starting to run drugs into the city. Drugs that aren’t safe? You say that like any street drug is safe,” I nearly growled, biting my tongue from my own past.
“Ours don’t do this. If someone overdoses and takes their own life on purpose, there’s nothing we can do to stop that. But I won’t let my drugs kill someone from immediate ingestion.”
“That sounds like a bigger problem you’ll have to figure out after we figure out who’s trying to kill you.”
Ryatt got the hint I was done talking about it, so we made our way back to my car.
He could say whatever he wanted about the lifestyle he lived, but he didn’t know I’d been forced to become a bottom feeder because of the drugs he sold.
Now being clean for six years, I had to actively fight an addiction I never asked for.
Pulling back onto the road, we both remained quiet the rest of the drive.
Ryatt wasn’t prepared to see this side of me, but he needed to.
After what happened two nights ago, he needed to see I wasn’t the sweet Omega left behind.
Everything changed between us, but he needed this mission to finally see it.
Drugs and weakness ruined me into hitting rock bottom.