4. Milo #2
“What? No! What the fuck are you talking about? A noose? Why would we—” Tyler looks between us, genuinely bewildered, and for the first time tonight I see something in his face that isn’t anger or fear or bravado. It’s confusion.
“Someone threatened her then hung her, Tyler,” I say. I shouldn’t be telling him this. Holden would lose his mind. But I want to see his face when it lands.
He doesn’t disappoint. The blood drains out of him so fast I think he might pass out. His mouth goes slack. His good eye widens until I can see white all the way around.
“What?” It comes out as a whisper. “Someone—what do you mean, hung her? Like— Is she dead? Is Sage—?”
“She’s alive,” Micah says. “No thanks to whoever did it.”
“That wasn’t—” Tyler is hyperventilating now, chest heaving, the chair rocking with the force of it.
“That wasn’t us. I swear on my fucking life, that wasn’t us.
We would never— I would never— Chris talks shit but he wouldn’t— We’re not— Jesus Christ, someone tried to kill her? What about Amy? Is she okay? Oh God.”
He’s going to throw up. I can see it building—the green tinge, the convulsive swallowing—I step back just in time as he twists sideways and vomits onto the concrete. It’s mostly liquid. The sharp smell of cheap beer and stomach acid. It stinks.
This guy is the worst.
“Please,” Tyler sobs. “I didn’t do it. I promise.”
I look at Micah. Micah looks at me.
We believe him. Tyler didn’t do it. Tyler didn’t even know it happened. Whatever else he is—and the list is long and unflattering—he’s not the one who put a rope around Sage’s neck.
Fuck.
I still want him dead, though.
The warehouse door scrapes open.
The footsteps are measured. Deliberate.
Holden walks to the edge of the light and stops.
No mask. Doesn’t need one—Tyler couldn’t see him if he tried. He has his hands in his jacket, eyes sweeping the scene, taking in the vomit, the blood, Tyler’s swollen face, the knife in my hand and the two of us in our skull masks standing over him like the cover of a metal album nobody’s proud of.
“Outside,” he says. To us. Not to Tyler.
“We’re not—”
“Now.”
The night air hits me and I rip the mask off, sucking in a breath that doesn’t taste like rubber. Micah does the same. His face underneath is calm, composed, the swollen knuckles of his right hand the only evidence of the last hour.
“It wasn’t him,” Holden says. No preamble. “He was at a bar getting hammered, moaning about his girlfriend dumping him. Bartender confirmed it. Security footage confirmed the timing. As do his credit card and Uber receipts. He was six miles away when Sage was attacked.”
“Can we just kill him, anyway?” I ask. “Fucker deserves it after threatening our girl.”
Holden’s jaw tightens. “He’s a piece of shit, but he’s not our piece of shit.
Cut him loose. Drop him somewhere he can’t trace back to here.
” He pauses. “Clean up his face but make it clear to him that if he mentions this to anyone, Brock won’t be the only one missing.
Last thing we need is him filing a report. ”
“What about the rest of them?” I ask. “Chris, Darren, whoever was in that group chat. I vote we drag them out here tonight, work them over—we’ve already got the bleach out and I’ve got energy to spare.”
“No.” Holden doesn’t even slow down. “Think for one second. If we keep snatching up Brock’s bros, someone’s going to notice.
News gets out that half his crew went missing the same week?
It puts a target on all of us and makes this a fuck ton more dangerous for Sage.
Don’t be dumb. Cut him the fuck loose. He didn’t touch her. ”
“Didn’t touch her this time,” I force through gritted teeth. I glance at Micah. “You heard him, right? He said Chris is the one who can’t let it go. Chris is the one still telling people she’s lying.”
Micah lets out a breath. “He said Chris wanted to go to her apartment and he talks shit.”
“Same fucking thing,” I say.
“Then we add Chris to the watch list.” Holden’s tone is final. “We don’t paint a target to scratch an itch.”
A growl rumbles in my chest, an unfed animal, pissed I’m being made to let this go when every part of me knows I shouldn’t. I turn away. “Fuck this.”
Holden’s hand drops to my shoulder and his fingers dig in a fraction shy of pain. He pulls me back, turns me like I weigh nothing. It should make the rage worse. Instead it short-circuits, and I don’t have a file for what that means.
He doesn’t speak at first. He waits for me to look up, which is a fucking power move because he’s taller and I’m not exactly small. When our eyes lock, he brings his other hand up, palm flat against my jaw, and tilts my face so I can’t squirm away. My guts go tight.
“We’re gonna handle this,” he says, voice low. “You got me?” His grip on my shoulder doesn’t loosen. “I’m not just saying it. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. For Sage. For all of us.”
I nod, once, and Holden lets me go.
Somehow, the pressure of his hand stays behind, the shape of it still burning on my jaw and crawling up the back of my neck. I don’t know what the fuck that is, but it’s not anything that’s ever happened before.
We both stand there, looking at each other.
Then Holden’s gaze drops, and he slides his hands into his jacket pockets, the air between us snapping back to cold.
I rub the itch out of my jaw and try not to look at Micah, whose expression has gone curious.
“What?” I snap. He smirks a little and shakes his head, turning his attention to Holden.
“Have you figured out who Stephen is?” Micah asks. “He’s the only other lead we have.”
Holden shakes his head. “Nothing. The number he uses to text Brock is some proxy thing that location hops.” He nods toward the warehouse. “He say anything?”
“No.” Micah sighs. “Claims he doesn’t know a Stephen. I believe him.”
Holden looks at me. “What about you?”
“Undecided.” I rub the back of my neck. “I mean, I called him Stephen when I first met him, and the guy was real confused. But then there were those texts that landed while we were watching him at Pinecrest. I can’t rule him out, and I want him and all his buddies dead just to be safe.”
“For fuck’s sake, Milo,” Holden grouches. “We need to know what’s real or we’re no better than the bad guys. We don’t kill because we think. We kill because we know.”
I hate that he’s right. Because if I’m wrong and Tyler—Brock’s best friend—isn’t Stephen, and doesn’t know who he is, then who the fuck is this guy?
“So we’ve got exactly nothing,” I say.
Holden’s eyes stay on mine for a beat. “We’ve got a dog nobody can place. A rope. A name nobody recognizes. And our girl in a hospital bed.” He turns toward his car. “It’s not nothing. It’s just not enough to get anywhere.”
When he drives off, Micah and I stand in the lot, the warehouse looming behind us, Tyler’s muffled sobs leaking through the walls.
“He called her a lying bitch,” Micah says quietly. He’s looking at his swollen knuckles. Flexing them. “Said she was begging for it.”
“I know.”
“I want to kill him.”
“Me too. But Holden told us to cut him loose.”
Micah looks at me. Behind the calm, behind the steady heartbeat and the measured voice, the need for retribution vibrates like a tuning fork.
“Then let’s make him wish he was dead.”
He slides his mask back on, the skull smile luminous in the moonlight.
I nod and pull my own mask on. We step back into the warehouse, letting the door bang and echo so Tyler feels the thrum of it in his bones. He’s still bent sideways, vomit drooling from his chin, but when he hears my footsteps, he tries to scramble upright, all desperate hope and terror.
“Please,” he whimpers. “I don’t know anything else. I swear to God. Please—”
Micah crosses the distance in two strides. He grabs Tyler by the hair and yanks his head back until the neck strains, cords standing out in high relief.
Then he goes to work.
It’s not random, the way Micah does violence.
It’s not rage. It’s art. He methodically aims for tissue that won’t put Tyler in a hospital or under more scrutiny than a black eye and an ER trip for pain meds.
It’s two open-palmed shots to the ears to fuck up his hearing; one to the throat, low enough that it’ll swell but won’t impact the airway.
He takes a knee to Tyler’s thigh to deaden the muscle, so Tyler can’t run when he gets cut loose.
It’s the throat one that gets me. Sage can’t swallow tonight, so now Tyler can’t either. Micah’s settling the account in matching currency—and I file that where I file everything about Micah I’m not equipped to handle.
I stand and watch, arms folded, letting him have the moment. It’s like watching a really cool dance, what he does. He kneels, whispering words I can’t hear, then lets the knife linger cold on Tyler’s cheekbone, slices.
By the time Micah’s done, Tyler is unconscious, head lolled back, blood seeping from both nostrils, bruising a roadmap of reminders. For a moment Micah just stands over him, chest heaving as he holds the knife in loose, practiced fingers.
“You good?” I ask.
“Yeah.” His voice is flat, toneless, like he’s already left the building. He wipes the knife off on Tyler’s shirt, flicks blood from his knuckles, and steps back.
I get the cleaning kit from the trunk. Rags, bleach, a bottle of saline for the wounds—don’t want our star witness dying of infection—and then I do what I do best.
I erase what we just did.