Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 78647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Everything was going dark. Fuzzy. I tried to fight it, tried to stay alert, but I couldn’t. I was going to die here. In front of my apartment.
Suddenly, I heard the man swear again and he was gone.
Then everything went black.
CHAPTER TWO
Cal
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Addison Beck, the FBI agent on our ass about the priest murders, had spent some time undercover. Details on her personal life, aside from her social security number, had taken a lot longer to find than it should have. It had been buried deep and that piqued my interest.
I pushed back from the desk and looked up at each of the five monitors with intimate details of Agent Beck’s life. She’d grown up in a small town just outside of Boston called Malden. Her mom worked as a secretary at the local high school and her father was curiously absent. So far. There was something about the woman I didn’t trust. I knew Ma and Jasper, and even Virgil and Kat would say it would be stupid to be anything other than suspicious of so-called law people, but this was different.
Her heat, her anger toward the Ashby name, felt personal.
I might not have the business skills like my oldest brother Jasper or the muscles and bloodlust of Virgil and none of us had Kat’s brains, but I had my own skill set that I used to keep the family safe.
I dug and dug into every fucking corner of the internet to find what I could on Agent Beck even though I had another woman on my mind. Bonnie fucking Byrne with the flaming red hair was also on my mind and it wasn’t even that sweet body of hers, dammit.
Maisie had explained how she got eighty-sixed from her own house and Sadie even asked why she wasn’t here with us.
Pride, I guessed. Too good?
I was worried about her even though I knew I shouldn’t be. Hell, I had no right to be. She was nothing to me, not even someone I’d call a friend.
If only that shit mattered to me.
Thankfully my phone chose that moment to chime beside the keyboard, pulling me from thoughts and bringing me back to the here and now. “This is Cal.”
“It’s Colby. Your girl Bonnie was here. Left in a hurry but looking a little too wobbly to be safe. Thought you might want to know.”
I ignored the ‘your girl’ part of his statement and focused on what he said. “Bonnie was wobbly?” Bonnie hadn’t gotten through even one glass of wine and barely a few sips of whiskey at every meal we shared. “Drunk or drugged?”
“Tipsy for most of the night, but the guy I chased off could have drugged her, hoping to make her more compliant later.” I didn’t fault Colby for his casual tone. Ma had put him there for his good looks, the way his eyes caught everything in the room, and the glee he took beating the shit out of people who deserved it. “She left a couple minutes ago but she probably shouldn’t be out there alone.”
“Why didn’t you stop her?”
“Dude, I stopped him to give her time to get away, but security said she left on foot. How the fuck could I know that man?”
“You’re right. Thanks for the call.” Speak of the redheaded devil and she will appear, at least in name.
Bonnie had been through the shitter lately, so I couldn’t really fault her for wanting to get shit-faced and ignore her problems. But she was a damn fool, determined to deal with being disowned by her parents and left with almost nothing, all on her own. She wouldn’t even let Maisie help, never mind an Ashby.
Stupid girl.
Even though Bonnie was a snob and a half, I grabbed my fob, shoved my feet in my sneakers and jumped in my car. She’d been staying somewhere downtown and the fact that I hadn’t been able to find out where meant she was staying at some cheap shithole that wasn’t safe. Inside or outside.
This time of night, or morning, the streets weren’t quiet but they weren’t packed with people either. Glitz wasn’t Vegas, it was where people came to stay and party when they wanted Vegas fun without the risk. Or so they thought.
The streets behind Bullets & Beer led toward downtown. I drove slowly, hoping like hell I wouldn’t find anything. I hoped when I found her, she would be the pissed off, stuck up pain in the ass she always was.
When I found her because there was no other fucking option.
Just before a row of hostels and apartment buildings that rented rooms by the week, I saw a body lying very still on the concrete. The feet wore heels and I slammed on the brakes, jumping out of the car before it came to a complete stop.