Chapter 107
-Hailey-
The door swung inward, revealing a long hallway full of shadows
Cool This was fun. Not at all like a horror movie.
The air inside was stale and cold, and I was immediately hit with the familiar tangy scent of blood.
I hated that it had become familiar to me.
My stomach flipped.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice sounded thin and reedy in the massive space. Somehow, it didn’t echo. The emptiness seemed to absorb it. “I came alone, like you told me to… Where
she?”
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For a few long seconds, there was nothing. Just the sound of my own ragged breathing and the creak of the floorboards under my feet.
Then, it came
Stella.
–
a muffled, frantic sound. A shout, gagged by tape.
It came from a room to the right, around a corner where the hallway deepened into darkness.
Every instinct screamed at me to run away. Get the hell out of this tomb. Instead, I tightened my grip on the pistol, with my finger resting outside the trigger guard.
I took a step, then another. My
boots creaked across the floor.
I rounded the corner, letting the gun
lead the way.
It turned out to be a dining room. The weak light from the setting sun filtered through dirty windows, illuminating floating dust… and a scene straight out of a nightmare.
Stella was there, just like in the picture, zip–tied to a wooden chair. Her wrists were raw and angry where she’d struggled.
The same silver duct tape was slapped across her mouth, and her eyes… her eyes were the same. Furious. Alive. They locked onto mine the second I entered, wide and pleading.
And then my gaze slid away from her to the other occupant of the room.
A man was seated across the table from her. He was big, wearing a gray suit that was now stained a dark, ugly red across the chest. The blood was still wet. Fresh. His head was tilted back against the chair’s high back, and his mouth was hanging open.
His throat was slit straight across. A trail of blood had seeped from the corner of his mouth and dried in a rusty trickle down his chin. His eyes were wide open, milky and unseeing, fixed on some point on the ceiling.
On the table directly in front of him were the pliers and the tooth.
My brain tried to assemble the pieces. The kidnapped, zip–tied woman. The dead man. The tooth. The otherwise empty house. It made no sense.
My gun hand wavered, and the barrel dipped toward the floor as my mind tried to catch
up
with
my eyes.
Stella made another frantic, muffled sound behind the tape, jerking her head toward me. it. The dead person wasn’t going anywhere. The living one needed me.
The movement snapped me out of
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13:06 Fri, Jan 23 GDD
Chapter 107
“Okay.” I breathed. “Okay, Stella. I’m here.”
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vouchers
1 kept the gun pointed at the floor and moved around the table, staring at the dead man like he might come alive and get me. His stillness was more menacing than any movement could have been.
Up close, I could see the stubble on his chin, a tattoo crawling up his neck. He used to be a person. Now he was a prop in Anatoly’s sick play.
I stopped next to Stella’s chair. My free hand went to her hair in brief, comforting touch. “I’m gonna take the tape off. It’s going to hurt.”
She nodded vigorously. Her shoulders were trembling. I hooked a finger under the edge of the tape, took a quick breath, and ripped it off in one fast pull.
She gasped as it came away, sucking in a huge ragged breath. Her lips were swollen, and the skin around them was angry and red.
“F**king CHRIST that hurts,” she rasped. She worked her jaw, wincing.
I vaguely heard voices in my ear, but I was too focused on the scene in front of me to register them.
“Are you hurt? Are you shot?” I asked, scanning her for injuries or blood. I didn’t find any.
“No, no, I’m okay. They didn’t hurt me.” Her eyes flicked toward the corpse. “Can’t say the same for him.”
My own eyes were drawn back to him. The gaping wound in his neck. The pliers. “Stella… what happened here? Who is that?”
A full–body shudder wracked her frame. “There were five of them. Big Russian dudes. All in suits. They kept asking me weird questions about you and Logan. I told them to go fuck themselves.” A flicker of her old defiance was back. “The one in charge… he thought that was funny.”
She took another shaky breath. “He wrote something on a slip of paper and made me hold it up while he took a picture with my phone. I assumed he was sending it to you.”
I nodded. She continued.
“Then he got the pliers out. I thought they were for me.” Her voice cracked. “I fucking braced for it. But he walked over to *him*.” She nodded at the dead man. “His own guy. Said something in Russian. The big guy started begging and crying. The boss just… grabbed his jaw, shoved the pliers in, and… and yanked.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “The sound… God, the sound. Then the boss took a picture of the tooth. Sent it. Then he just… pulled out a knife. Didn’t even say anything. Just put it to his throat and fileted him like a fucking fish.”
She flinched. “Then he said something to the others in Russian, and they all just… walked out. Left me here with him. He took my phone.”
The story landed hard. It was so much colder, so much more calculated, than anything I had imagined. He didn’t summon me here to kidnap me. He was never going to hurt Stella.
The fucker was toying with me.
He’d had one of his own men mutilated and executed just to send a message. Hell, he might’ve been the one holding the knife for all I knew.
The horror of it. This man had Logan in his crosshairs. This was the sick mind we were up against.
The gun felt like a stage prop in my hand now. Heavy and useless in my hand. I put the safety back on and tucked it back into my waistband.
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13:06 Fri, Jan 23 GDD
Chapter 107
I looked at the open doorway I’d come through, and at the dark Ballway beyond. The silence was pressing in again.
Suddenly, I remembered Talon and River. Were they out there waiting? Or had they wandered into their own trap?
I cleared my throat, about to say Talon’s name through the coms when they both appeared in the doorway on the far side of the room. I hadn’t even heard them enter the house.
Without a word, Talon set his gun on the table and started rummaging through the dead man’s pockets, River pulled out a pocket knife and carefully cut through the zip–ties on Stella’s wrists and ankles.
Then my phone started buzzing in my pocket.
AD
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