Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 72122 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72122 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
My eyes slowly snapped open, and I came face-to-face with Verity, who was staring at me like I was some interesting science project she was trying to figure out.
“You’re awake?”
I nodded, a yawn stealing my breath as I moved my arms up high over my head and stretched my back and legs.
“Yeah,” I said gruffly in between yawns. “What are you waking me up so early for?”
She pointed to the side table where my phone started to go off, and I sighed.
“Big Papa,” I mumbled.
Reaching to the desk, I picked it up and answered it, listening to what Big Papa had to say.
“Is he dead?” I asked the moment he told me why he was calling.
“We found him in an alley right outside the pub,” Big Papa answered. “Not dead…yet. But he will be soon, if all the blood loss was any indication.”
I cursed.
“You get anything out of him?”
I crossed my fingers like a child but was disappointed.
“His throat was sliced when we got to him,” Big Papa answered. “It was obvious that we were meant to find him before he was dead. There was a note pinned to the body with a fucking knife dedicating the kill to you. The anonymous 911 caller also called and told us exactly where to find him.”
“Did you trace the call?”
“Yes,” Big Papa snorted. “Was traced back to a pay phone outside the pub.”
I grunted.
“What else is there?”
He didn’t pretend to hold anything back, but that was also because I was a knowledgeable source of information, as well as a good resource. I’d been an instructor for going on eight years now at the police academy, and I’d been a resource utilized by MPD for six of them.
“The academy was vandalized,” he answered. “Nothing too bad, but there’s graffiti, as well as damage to the outside gates and cruisers.”
“You think it’s related?” I assumed.
“Yes,” he answered. “But not because there’s any evidence that there is, it’s just a gut instinct.”
“Did you tap into the video surveillance?”
“Yes,” he sighed. “Nothing at all. Every single camera angle from both the store where he was found and at the academy was clean. Not one single person was caught on it.”
I growled in frustration.
Of course they were able to avoid them.
That spoke of professionalism, not petty crime to me.
It didn’t matter, though. I knew exactly who it was that left that particular calling card.
Elais fucking Beckett.
“Why do you say they’re connected?” I feigned confusion.
The less people that knew this man was in town, the better.
“Nothing concrete, just a feeling,” he answered. “I just wanted to give you a head’s up, anyway. Didn’t want to surprise you.”
You did enough, I thought morosely. Just knowing that man is in the same town as me is enough to set my hair on end…and that’s quite a feat seeing as I don’t have much in the way of fucking hair.
Beckett’s fault again.
Six years ago, when I got out of the Navy, I’d hooked up with a black ops group that was—or so I thought at the time—in the business of rescuing and recovering children who were kidnapped and being held hostage all over the world.
What it actually turned out to be, though, was my inability to see anything bad in an old man who looked and acted like my grandfather. The same fucking man that my grandfather had introduced me to and who had been like a second grandfather to me for the entirety of my life.
The same man that my father warned me about when I first started working for him.
I’d trusted my grandfather, though, and it’d been the one and only time he was ever wrong. But, Jesus Christ, was it a doozy.
Why? Because I’d killed a man. Although that man hadn’t been innocent by any stretch of the imagination, he did have the right to be tried for his crimes in the United States, and I’d robbed him of that right.
Five minutes later, I hung up the phone, letting it drop down onto the bed at my side.
“You okay?” She pressed a kiss to my pec, right above my nipple, and my dick stirred.
I was a sick mother fucker.
Not even ten minutes ago, Big Papa had told me the gruesome details of a man’s death, and now I was hard.
Not to mention that there was a man here in the city who would like nothing more than to see me dead just like my grandparents.
The same man who was sent to prison because of me—and whose release I apparently had not been told about.
But did that stop my dick from getting hard as she trailed kisses down my sternum?
Fuck no.
Yeah, definitely going to hell.
As I rolled over and pinned her underneath my body, I delighted in the gasp that left her throat. And I didn’t let the outside world—nor my conscience—intervene for the next thirty minutes as I made it my mission to forget anything and everything while in turn I memorized Verity’s body.