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None of this adds up.
Corbin can be a loose cannon, but this woman is wearing tights with tiny clouds on them. I’ve never seen anyone as utterly beautiful, or as utterly out of place.
In the thirty-eight years of trauma I call life, I have never before witnessed a scene quite this jarring.
Yeah, no. No cannon is quite this loose. Something is up.
Muttering a swear, I turn my back on the disturbing sight, pull my burner phone out, and dial Corbin. A heavy sigh leaves me as it rings once. Twice.
Then a gunshot answers.
“Yeah, Boss?” Corbin asks, alongside another more distant gunshot.
“What’s going on over there?” I grumble.
“Just practicing.”
Well, that’s one less thing to worry about, I guess. The tension in my shoulders doesn’t ease, though. I mutter, “I found my surprise.”
Corbin’s light tone doesn’t change. “Didja? Get any good information out of him?”
My eyes narrow on a disturbing discoloration near my boot. “Him?”
“I’m told he’s a big guy, almost as big as you. Aster found him snooping around near the heart of The Casa. He thought it was unusual for anyone to make it so far into the base without someone noticing and assumed the guy had to be linked to the Maxim Project. Aster told me he couldn’t get any information with verbal threats, so given your updated rules concerning torture, he asked me to pass that onto your discretion.”
A moment filled with more distant sounds of shots hums into my ear. Deep-seated unsettle permeates my lungs.
“What’s wrong?” Corbin prompts. “Have you gotten a lead on where your parents ended up yet or not?”
“There’s a woman tied up in my basement, Cor.”
“What?” The gunshots grow distant, then they fade entirely as an eerie vacancy consumes the space surrounding my consigliere’s next words. “What do you mean there’s a woman tied up in your basement?”
“Exactly that,” I mutter, and turn back toward the chair. “There’s a…”
My heart drops when the rough, empty wooden seat greets me. I swear.
“Boss?” Corbin asks.
“She—” I swear again. “—disappeared. She—” Before I can finish my thought, fabric rustles behind me. I twist to find piercing, ice blue eyes—no longer blindfolded.
A sheer sensation of danger stabs me in the gut.
“Is everything okay over there?” Corbin asks. When I don’t respond, he says, “Boss?”
The woman mouths the word boss before the dim overhead light sparks in her gaze. She pounces, like a black-footed cat. Gripping my hair, she yanks my head down and crushes her slender legs around my chest as she whirls onto my back.
Her arm locks around my neck as her lips settle near my ear. “Shhh,” she whispers—closing my windpipe with one effective squeeze. “Be a good boy for me, pet.”
My heart seizes as spots invade my vision. Before my brain can compute what’s going on, something pricks my skin. The undeniable sensation of a drug entering my bloodstream makes my stomach plummet.
Corbin’s voice slips through the line, frantic, distant, thinning. Gripping the phone like a lifeline, I lose feeling in my legs and collapse.
While the world darkens, the woman’s soft fingers pry my phone out of my hand. My muscles strain when I tell myself to get up. But before I can manage any headway, the weight of her foot lands between my shoulder blades and pins me to the cold floor.
Blearily, I twist my attention toward her cloud-spattered tights. Leading up, up, up. To a knife strapped beneath the frills of her sky-blue skirt. The detailed inscription on the sheath blurs as more darkness crawls over my eyes.
Another curse whistles through my skull, weakly exiting my lips.
