Page 34 of Callum

“Weird.” I move back to the pool of blood on the other side of the room, feeling far more confident in my cleaning abilities now that I’m not dealing with the actual body.

I ignore the small part of me that wishes he would help with this, too.

No, Rosalind. You don’t need him anymore.

—

The woman on the bed wakes with a deep gasp.

Callum is on her in a moment, soothing her panicked breaths. “Hey, hey, hey. You’re alright,” he mumbles, brushing the hair from her forehead as he tries to look at her wild eyes. “Calm down. We’re not going to hurt you.”

We’re not?

“Wh-what?” Her eyes bounce from Callum to me and back again, the fear pouring off her in waves. “What do you want?”

Does the burglar typically end up asking the homeowner what they want? That feels backward.

“I just want to ask you some questions. Do you think you can handle that?” Her entire body begins to shake, but she nods her head at Callum’s question.

“Great,” he smiles at her, and I swear I see her relax a bit. What the fuck is that? He shot her in the leg, killed her companion, chased her down, and tied her up in this dark ass room, and she’s looking at him like he’s her fucking savior.

Is the man magic? Does he have some sort of superpower over women? He should come with a fucking warning sign.

Beware: Looking him directly in the eye may cause temporary insanity.

Mostly because he looks at you like you’re his sole purpose for living,

even when he’s telling you that he hopes you die a slow and painful death.

It’s a bit too wordy for a pin, but I bet it would fit on a t-shirt.

“Let’s start with something easy, yeah?” She nods again, her trembling growing less violent by the second. “What’s your name?”

“Lista.” She mumbles the words so softly I almost miss it. Turns out, it would have been fine if I had missed it because the moment the word passed her lips, about five hundred others followed it.

“Well, my legal name is Calista Day Leeds, but everyone just calls me Lista. That’s probably because my mother was also Calista Day Leeds. She wasn’t born Calista Day Leeds, of course. She was Calista Day Hostetler, but then she married my dad. His name is Derek, and he’s a dickhead. Derek Marvin Leeds,” she adds as if either of us had asked.

“Alright, Lista,” Callum looks at me over his shoulder, his face clearly asking what the fuck? “Who do you work for?”

This question apparently also requires a thousand-word essay in response.

“I work for the GiGi’s. Well, sort of. I’m a Girl, you know—one of the prostitutes who works for them. I work the south side of Chandler, or at least, I did. I don’t think they’re going to let me work anymore. I told Rita we shouldn’t have done this. I told her it was stupid and we would lose our jobs, or worse. I told her,” Lista sucks in a shaky breath, her eyes falling on the body-shaped sheet wrapped up near the door. “I fucking told her not to trust Ginetta. Rita said she knew Ginetta, though. She said Ginetta was a good person, and she only treated you bad if you treated her bad. I’m-I’m-I’m,” Lista hiccups through the thick sobs now clogging her throat, and Callum pats her kindly on the shoulder until she can catch her breath again.

“I’ve been using behind Ginetta’s back. Sometimes, the guys don’t pay me in cash. Sometimes, when I meet them under the North Nail Bridge, they pay me in pills. I didn’t see the harm ‘cause Ginetta doesn’t take cuts off those deals. Probably because she doesn’t know about them, but now she knows about me, and she’ll start looking. She’ll start paying attention. She’ll see me under that bridge, and she’ll kill me. So, I had to do it. I had to do what Rita wanted so I didn’t get killed. I tried to talk her out of it, but she already went to Ginetta. I didn’t have a choice.”

Her sobs grow louder than her words, and I lose track of the plot for a moment. It seems, generally speaking, like Rita might have been the brains of this operation. By the time Callum gets Lista calmed back down, the woman is telling him all about Rita’s plan to get them inducted into the GiGi’s. They were going to find some evidence that I was here. That’s all. They didn’t plan to kill Callum with the guns they brought. Just like they didn’t intend to kidnap me with duct tape and the fucking burlap sack that Callum found in Rita’s coat pocket.

It was simply a fact-finding mission.

I call bullshit.

Nine: Clichés

CALLUM

Unsurprisingly, Grant beats me to the meeting spot, his blacked-out Ducati Diavel parked against the forest’s edge. I’m not sure how a man who lives thirty minutes west of Forest Falls managed to beat me to the eastern border, but I curse my bad luck as I slam the Range Rover into Park.

“Why are you always late?” Grant’s voice travels through the air the moment I’m out of the car, and I have to hold back a sigh.

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