Page 76 of Locke

From my peripheral, I caught her nose wrinkling as she looked me over. I hadn’t bathed, or changed my clothes, or even cooked dinner.

“You gonna make one of those tinfoil hats?” she joked dryly.

“This isn’t funny,” I retorted, peering out again. A quick peek. One he would not see so easily if he was down there. “I am trying to protect us, Syl.”

Without pressing me, she went to bed early, and I was pretty certain she wanted to get away from me. Whatever. I’d cook up some acceptable bullshit later to justify my erratic behaviour.

Then I had entered the kitchen. I had plugged my phone into the wall earlier, a little disturbed that it was already on half charge. Which meant he had charged it the month he had it. But my passcode was still in place, so he couldn’t have gone into it, right?

Paranoid, I went through my entire phone, but it was exactly how I had left it.

Because Sylvia was useless giving me information on Locke, I spent the night combing through the internet instead, reading everything I could about him. There weren’t bucketloads of information on Locke, but his name popped up enough times. He owned most of downtown Blackwater. He was responsible for giving downtown a facelift, turning it from cesspit to classy. All things that everyone already knew.

He was also a prominent defence lawyer with an impressive win streak. Notorious for letting criminals go, or for giving them tamer sentences. Like Conor Thames for example. That crazy dude flattened a guy’s head into a pancake and had only served eight years.

However, lately Locke had gone underground. He didn’t take on any new cases. He was hardly seen around Blackwater. No one talked about it. No one asked about it. Because word on the street was Locke had eyes and ears everywhere.

There were still whispers, though. Short sentences you couldn’t escape here and there. After a while, you could put the sentences together to formulate a picture.

The picture I got was he was extremely dangerous (no shit, Sherlock, he killed two people in one night). Before the club, I didn’t know what made him that way, and even now I wondered why exactly he blew that loving family man away in such a cold manner.

Word on the street was he left a trail of bodies behind, and they seemed to always be the rich and elite he targeted. It was no wonder many of these men fled Blackwater—they must have felt like targets themselves.

Locke was scary, and nobody wanted to fuck with him for a reason. He was a giant mystery, and there was not one damn picture of him on the internet!

To make matters even more convoluted, there were a few news articles. Not from recent years. They dated back more than two decades ago, and even then they said very little. But what I gathered was he had gone missing for over a month, like Sylvia had said. When he emerged from the unknown, he had been very malnourished and on the brink of death. The articles were bizarrely vague. But a word kept popping up in them. A word that sent a chill down my spine again and again: Hole.

He had been in a hole.

And if I really wanted to think about it, it didn’t take much to link the men he had killed to that hole.

"Why did you kill him?"

"Because he killed me first."

Was Ronald in the hole with him?

And the perverted fat man in the trunk, the one that talked about little boys, did he touch Max when he was a little boy in that hole?

These thoughts consumed me and disturbed me.

What was wrong with Blackwater? I kept thinking in some other reality maybe my dad didn’t end up going murder-suicide on us. Maybe I was still with my mom and sister in the city and Aurora was still doing ballet and that fuckhead was behind bars and not let out on fucking parole because they had asshole scum lawyers like Locke on their side. Imagine that kind of world.

As I stood in front of the law firm now, Aurora flashed through my head, and I whispered to her, “Sis, you know, at this rate, I might be seeing you soon.”

I’d looked at our photos last night too before I’d passed out—

I went still, brows furrowing because I passed out with that phone against my chest and yet it was on the nightstand, plugged in.

My breaths picked up.

CrazyamIcrazycrazycrazy—

No, I was not crazy.

He had returned to me last night, and although I couldn’t be certain he was in the bedroom with me, I had a strange feeling he was. I had woken up soaking wet. And sticky! I was goddamn adamant he had touched me—

And what the fuck, now my pussy was throbbing all over again.

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