Page 125 of Killer Kiss

“We’re closed—Hey!” But then her face fell as she took in my expression, the disheveled clothes, and the lump on my head. “Shit, come in. Sit down. What happened?”

“I want to tell you everything, but I don’t have time. I need to know where your brother would take someone to torture them.”

Jezebel’s mouth flattened out into a hard line. “Shit. Not exactly what I was expecting you to say. Who?”

“Augie’s brother.”

She swore beneath her breath. She was the only person I’d talked to about Augie. She knew what he meant to me. I didn’t need to explain his brother was important to me as well.

“Riddick will kill me if I tell you.”

I grabbed her hand, understanding her turmoil. Riddick was the stuff of nightmares. The one person even people like she and I were scared of. Around anyone else, we were unbreakable.

But Riddick didn’t play by the rules. He had no morals. No codes. He’d spent his entire life being trained to kill.

He was a weapon with no control.

I pressed my fingers into her palm. “Banjo has a daughter, Jez. She’s only three. She needs him.”

So does Augie, I mentally added.

I’d screwed that poor man over so many times in the last few weeks, the very least I could do was give him back the one person he loved most.

For a second there, I’d thought I could be another.

A tear slipped down my face. I didn’t even have to fill Jez in on why I was crying. She knew. Because we were the same, me and her. She knew as well as I did there was no happiness in our futures.

Vincent and Scythe were an anomaly because they were special.

But for her and me there was no escape.

Fawn had known it. It was why she’d left the family. I wished I’d been half as smart and gone with her. Hiding out in Spain hadn’t been enough. I was too tethered here. One tug on the string from my mother and I’d been right back here in the thick of it.

For all Fawn appeared to be weak, she was actually the strong one. The one who’d been able to stay away.

Jez rubbed my arm in sympathy. “I’m sorry it ended like this.”

“So am I.” She had no idea how much. My fucking heart felt like it had stopped beating. “But please, Jez. Just tell me where he’d go.”

She thought it over for a moment and then made a face. “Do you know the old hockey rink in Providence?”

I squinted. “Old? I know the new one. That huge industrial thing on the road out to the city, right?”

“There’s an older one behind it. One they haven’t used in a lifetime. People have been campaigning to knock it down for years, but it has so much history attached to it they haven’t been allowed. But it sits empty. Riddick used to take targets out there when we were in our teens. He’d force me to go with him and threaten me if I said I was telling Mom.” She shrugged. “I don’t know where else he’d go. Not his house. He doesn’t like being outdoors when he puts someone to ground. I’ve noticed that. He almost always goes into their houses or workplaces. If Banjo was removed from his house, then Riddick is probably holding him at the old rink. That would be my bet anyway.”

I nodded and ran for the door, praying beneath my breath. “Please be playing with your catch.”

The new ice rink parking lot had probably been filled with cars earlier in the day. Families towing their kids around with those stabilizers shaped like penguins. Teenagers hanging out with friends. Maybe groups of college-aged kids who played on hockey teams.

But when I pulled in, there wasn’t a car in sight. The entire place was deserted, a quiet, desolate feeling to it, with the woods thick behind the two rectangular buildings.

The building in front was a huge monstrosity of a thing, with slick silver sides and a flashy “Providence Ice Facility” logo above black glass doors that marked the entrance. It was a multimillion-dollar venue the government had splashed a lot of money on to bring tourism to the area.

It was nothing like the dingy old building behind it. It had been abandoned for as long as I could remember, well before they’d built the new one in its place.

I steered my car in that direction. If there’d been a road here once, it had been demolished when they’d built the new building. The only way to get back to it was to walk across a lumpy field. Or drive your car over it.

I jolted up and down, praying I wouldn’t get stuck in one of the ruts. My headlights lit up the decaying building, and a shiver ran down my spine. It was the sort of place people steered clear of because it might be haunted.

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