Page 1 of Black Hearts

1

Alex

Pacing backand forth across the room, I kept a keen eye on the black and white clock that hung to the right, willing the hands to freeze, willing time itself to stop for just a while. Just for me. But they kept on ticking, the minutes crawling by, endlessly mocking me in their passage.

Twelve hours. That’s how long it had been since I lost Celeste.

Twelve long, agonizing hours, never knowing if she was okay, but knowing for sure she was in serious trouble.

I sat down on the end of the bed, putting my head in my hands. Black thoughts and heavy emotions were sprinting through my mind, fractured and confused, spiraling together in a grim dance. Out of control. Just like my fucking life.

I was usually steadfastly in control, but somewhere along the line, I’d lost every remnant of it, and every shred of self-respect had gone too. It was my own fault. All my fucking fault. Guilt hammered constantly at my brain, making my guts twist and my head throb.

I shouldn’t have gone to work yesterday, shouldn’t have left Celeste alone. I should’ve taken leave from the hospital the second I took her, so I could spend every moment watching over her and keeping her safe while we slowly worked on eliminating the Circle.

But I was arrogant, filled with hubris. I thought I could do it all—have her, have my job, and handle all my other shit at the same time. I thought setting up all the security measures around the relatively rural location would ensure it all went smoothly; ensure her safety even when I was miles and miles away.

It was nothing but a placebo effect, making me feel okay about it when in actual fact, it achieved fucking nothing, because by the time I heard the alarm bells going off, Celeste was already in trouble. I was thirty fucking miles off when those men broke in, and still fifteen miles off when she got in the car and left with them.

My fucking fault.I let her slip right through my fingers.

After going through all the possibilities, I had a good idea of who had her right now. There were three main prospects for who might’ve tracked her down and taken her with them—her friends, the cops, or the Circle.

I’d eliminated her friends right off the bat. From observing her all those years, I knew she preferred to keep female friends and didn’t hang around many guys, and the two people I’d seen on the security footage were assuredly men. On top of that, her friends wouldn’t have sent some sort of elite unit with four black cars to try and catch me once I arrived home, and there had definitely been that many cars swarming around my property last night, chasing me around the dark backroads until I managed to lose them. To add to that, even if her friends had tracked her down, they would’ve informed the police instead of trying to handle it themselves.

So that brought us to the second possibility—the cops or even the FBI. I figured this was the most likely option at first for three main reasons. One, the guys who took Celeste looked like cops. Even though the footage was grainy and I couldn’t make out their faces properly, just the way they were dressed and the way they behaved made them seem like law enforcement.

Two, it made sense that cops might’ve been looking for either Celeste or me. She was a missing person, and I also figured they might’ve finally found some evidence to tie me to all the Circle murders. Maybe I wasn’t careful enough when I dumped the last body; maybe I was too distracted by thoughts of Celeste. I might’ve accidentally left a print or been spotted by someone, even though I was sure I’d been just as vigilant and cautious as usual. If that was the case, and they suspected me, of course they’d raid my properties.

Thirdly, there was the men’s license plate. It was hard to make out in the footage, but if I paused it at just the right second, I could see part of it as they pulled out of the frame with Celeste in the back. It was a government plate, which likely meant police or FBI.

However, I’d eventually knocked that out as a possibility too. If law enforcement actually thought I was a suspect for anything major like the goddamned Heartbreaker murders, they’d already have me under arrest. They would’ve come to the hospital yesterday and pulled me right out of that damn surgery to read me my rights and restrain me, and in the situation that I wasn’t there, it would be all over the news that a manhunt was underway. My name and picture would be splashed everywhere—TV, radio, newspapers.

But it wasn’t. When I turned the radio on earlier to listen to the latest crime updates, all I’d heard was something about a home invasion in East Liberty and a double shooting in Homewood before the reporter moved on to the weather. There was no warning to the public about any sort of manhunt.

Also, when I called the hospital an hour ago to inform them I needed to take emergency leave due to some ‘family complications’, the HR woman I spoke to sounded mostly calm and relaxed, maybe a little tired given the early hour. Certainly not the demeanor of a woman who knew she was speaking to a dangerous wanted criminal. She told me that Zoe Leigh (the scrub nurse) had already gossiped to a few people that I ran out of the place last night citing some sort of family emergency, and so they’d been expecting me to cancel all my upcoming consults and surgeries anyway.

The hospital was my employer, so if I was in any trouble, the cops would’ve told them. Obviously, they hadn’t—as far as the hospital staff were aware, the only problem I currently had was my fictional family emergency.

On top of all that, I drove back out of the city after that phone call and parked about two miles away from my property. There was just enough light in the pale purple and gold dawn sky for me to fly a drone over my property and take some photos and video recordings of what was going on. As I predicted, there were men tearing the place apart to look for me or god knows what else, and they damn well weren’t cops. Their cars were unmarked, the men weren’t in any sort of uniform, and they didn’t seem to be following any sort of proper protocol.

I also checked out my other two investment properties—a condo downtown and a two-story place in Shadyside. It was the same deal there. Men swarming around searching, but no law enforcement presence or protocol to be seen.

That left only one option. The fucking Circle.

They had Celeste.

The thought made bile rise in my throat, with an accompanying feeling of dread and heaviness in my chest. If it’d been the cops who took her, then at least she’d have a chance at staying safe, provided she finally heeded all my past warnings and was careful to escape the clutches of those sick Circle bastards when they came for her. Even if I went to prison for the rest of my life once the cops caught up with me, she’d still have that chance, as small as it may be given the power and influence the Circle had. But that wasn’t the case. They had her, not the police, and if I didn’t locate her in time, she had no chance at all.

With a weary sigh, I looked around my motel room again. It was one of those seedy places with a faded paintjob and cheap furnishings where middle management guys with beer guts brought hookers to bang behind their wives’ backs. Or hookers themselves brought their johns, paying for crappy, dimly-lit rooms by the hour. I didn’t even want to know what might show up on the pillows, duvet, threadbare carpet and walls if I ran a black light over the room.

The parking lot was littered with trash and weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt, and I was willing to bet at least a grand that a building inspector had been bribed to not close the damn place down during their last review.

Despite all that, the place took cash without me needing to put down a credit card at the front desk, and right now, that was all that mattered. I needed a safe place to hide out; one which couldn’t be tracked. That meant cash only, no IDs of any kind presented to anyone else.

Even though the cops clearly didn’t have me on their radar, I still had to lie low, because the Circle obviously knew who I was now. If they tracked me, caught up with me, and killed me, I’d lose any chance of rescuing Celeste. And so I’d ditched my cell phone on the edge of a road somewhere and replaced it with a burner, affixed fake plates to the back of my car (I kept them in the back in case of an emergency situation just like this), and rented the motel room. My usual killing disguise was also in place—the dark blond wig and green contact lenses.

As I tried to think of my next move, my mind kept straying, and my heart thudded painfully in my chest, haunted by memories of Celeste and everything I knew her to be. She was so beautiful, so innocent and yet so wild. So strong. Even though she’d been dealt a rough card in her early life, she never stopped persevering, and when her bank account dwindled down to mere double digits some months, she still found it within her wide-open heart to give something to that little cat shelter she loved, all because she saw it as more important to help other innocent souls before she helped herself.

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