Page 8 of Savage

King turned on his heel and stormed out of the room, and I looked at Benoit, who let out the breath he’d been holding.

“Good thing he’s not the ‘off with his head’ kind of King or yours would’ve been rolling,mon cher.”

No doubt. But I wasn’t about to let it bother me. It wasn’t the first time I’d been on King’s shitlist, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

“I just love getting my ass chewed out because of someone else’s fuck-up. Thanks for that.”

I rounded back on Alessio. “That’s what you’re worried about?Myballs just got busted becauseyoudragged your damn feet, asshole.”

He snorted. “If your balls were busted you’d be crying on the floor, so quit your bitchin’—I don’t have time for it. I have to get to work erasing your…indiscretions.”

He spun back to the screens, and when he pressed a button on his keyboard and the feed came back up, a still of Boy Scout appeared front and center and I said, “Wait a second.”

Alessio glanced back at me, his hand frozen above his keyboard.

“Can you find out who that is?”

“Why do you care? He’s fine, you saved him, there’s no reason to?—”

“Just find out who the fuck it is, would you?” I cocked my head and said the one thing I knew would spur Alessio into action. “Unless you don’t think youcan…”

His eyes darkened at those fighting words, and just as I’d predicted, he cracked his knuckles and turned back to his keyboard.

“You’ll know within the hour.”

I smirked and turned to leave, but as I made it through the entrance, I heard Benoit chuckle. “But he didn’t notice how attractive the man was…”

4

COOPER

THE COMMUTE TOOK forever. By the time I made it to the Lower East Side I was hobbling, my left knee screaming with every step I took. Not like I could’ve braced myself better for the fall—I had been too busy coming to terms with the fact that I was about to die.

Once again, I looked around me, hoping like hell no one had followed. I had a feeling paranoia was going to be my friend for a long, long time.

As I reached what was now “home,” I stopped in front of the barbershop that took up the bottom floor of the tenement building I lived in and sighed. Of course the only place I’d found in my price range was a tiny-ass fifth-floor walkup. The square footage was about the same as my closet back in Colorado, but it didn’t matter. It was about location here, not space, and this was where I needed to be.

Tipping my head back, I sucked in a deep breath of air, holding it in so the cold burned my lungs.

I didn’t even know how to begin to process what had happened tonight. If I could. It was beyond anything I’d ever experienced, and being a journalist had taken me down someshady roads in the past. All I could hope was that I’d gotten a few good shots of their faces, so I could?—

Wait. Shit.There was no point in finding out their identities now or continuing to follow them, was there? The man in the mask had taken care of every last one of them, and judging by the way none of them had been moving by the time I left the alley, I could guess what that meant.

My heart began to pound faster as the reality of the situation hit.

Oh God.Had I really been a witness to murder?

No,I thought, forcing my eyes open.No, he just incapacitated them so they wouldn’t killme.

Though, truth be told, I didn’t give two shits if they died. Maybe that was callous, but those men were the scum of the earth. They were killing people.

They were killing…mypeople.

I swallowed hard and tried not to think about that, at least not until I was in my apartment. As I reached for my key, I briefly considered attempting to climb the fire escape so I could avoid the confrontation that was about to happen, but the hope that maybe my landlord had taken a strong sleeping pill to knock her ass out all night had me heading for the door instead.

As I slipped inside, I could hear the sound of late night infomercials coming from her door and prayed that meant she wouldn’t hear the creak of the stairs as I headed up?—

“Skulking around in the middle of the night. I knew you were bad news.”

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