Page 1 of Hunt

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What happened to the baby?” I asked Judith as she leaned against my door and swept her jacket back to reveal a Glock on her hip after escorting me to my room.

“There was no baby,” she exhaled impatiently. “The whole thing was a setup.”

“Why?” I questioned. “Are you still in the police force? Is that badge you flash about actually valid?”

“Yes,” she answered bluntly, and I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. Silence fell, and I felt utterly perplexed, betrayed, and furious.

“So, you deliberately persuaded me to come to this university to be closer to the Kaisers, my enemies, the men who probably want me dead,” I seethed. “I don’t understand. If you wanted someone to be a spy in the club, then why not choose an undercover…” Then, a horrifying thought occurred to me. “You want me as bait? You knew they’d figure out eventually who I was. That’s it, isn’t it? The plan was to have me walk into the line of fire…hoping they’d kill me. Because if they killed me, you could arrest Mikael since I worked in his club. Is that it? Am I warm?”

“I will be calling you twice daily, and you will answer and update me on what is happening in Savile Gentlemen’s Club under Mikael Kaiser's iron fist,” she explained. “Life goes on. Go to class. Do your normal activities. Nothing changes except that you will be watched and followed twenty-four-seven, so don’t bother trying to run. And don’t bother trying to communicate with Sergeant Tindale.”

“So, I’m right. You want me to be the meat you lay in the trap for the lions?” I challenged her, but she wasn’t admitting to it, not that she needed to because it was pretty damn obvious.

She glanced down the hallway as heavy footsteps approached and stood away from the doorway to greet the incoming person. Then she returned with my phone in her hand, which they had taken from me after I called Sergeant Tindale. “Here,” she said, handing it back to me.

“What have you done to it?” I asked precariously as I took the phone from her poisonous claws.

Planted a device to track your calls and text messages. The SIM card and your number haven’t changed, so you won’t need to inform your contacts,” she explained as suppressed rage boiled inside me, so close to exploding. But there was no point. She won. I lost. By being the loser, I became her puppet, allowing her to get what she wanted.

“That’s fine. Nothing is stopping me from buying a new phone to make my personal calls,” I protested.

She shot me a warning look. “Don’t even bother trying.”

“I don’t want you listening to my private romantic conversations,” I proclaimed firmly. Then it occurred to me that my romantic conversations were with the masked man, the one and only Gunner Kaiser, my foster brother. Oh hell, what have I done?

As soon as it was revealed that I was attending the same college as Gunner, I knew it was him. I could see it in his eyes, his movements, and the sound of his voice. Like his father, he had grown tall and broad, as I had known he would. Wearing his grief on his skin in the form of ink and razor cuts into his skin. I wonder how many cuts he made after I hurt him because I knew I’d hurt him badly.

But how long did I have to keep up the charade of pretending I didn’t know who the man behind the mask was? This war isn’t over until Mikael is arrested, or maybe she has another plan for him. She seemed to be still working for the police, so I was confused about how Judith could get away with what she was expecting me to do.

“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice,” she pointed out flippantly, clarifying that she didn’t care about my personal life and was more interested in particular damming evidence on the Big Boss. “Now, off you go to class like normal, and I will call you later today.”

“Fine,” I sighed, my stomach twisting in nervousness and frustration.

It will be difficult going to work and pretending that I wasn’t aware that it was owned and operated by the men who want to kill me. And how was I supposed to carry on as usual with Gunner? He was practically my brother.

The fatigue was wearing me down, but I needed to devise a plan to escape my cage. I planned to leave Gothenburg in the middle of the night.

“Do you think the Kaisers know who you are?” she asked just before leaving.

“I don’t know,” I lied because I suspected Gunner knew who I was, or perhaps he wore the ski mask because he was suspicious of me. Then it occurred to me that Ronan Byrne had turned up at the forest pool, so maybe he knew who I was and had followed me. However, that didn’t make sense because the Kaiser family didn’t do the dirty work; they hired someone else.

“I’ll let you go to class,” she said flatly and left as I listened to their two sets of footprints walk down the hallway's wooden floorboards.

My middle finger shot up as she left, too chickenshit to do that to her face, although I was so enraged with nothing left to lose that it was going to be hard to be civil to her. Bitch.

My face dropped into my hands, and I rocked back and forth as I sat on the edge of the bed, trying to figure out how I could get out of this. I couldn’t see an option. If I ran, they’d find me. I know it’s a prominent place, but I have limited financial resources, so I had to live on the streets…I couldn’t see a way out of this except to do what she said and hope like hell the Kaiser didn’t kill me. But who was I kidding…of course, they’d kill me and throw my body into the lake or bury me alive in a wasteland.

The first time around, dirty cops persuaded me to make up a story about Mikael shooting Lars, Gunner’s father, through constant harassment and threats against me and my biological mother’s life. They put pressure on them by calling her a trailer trash drug addict and saying that it wouldn’t matter if she didn’t wake up at all.

The Kaisers paid for her to go to rehab, and she’d be clean for a couple of weeks before falling off the wagon. They bought her a lovely little house out of the drug-peddling slums, but she always found her way back there again.

When my mom overdosed and wound up in the hospital, then back to rehab, the dirty cops told me that they had organized her death, and she was lucky to dodge that bullet, and next time she won’t be so fortunate.

Then, when that didn’t work, they pulled the King’s gambit, the ultimate move. The swines produced footage of a little boy, aged 3, who they said was my half-brother, and my mother sold him to a loving family for drug money, so he was thriving and doing well, but could all change. They threatened to arrest those concerned, take the boy from the family, and place him in foster care.

I didn’t believe them, so I rang my mom, who confirmed it. She had a baby boy and sold him to a loving family, apparently. The dirty cops prompted me to call her, and I remember her words as they slurred down the line, “Please don’t visit him because he doesn’t know you exist. That was the deal. They paid me money, and you and I cut all ties with him.”

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