Page 56 of Target Me
His ass hit the table with an audible thump, and we both sat quietly, lost in our own thoughts.
“He ordered a hit on me?” I said at last, the words shredding my throat as I forced them out.
The first part of the exchange was damning. It alluded to me getting too loud and ordered the recipient to take me out. Whoever was on the other end of the exchange refused, at which point the threat had been made about failure to comply.
Bear blinked, coming back from wherever his mind had gone with a curse as he pulled up his cell, scrolling furiously.
I knew he had found whatever he was looking for when the blood drained from his face. He snatched up the papers again, scanning the document before his eyes lost focus, his brow furrowed into a scowl that looked nothing like his usual cheerful self.
“We need to go,” he said suddenly, pushing up from the desk and striding out of the room.
“What do you mean, we have to go? Where? Bear! Stop!”
“Avery’s in danger.”
That got me moving.
We slid into my truck, and I peeled out of the drive, hanging a left and then a right to head toward Damon’s house.
“Talk to me. Now.”
“Do you remember after the last deployment how Damon lost his cell on the last night? We were all convinced that the hooker he’d picked up had stolen it off him. He got a burner cell for about a month before he bothered to replace the old one. This was his number.”
I glanced at the papers he shook at me before turning my attention back to the road.
“So… Damon was supposed to kill me? That seems really random, dude.”
“No. It makes sense. After Adrien died, when Damon was drinking every day, he kept talking about shitty things catching up with him. He said he’d done things I couldn’t even imagine. What if this was the shit he meant?”
“You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”
“Do I? It’s right here in black and white, dude. And if I’m right, we need to get to Avery right now. Fuck. If he’s done something to her, it’s all my fault.”
“Calm down. You’re freaking me out.”
I threw the wheel hard to the left, taking the last corner into Damon’s street much faster than I should have. We pulled up to the curb outside his house in a screech of tires and all but ran to the front door. Bear’s panic was feeding my own, and as much as I didn’t want to believe Damon was capable of the shit we’d been going through, I wasn’t about to bet Avery’s life on it.
The inside of the house was dark, and no one answered our knock on the door. They should have been here. Damon had said the plan was movies for the day. I picked my way through the garden and peered through the window into the sitting room. I could see a glass of juice on the coffee table, pieces of something glinting on the floor and…
“Blood.” My heart leaped in my chest, trying to break loose and confirm for itself the blood didn’t belong to my girl. My hen.
“Fuck this,” Bear muttered, stomping back to the front door and smashing it with a powerful kick.
“Damon! Where the fuck are you?” he called, moving through the house.
“Clear,” he called a moment later.
The world stopped rotating. For a fraction of a moment, I felt the earth fall away from my feet, and I spun through an infinite abyss. The grief I’d felt when I learned of Lana’s death grasped my throat, squeezing tight enough to crush the life out of me.
A heavy blow landed on my cheek, knocking me out of my shock and very nearly off my feet.
“Get it together, man. Avery is not Lana. She hasn’t been blown apart, and she sure as shit isn’t dead yet. This is about the General. He’ll want to gloat before he kills her.”
Bear was right. We’d known from the start this was about the General. We could find out the details after we got Avery out safely. Wandering around to the back of the house, I noticed a green van parked on the grass.
“Shit. That van has been watching us for days. How did I not know it was Damon’s?”
“He didn’t want you to know. Come on. Isn’t there a boat shed by the river down there? We went fishing out there last summer.”
