Page 86 of Corrupted Deception

“Do you want to tell me what exactly it is that’s worth stealing from the teachers’ lounge?” I ask her as I peek inside, making sure the room’s clear.

“I’m not stealing,” she says indignantly as she pushes past me and barges right in. “I’m taking back what’s mine.”

“I did hear a rumor that Mr. Milner is a clepto,” I tease as I follow her into the empty room.

She sticks out her tongue at me as she rummages through stacks of magazines. “Mrs. Leahy caught me reading in class and took my book—because clearly, reading is something that should be discouraged in schools.”

I chuckle as I search through the stack of books and papers next to the coffeemaker. “You do know that if you just waited until class tomorrow, she’d give it back, right?”

She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “It’s my book,” she says emphatically,as if Mrs. Leahy confiscated a sibling or maybe a kidney.

I spy a copy of Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ on the chair in the corner and pick it up. It’s a pristine copy—not a crease in the spine and not a mark on it, just a scrap piece of paper in the middle of it like a makeshift bookmark.

She crosses the room and peeks over my shoulder, then she sighs. “You found it,” she says with more relief than an ordinary book warrants—in my opinion—and a rare smile that lights up her whole face. Fucking priceless.

“Do you still like to read?” I whispered as I slipped inside Mendoza’s front door and headed through the opulent, marble foyer and straight up the spiral staircase.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just curious,” I said, my voice little more than a breath as my footsteps fell silently down the carpeted hallway to a pair of double oak doors. Luis Mendoza lay just beyond it, likely passed out after a Viagra-fueled fuck fest.Perfetta.

“Favorite book?” I asked as I crouched in front of the doors and slipped a slim lock-picking kit from my tactical vest. With deft fingers, I silently manipulated the tumblers.

Charlotte was silent. I thought perhaps she’d decided not to answer.

“’Kindred’,” she whispered.

I smiled to myself as I swung the door open without making a sound.

The lights inside the room were off, but moonlight shone in through a part in the curtains, spilling across the king-size bed beneath it. And sure enough, the old asshole was snoring, fast asleep with two naked blondes laid out across his massive body. The girls were skin and bone—they looked like twigs laid out across a wrinkled trunk—and the track marks down their arms were red and swollen. Combined with the discarded needles that littered the floor, there wasn’t much guesswork necessary to figure out how they’d managed to fuck the ancient prick beneath them without vomiting.

I withdrew the syringe of pentobarbital from my vest as I crept across the room. Not one of the three stirred, not even when I had to lean right across the passed out twigs to reach the rolls of flesh that made up Mendoza’s neck.

The moment I jabbed the tip in, he let out a loud snore and one meaty arm swat out reflexively, but it missed its mark, and I depressed the plunger.

Mendoza’s body jolted, making one of the twigs roll over, flopping back onto the mattress before she nuzzled into his side and settled. But Christ, the girl couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old.

You sick fuck,I seethed silently as I stared at Mendoza for a heartbeat. The drug coursing through his veins would kill him, but it would do it quietly. No pain, no violence. It was an unfitting end for the asshole who trafficked in everything from drugs and guns—which I couldn’t exactly fault him for—to child labor and sex slaves. On the upside, when the teenage girls awoke, it would be less traumatic to find the old man cold and blue-lipped than it would be to find him with his throat slit.

I shook my head and turned away, heading back to the door and closing it quietly behind me.

“Are you done?” Charlotte asked—as if I’d forgotten I was on a time crunch here.

If I was a lesser man, it would have made me jump out of my skin. I wasn’t accustomed to working with a partner.

“Because if I have to come in there and rescue your ass, I’m going to be pissed about it.”

“If you come in here to ‘rescue my ass’,” I whispered under my breath as I strode back toward the stairs, “you won’t be able to sit down on yours for a week.” Which reminded me: “I still intend to paddle your ass for showing up here to begin with.”

She laughed. “Promises, promises.”

“That it is.”

“All right, but I give as good as I get—just remember that.”

I’d reached the top of the stairs when I heard a door at the far end of the house open.

“Fucking deer,” a deep voice spoke in Spanish. “Need to tell the boss it’s time for another hunting expedition.”

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