Page 71 of Virtue & Vengeance

19

ZANDER

THE MAGIC EIGHT MOTEL was the biggest piece of shit in Vegas. As I made my way across the parking lot and toward the room where the shady fuck was hopefully still staying, rats scattered behind the building and around the overflowing dumpster.

Room one-sixty-two was in the last building in the line of buildings, and the parking lot out front had a broken street light, leaving the place dark and swathed in shadows.

Pulling my gun out of the holster beneath my jacket, I didn’t cover it as my shoes scrapped across the broken asphalt.

Once again, I was met with a door that was slightly ajar.

That was never a good thing.

As I stepped up to the door, a familiar scent reached my nostrils.

Blood.

I paused, scared for one of the few times in my life of what I might see on the other side of the door.

The door was sticky against my fingertips as I pressed them to it and pushed. The door creaked when it opened, and then I was met with a mess that left me both relieved and shaken.

Relieved that Eden wasn’t the mangled body on the floor, but shaken because whoever did this, probably had Eden with them.

The shady fucker from the hotel lobby was the one dead, the side of his head blown off and his eyes still open in shock. Blood spatter covered the wall at his side.

I panicked, moving past his body and into the room as I searched for Eden.

“Eden!” I called out. “Angel, are you in here?”

I looked on the floors around the bed before rushing to the bathroom. The door was closed, and the light was on inside, giving me a tiny bit of hope, but that feeling dissolved when I opened the door and found it empty.

She wasn’t there.

She might never have been there at all.

I turned, ready to get the hell out of the room before someone else came along, and when I did my eyes landed on a chair in the corner with pieces of rope hanging from the slats on the back.

Someone had been tied to that chair.

Eden.

My angel.

I moved across the room and touched the ropes gently as if I was touching her. She had been tied to the chair. Of that I was certain. It was as if I could still sense her there.

However, the chair was empty, and she was gone, which could either be a good thing, or really fucking bad thing considering the dead body lying on the floor by the door.

“Fuck!” I roared, knocking the chair across the room.

Feeling helpless for the first time in my entire life, I closed my fist and turned, sending my fist through the wall.

I would find her, and once I did, I would never let her out of my sight again.

She was mine.

---