Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 91423 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91423 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
I don’t even want to begin to unpack that logic.
“You could have shot the people holding him hostage.”
“I did that too, but I needed them to think I didn’t give a fuck about him, and once he was down and bleeding they were too busy being all ‘oh my god’ to notice the bullets that came their way. This wasn’t a prank to fuck with you, dude.”
“If you call me dude again, I might shoot you,” I say.
The amount of trouble my brothers can get themselves into when I am not watching has always been monumental.
“I’m sorry we scared you like that. I should have given you more details, but I think the phones might be bugged, or I don’t know. What I can tell you is that BP’s organization isn’t as gone as we would have liked. There’re more people. There might even be someone above him.”
This is the thing with killing bad guys. There’s always a hydra. You take out one guy, two more worse men appear in his place. Sometimes it’s better to keep the bad guy in place just to stop that happening.
“Ella is on the loose,” I say. “If they found you…”
“Yeah. They might find her. But on the plus side, she’s not with us, so they might think she escaped.”
CHAPTER 17
Ella
I’m enjoying running. It’s almost as thrilling as cardio, in terms of endorphin release. Once I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I started to feel a very specific kind of thrill. The first time I ran, I felt so much guilt. This time it is more like a game, and there is no reason to feel bad. Aiden gave me permission, and I know that at any moment, any of the three of them could show up.
I book a flight to South Korea. I stay in a luxurious Seoul hotel. I indulge myself in all manner of Korean food, attend a dance class at a studio, and watch tourists trail back and forth from the DMZ.
Then I fly to Thailand, lie on a beach in an archipelago so beautiful and so complex I feel as though I could be lost here forever. There are a lot of places on this planet where you could truly disappear, I think. They say it can’t be done, but a fistful of American dollars in a remote enough location and I have a feeling I could become nobody at all.
When I get tired of enjoying myself on beaches and indulging in rich cultural experiences, I go to London for some drizzle and stone. It is there, after a cream tea, that I feel a gun pressed into the small of my back as I am cleanly ushered into a black cab.
“Come with us, please,” an Englishman says.
I do as I am told, because I obviously have very little choice. I could gamble on them not shooting me dead on the street, but these days that seems to be less of an outlandish proposition than it used to be.
I don’t recognize the men who get into the cab with me. There are four of them. One driver, obviously not really a cab driver, one passenger in the front, and two at either side of me in the back. They’ve all got big, broad, heavyset builds.
I wonder if Aiden changed his mind and sent some freelancers after me. I kind of doubt it. But it’s not something I’d entirely put past Leo. He’s smart enough to outsource some hunting. Maybe this is his idea of pageantry. Or maybe he wants vengeance for the cabin incident. He likes to forget that he stuffed me in a car trunk for quite some time before I cuffed him and left him to sober up.
We go to a hotel in a big, impressive building surrounded by other big, impressive buildings. Clearly we are in the part of the city where people have generational wealth. I am ushered indoors to a place that looks like a cross between a hotel and an office. There’s a clinical tidiness to it that makes me wildly uncomfortable, on top of being kidnapped by armed men. It also smells like fish and cucumbers, but that’s a secondary issue.
“Upstairs, please,” one of the men with a gun says. They’re all wearing pretty nice wool coats and scarves. I wonder if they’re military of some kind. Either ex, or wannabe, would be my guess. More likely ex, because they’re quite disciplined. They’ve been stoic and silent this whole time apart from asking me to get in the car and asking me to go up the stairs.
We reach a door with a notably blank name plate. It’s very odd. Someone went to the trouble to screw a brass plaque there, but not to put anything on it. How mysterious.
The guy I am with taps on the door three times.