Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 104165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
“You don’t want to go to war with me, Quinnlynn,” I warn. “You will lose, and it will be painful for you.”
She pulls out her phone from her boot and pushes a few buttons. “You’re a smug bastard. You forget. I know your weaknesses.”
Is she really calling the police? I’m not bluffing. Nothing will make me give Madison up.
“Hey, what’s up?” comes my sister’s perky voice over the phone that Quinn put on speaker. She’s breathing hard like she just went for a jog. In the background, I hear a familiar rhythmic thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.
“Jesus, Moira,” I cover my face with my hand even though I can only hear her, not see her. “Are you fucking somebody right now? How many times do I have to tell you not to answer the phone while you’re fucking somebody!”
“Domhnall, hi!” she says, completely unphased as the thwacking continues. “So Quinn found you. Good! We were worried about Brooke when you disappeared with her all the sudden. We just wanted to check in with her after the devirginizing. How’d it go?”
Quinn tilts her head at me, glare still in full force as she holds out the phone in my direction. Power move, using my sister against me.
“Everything’s fine here. Isn’t it, Quinn?”
She stabs the mute button. “You’ll let me see her?”
“I’ll let you in and we’ll have a chat,” I amend, teeth gritted as I sift through various plans in my head.
She hits unmute. “Everything’s great. Chat later, babe. Bye.”
“Oh good,” Moira says, her voice a little higher pitched, “because I’m about to co—”
I hit the red end call button on my sister who’s got no boundaries.
Then I step back and gesture for Quinn to step inside.
“Start explaining,” she demands.
We sit in my den and jaw clenched, I do. I talk. I pace. Then I talk some more.
I explain who Madison was to me. And her father. It’s difficult for some of it to make it past my lips. I’ve kept all of it under lock and key inside me for so long.
Quinn sits stone-faced through my whole story. She only lets out an explosive breath at the end. “Well fuck. And you’re sure she’s the same woman?”
“Positive.”
“But she’s lost her memory.”
I tilt my head at Quinn, as if to say, seriously?
“A woman who fucked me over half a world away just coincidentally ends up at a hospital that sends her to the shelter where my sister works? Come on. I don’t think so. You don’t know this family. But I do. They’re sociopaths. Convincing sociopaths. They draw you in. Weren’t you listening? She’s the bait, and she’s so, so good at what she does. She was a genius at it all those years ago and I can only imagine how she’s perfected her skills over the last decade. She’s here because she wants something.”
“What if it’s just her dad? Did you consider that? Maybe he brought her here.”
“He’s dead,” I spit. “The devil took him back to hell two years ago. I stood on his grave and took a good piss.”
I never stopped looking for them. Two years ago I thought I’d finally found them when he popped on one of my personally designed internet-crawl systems. I knew his dark web signatures intimately—it was one of the reasons my anti-spyware software became so successful so quickly. I had intimate, cutting-edge knowledge of exactly how criminals exploited loopholes in systems.
Hunting him was one of the reasons I began building it in the first place. But I’d find him only for them to have recently skipped town. It was how I found his other victims. Always victims in his wake, usually with my M.O.
He finally changed things up and went off the map, until two years ago when he popped up again.
I thought I finally had him.
Turned out I only had his headless corpse. It washed up on a Bulgarian bank of the Danube. I felt some satisfaction imagining that all his evil shite finally caught up with him in the end and someone took an ax to the evil bastard. He was a John Doe, but I knew it was him by the tattoo of the angel Gabriel on his chest. I’d never mistake that fucking tattoo.
He was buried in a pauper’s grave outside of Budapest. Too nice an end for such a vicious motherfucker, but still, one chapter closed.
The other stayed elusively open until she strutted onto that stage tonight.
“She’s playing games again. I’m just better equipped this time. And I’m not letting her out of my sight.”
I’ve been leaning against the wall, but I push my shoulders back and stand up tall, deciding on a plan to buy me some time.
Quinn’s an unusual mind and one of my best project leads. I’d hate to lose her. Time to pretend to be affable-guy.