Authors: Shelly Laurenston
Lyle had never thought the police would show up at his office door asking about Frankie Whitlan, of all people. There had been many layers between Lyle and Frankie since the man had gone on the run, and since Lyle did nothing to attract attention, he never thought anyone would link them together.
In the end, though, it was Lyle’s fault. He never should have agreed to make sure those packages from Whitlan made it to Allison. But he had, even though Allison had wanted nothing to do with her father. A man who’d abandoned her before she’d even begun to crawl.
Still, Allison would never talk to the police, so there must have been another way they’d found out. Had Lindow’s business finally been busted by the police? Had he turned rat in order to protect himself? Lyle didn’t know, and he was afraid to look into it. Afraid the cops would be able to make a case against him based solely on his actions. What did his lawyer call it . . . evidence of a guilty mind?
But Lyle wouldn’t tell any of that to his wife. His time as an associate of Whitlan’s was done now that the police had showed up at his office door, and he wasn’t about to involve her.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” His wife smiled, and together they got out of the car and headed into their spacious home.
Lyle went to the kitchen, in desperate need of a scotch. He was just pouring it when he heard his wife call out, “Lyle!”
Setting his drink down, Lyle rushed down the hall. He found his wife standing in the laundry room and staring.
“What is it?” he asked, coming up next to her.
“Look at that.” She pointed at a hole chewed into the wall. “Rats?” she whispered. “Do we have rats?”
Lyle crouched by the hole. It was huge, bigger than a rat would make. But it could be a raccoon or some other pest.
“Hopefully not, but—”
“Here’s another.” His gaze followed where his wife pointed. And yes, there was another hole.
“Were these here yesterday?”
“No. Besides, Lilah would have said something.” Lilah was their maid, but she was off today. “She was doing laundry all day yesterday.”
Lyle stood and decided to walk through the house. As he and his wife looked, they found more holes. In the living room, the kitchen, the playroom, the closets, the bathrooms. Not only low in the wall but in the ceilings.
“What the—”
“Dad!” one of his children screamed out.
“Dad!”
Terrified his children had stumbled into a rat’s nest, Lyle ran up the stairs, only to crash into his children running down. They didn’t even stop. They just charged past him, screaming and moving faster than he’d ever seen.
Lyle, once he’d steadied himself, continued walking up the stairs until he reached the top. That was where he stopped, his mouth dropping open, as a six-foot-long snake slithered from his eldest daughter’s room and right into his son’s. The snake hissed as it moved by, but then Lyle realized that he was hearing more than one hiss. He was hearing . . . several.
He began backing up as several snakes fell from a hole in the ceiling and plopped onto the floor in a slithering, hissing ball of scales.
He screamed in horror and charged down the stairs, hustling his terrified wife out the door. He got his family into the car and raced down their driveway.
Once away from the house and checked into a nice, local hotel, Lyle used his cell phone to contact the only exterminator in their small upper-class town. The woman who answered the phone promised to have someone out to his house the next day, but Lyle demanded “now” and promised to pay double the usual fee.
Leaving his family in the safety of the hotel, Lyle went back to the house and waited inside his car.
Several men showed up. Short, powerfully built men. The oldest-looking one walked over.
“You have snakes, yes?” An accent. Russian, maybe? Definitely Eastern European.
“Yes. I need you to do whatever you have to and get them out of there. All of them.”
“Won’t be cheap. Snake removal very expensive.”
Immigrants,
Lyle thought. Always looking to shake that last buck from people who shouldn’t have to worry about getting snakes cleaned out of their homes.
“Yes. Whatever. Just do it.”
“But first you pay.”
Lyle was no fool. He wasn’t about to play this game with these people. “I’ll pay when you clean this up.”
“We clean this up when you tell us how we find Frankie Whitlan.”
Lyle blinked, took a step back. “What?”
“Frankie Whitlan. You contact him yourself? Or he only contacts you?”
Lyle took another step back, but one of the other burly men was now standing behind him. Somehow they’d managed to surround him.
“I don’t under—”
“Do you talk to him yourself? Or does he call
you
?”
“I don’t know any Frankie Whitlan.”
“Don’t lie, rich man. You get gifts from Whitlan and have them delivered to Whitlan’s pretty little daughter?”
“Look, I don’t know who you people are, but—”
“Just tell us. Then we clean your house and we go. No money needed. Just information.
Truthful
information.”
“Or,” the man behind him said, the younger man’s English perfect, if low-class, “the next batch of snakes will be poisonous . . . and in your bed.”
Lyle looked at the men surrounding him. They all had dark,
dark
eyes. Eyes that watched him, waited for him to do something stupid.
Protecting Frankie Whitlan wasn’t worth all this. It would
never
would be worth this.
“I haven’t been in contact with Whitlan for years. Not directly. He doesn’t call me, and I don’t call him.” The men waited, so Lyle continued. “But I help with . . . managing his money in some foreign accounts.”
“Who?” the older man pushed. “Who do you talk to about Whitlan’s money?”
“Rob . . . Rob Yardley. That’s who I work with. Whoever his connections are, they talk right to Whitlan themselves.”
“Good, rich man. Very good. Now . . . you go back to hotel and to your pretty wife and lovely children. You stay there for night. By tomorrow . . . everything will be done. Clean like whistle.” Several of the men walked into the house; Lyle had left the door open when he’d fled. “And,” the older man said, “you will keep mouth shut. You won’t warn Yardley or anyone else. And you say nothing to police, yes? Because that would make us very angry. Not something you want, rich man.”
As if to punctuate that, one of the men walked out of the house, a snake wrapped around his fist. That was disturbing enough, but then Lyle realized that the head of the snake was gone, the body just limp, and there was blood covering the lower half of the man’s face. And the man was . . . chewing.
Lyle felt bile working its way up the back of his throat, his hand slapping over his mouth.
The older man laughed. “Go, rich man. Go to your nice family. You stay out of this, and we won’t be back, yes? And that make you happy. Never to see the likes of us again?” He laughed again, slapped Lyle on the back, which almost had Lyle vomiting right there. “Go, and be happy this will be worst of it for you.”
Lyle did. He went back to his car, his wife and children at the hotel, and he tried—for the rest of his life—to forget the last thing he’d heard before he’d closed the car door and driven away from the house he was already planning to sell.
The older man yelling out, “Come, all my beautiful sons! It is time for us to
feed
!”
C
HAPTER
26
V
ic had changed clothes. Not into anything too fancy. Just his black jeans, black boots, black sweater, and his knee-length black leather jacket. He figured that after the bout, he could take Livy out for dinner. Again, nothing too fancy, but nice.
He walked down the stairs and Livy’s cousin Jake came in the front door. He caught sight of Vic and stopped. “Where you off to?”
“What makes you think I’m going anywhere?”
“You shaved.”
“Really? I shave and that means I’m going out?”
“Yes.”
“God, you’re just like your cousin.”
Jake smiled. “She is me. I am her. Are you taking her out tonight?”
“She has a derby bout. If she’s up to it after, I thought—”
“Derby?” Shen suddenly barreled out of the living room. “You’re going to a roller derby bout?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come, or do I have to stay here and keep an eye on the Jean-Louis Parkers?”
“Well, since you completely freaked them out the last time I asked you to do that—”
“Why did I freak them out? I didn’t do anything.”
“You stared at them for three hours straight until they were forced to go to bed.”
“You said keep an eye on them . . . that’s what I did. It’s not my fault they’re sensitive jackals.”
“I’m not going out tonight,” Jake said. “I’ll make sure they’re fine.”
Vic, satisfied with that since he knew how much Livy trusted her cousin, asked, “Any word yet about Lyle Bennett?”
“Yeah.” Jake yawned, scratched his neck. “We got a name from him. It sounded vaguely fancy British.”
“Do you remember the name?”
The badger thought a moment, then replied, “Yardley. Rob Yardley. Any guy named Rob Yardley shouldn’t be too hard to break.”
“No,” Vic said quickly. “Don’t do anything yet.”
“You know him?”
“I know of him. He’s a gambler.”
“That’s even better.”
“No. It’s not. Don’t do anything until you hear back from me. Understand?”
Jake studied Vic a moment, nodded. “Okay.”
Vic pointed toward the living room. “And you’ll watch . . .”
“It’s covered. Go. Have a good time.”
Vic and Shen walked out of the house. Shen waited until they were halfway down the block before he asked, “Who the hell is Rob Yardley?”
“A gambler who used to be under the protection of Grigori Volkov.”
Shen stopped walking. “Grigori? He’s under the protection of
Grigori
?”
“Calm down.”
“Calm down? Didn’t you say that Livy’s family thinks a shifter must be involved?”
“It can’t be Grigori.”
“Why? Because you like him? Because you went to his daughter’s wedding in Moscow? Because your mother calls him her little
konfetka
?”
“My mother calls everyone her little
konfetka
. It just means ‘sweetie.’ ”
“All I’m saying is, I hope you’re being smart about this. I know you like Grigori, Vic, but he’s still a gangster.”
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
“That doesn’t sound like you’re being smart.”
“What do you want me to do? Let the Kowalskis meet with him? That can only end badly, and you know it. I’ll deal with it. Tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Shen agreed. “But I really hope you know what you’re doing.”
Livy walked into the locker room to put on her gear and get ready for that evening’s bout. A few of her teammates called out greetings, some muttered condolences for her father. And Livy simply nodded to all of it and moved on until she reached her locker.
Thankfully, no one on her team expected more from her. Olivia didn’t eat, sleep, and dream roller derby like most of these girls. For her, it was simply a great way to work off aggression legally. At least legally among shifters. She couldn’t get away with half the shit she’d done if she were on a full-human derby team.
The love of the sport, though, was the same for both full-humans and shifters. These girls bought their own gear, did all their own team marketing, and paid for all travel out of their own pocket. They didn’t get even a tenth of the trappings that the bigger sports teams received, and yet they didn’t care. Livy liked that, too. It cut down on the egos considerably when
no one
was signing million-dollar contracts.
Blayne and Gwen walked in and were greeted enthusiastically by the rest of the team. They’d both become team co-captains last year when Pop-A-Cherry, the old team captain, got pregnant. Once the liger’s child was older, she’d probably get right back out on the track, but for now, she was working from home. She did still manage the team’s website, T-shirt marketing, and fund-raising, though.
Gwen, a tigon and Blayne’s best friend, stopped by Livy. “What are you doing here?”
“Blayne wanted me at tonight’s bout.”
“She did? Why?”
“Because she invited Vic Barinov, whom she seems to have discovered I’ve been fucking, and wants to get us married and popping out babies as soon as possible.”
“And she thinks all that will happen after he sees
you
playing derby?”
Livy looked over at Gwen . . . smirked.
Gwen’s eyes crossed. “I really hate when you two start doing this shit.” She walked to her locker. “I really,
really
hate it.”
And yet Livy enjoyed it all so much.
As promised, Blayne had a ticket waiting for Vic at the box office. And when he mentioned he needed to buy one for a friend, they gave him one more. For free.
Confused, Vic asked, “Don’t I have to pay for this extra ticket?”
The fox behind the window shook his head. “There are seats available in that section.”
What did that have to do with anything? “Yeah, but . . . don’t I still have to pay for it?”
The fox chuckled. “No one wants to sit in that section. Trust me.”
Unsure what was going on, Vic walked back to a waiting Shen. He handed him his ticket.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing. They didn’t charge me anything.”
“That’s cool, huh?”
“Yeah. I guess. Unless they’re really shitty seats.”
“Jeez, Vic. You really need to learn to relax. Shitty seats. Great seats. Who cares?”
Shen was right. Vic was overthinking things.
They entered one of the smaller coliseums, which was packed with shifters of every breed and species, including hybrids.
Considering they’d gotten free tickets, Vic expected their seats to be way up in the rafters. But those seats were already filled with people.
“We’re down here,” Shen said, pointing.
“Are you sure?”