Slow Burn (15 page)

It was the fifth time my phone had rung. I was snug against Griffin’s bare chest in bed, my skin gloriously just as bare, and he felt like hot, liquid marble against me. I didn’t want to move.

“Can you turn that off or something?” Griffin grumbled.

“Mmph.” With effort, I rolled away from him and slid out of bed. It was cold outside of the covers. I missed being close to him already.

My legs felt shaky, probably because of the things Griffin had been doing to me before we went to sleep. I smiled wickedly at the thought. I managed to make it out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Where had I left my phone?

I wasn’t sure if I was completely satisfied with his answer to the question I’d posed to him. I said that I wanted to touch him, and he basically responded by going down on me? It had been amazingly wonderful, don’t get me wrong. I shivered at the thought of it. So good.

But the thing was, I could tell that he was only trying to distract me.

I was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t horribly wounded or something. I wasn’t sure how that could have happened, considering he’d been given the serum and all of that, but I did remember what he explained to me about cutting off fingers....

I shivered again, but this time not out of pleasure. That couldn’t even happen, though, could it? I mean...

Plus, I’d felt his... you know, boy parts. We slept all jammed up against each other, and he sort of poked me sometimes. In the leg or the thigh. It seemed like everything was functioning okay down there.

He wasn’t broken.

At least, I didn’t think so.

He’d said something was wrong with him.

I wished he’d just tell me. Even if he was horribly wounded, I wouldn’t care. If that was the way things were, fine. I was sure there had to be something that we could do to make him feel good, and I wanted to do it.

I banged into my recliner. “Ouch.” The thing hadn’t moved hadn’t it? No, it was because it was dark.

My purse was out here somewhere, and my phone was in it. By this time, it had stopped ringing, but I needed to turn it off so that it wouldn’t ring and bother me again.

Maybe it was on the couch.

Blindly, I felt along the wall until I got to the couch. I blinked hard, trying to make my eyes see better in the dark.

No use. I couldn’t see much at all.

I felt along the couch.

Ah. Jackpot. Purse. I reached inside, found my phone, and pushed the button to turn it off.

Then I made my way down the hallway and climbed back into bed.

“Who was it?” Griffin asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t look. I just turned it off.” I snuggled close.

He wrapped his arms around me. “That’s weird, though, isn’t it? I mean, no one calls you except Stacey. And who would call that many times in a row?”

Was it weird? I was tired. I didn’t care. “If it’s Stacey, I’ll talk to her in the morning.”

Griffin shifted next to me, sitting up. “You need to check, doll.”

I moaned. “Why? I’m comfy now.”

“I’m thinking about it, and it’s weird. No one calls that many times in a row if it’s not urgent. And not very many people even have your phone number.”

I sat up too. “Fine.” I got out of bed again.

He did too. He went into the living room ahead of me, turning on the light.

When I got down the hallway, he handed me my phone.

“Why are we doing this?” I said, flopping down on the couch.

“Because it’s better to be cautious.”

I turned the phone on. “Six missed calls,” it said. I clicked on the notification.

They were all from Stacey. “It’s Stacey, all right.”

“Call her back,” said Griffin.

I selected her number and dialed.

It rang.

“Is she answering?” said Griffin.

And rang.

“I’d be talking if she was answering.”

And rang.

He rubbed his head. “Man...”

And went to voicemail. I hung up. “She didn’t answer.”

“Did she leave you messages?”

I checked. “Yeah. Three.”

“Play them,” he said. “Put them on speaker phone.”

“Do you really think something bad happened?”

“Play the messages.”

I did. I put the phone on speaker and set it on my coffee table.

“You have three new messages,” said my phone. “First new message.”

Stacey’s voice came over the speaker. She was a little high-pitched. “Hey, um, Leigh, it’s me. I’m freaked out. Jack and I heard something outside. I think someone might be trying to get in the house. Jack won’t let me call the police. You know how he is about that stuff. Do you think Griffin might come over? He’s a trained bodyguard and all, and Jack trusts him. You heard Jack earlier. He’s a weakling.” She paused. “Okay, well, call me back when you get this.”

I looked at Griffin. “It could be nothing, right? She just heard a noise. Right?”

He started to pace in front of the coffee table.

“Next new message,” said the phone.

Stacey again. Her voice was different now. Even higher. And it sounded like she was crying. “Leigh, there’s a guy here, and he’s making me call you, and he says if you don’t come he’s going to...” She broke off into sobs. “He’s got a gun, Leigh.”

Chapter Nine

I clutched the arm of my couch, listening as Stacey’s voice kept going. “He says you have to come. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I put a hand over my mouth.

Griffin stopped pacing.

“Next new message,” said my phone.

This time there was only noise. Then there was a muffled voice. Stacey. “She’s not picking up. It keeps going to voicemail. I can’t make her pick up the phone.” A long pause, a distorted deep voice in the background. Stacey screaming. “Oh God! Please don’t—”

“That was your last new message,” said the phone. “Check erased messages? Press four.”

Griffin and I both stared at the phone, neither of us saying anything.

“Check erased messages? Press four. If you are finished, you may hang up.”

I jammed my finger on the end button. I suddenly knew why this had happened. “Benton.”

“What?” said Griffon.

“Benton,” I said. “My dealer. The one asking me all the weird questions before that guy shot me on the way home from Morgantown?”

“Yeah?”

“He was at the party. He asked me if I lived there.” I slid my hands into my hair, grabbed handfuls of it and tugged. “This is all my fault.”

Griffin held up a hand. “Doll, don’t do that. That doesn’t help anything.”

I stood up off the couch. “Benton must be in contact with Op Wraith. He saw me, he told them where I was, and they sent people to Stacey’s house and they hurt her.” I dashed back the hall. I needed to get dressed. “We have to go there.”

“That’s stupid,” said Griffin. “We know they’re there. They have the advantage.”

“Stupid?” I demanded. “It’s Stacey and Jack.” I wriggled into a pair of jeans and threw on a shirt.

Griffin stood in the doorway to the bedroom. “Doll, we might get there, and they could be...”

“What if they aren’t?” I said. “What if we can save them?”

He fished a shirt off the floor. “If we’re going in there, you are going to listen to everything that I say. You’re going to do what I tell you, and you aren’t going to ask questions. You got that?” He pulled the shirt over his head.

“I got it.”

“Go find the guns and make sure they’re loaded.”

“All of them?” I said.

“Yes, all of them.”

Griffin kept guns hidden all over the apartment. Inside the couch, behind the toilet, under the bed. I began gathering them up. The ammunition was in the kitchen. Once I had all the guns, I sat on the couch, loading each of them with shaking hands.

Griffin sat down next to me, handing me a pair of sneakers and a roll of socks. “I’ve got this now. You’re going to need good shoes.”

“Okay,” I said. I started to pull them on. Everything seemed overly bright for some reason, kind of washed out. And Griffin’s voice was a little bit far away. It sounded like he was talking to me through a tunnel. I couldn’t quite grasp the fact that something was happening to Stacey. Not Stacey. She didn’t deserve that. She was my best friend, and this was what my friendship had brought her.

“They wouldn’t hurt them,” I said with conviction. “They’re keeping them alive to lure me there. When we get there, Stacey and Jack will be fine.” I turned to Griffin. “Don’t you think?”

“Sure do, doll,” he said, loading the last gun. But he sounded distracted, and I wasn’t sure he’d even been listening to me.

I followed him out of my apartment. We made our way down the rickety stairs. They groaned under our weight.

We got in the car, Griffin in the driver’s seat. He handed me a gun. “Keep your eye out, okay? They could be anywhere.”

I swallowed, struggling to remember how he’d taught me to hold it.

He pulled the car out of the parking lot. We drove in silence. Stacey and Jack lived about a ten-minute drive away. It was still dark outside, but it was the wee hours of the morning, so it was silent and still. There wasn’t even a breeze ruffling the new spring leaves on the trees.

I gripped the gun tightly, gazing out into the black early morning. The moon hung low in the sky, tired and bloated. The stars looked faded as well.

Griffin parked the car on the side of the road about a quarter mile away from Stacey and Jack’s house. He got out and motioned for me to do so as well. “Walk behind me, doll, and try to stay quiet.”

Stacey and Jack’s house was in the middle of the woods. It was on a hill (of course) and the driveway wound down the main road. We climbed up the hill, into the woods. We were going to walk down on the house from the opposite direction.

The woods were difficult to navigate in the dark. There were sharp branches sticking out every which way, clinging barbs that stuck to my clothes, keeping me from moving forward until I detangled them.

“Quiet, doll,” said Griffin. He seemed to move like a cat, silent and fluid. And it wasn’t fair, because he was so much bigger than I was.

I did my best to go more quietly.

We crossed over a tiny stream. It gleamed through the branches, reflecting the night sky in a speckled pattern. My shoes got wet.

Griffin’s didn’t.

Shortly after the stream, we came to a rusty barbed wire fence stretching through the woods. It was probably an old property marker. This all used to be farmland a long time ago. This might have been the edge of some farmer’s land.

It might have still been the edge of farmland. It wasn’t like there weren’t still farms around here.

Griffin halted when he saw it. He carefully stepped on the bottom line of wire, making sure to avoid the barbs and lifted the top wire, making a gaping hole. “Climb through.”

I surveyed the gap. “I don’t know.” It didn’t look big enough to fit through. I was afraid of getting punctured by the rusty barbs.

“There’s no other way unless we turn around,” he said. “And we’ve lost a lot of time as it is.”

I bent down and crawled through the fence. My hair got stuck on it, but not bad. I yanked it free.

“You grab it,” said Griffin.

I replaced his foot with my own and his hand with mine, holding it open for him.

He managed to get through without touching the fence at all.

Then he was in front of me again, leading me through the woods.

Within the next few minutes, we could see the lights of the house through the trees. There was a clearing that the house sat in, a yard of about an acre that surrounded it. The land was hilly and rocky.

Griffin crept up to the edge of the woods, kneeling behind a tree trunk. I did the same thing.

All the lights in the house were still on. It had a wraparound porch, and it sat on a garage. We could see that there were still leftover cans of beer and overflowing ashtrays littering the porch from the party.

There was a stack of crumpled cans on top of their grill.

At the other side of the porch, I could see half of their porch swing.

It wasn’t moving.

Everything was still. Quiet.

If it weren’t for all the lights being on, it would seem normal.

But the house was glowing. The indoor lights on, the outdoor lights on, casting a bright yellow circle out onto the lawn.

Griffin swore. “There’s no cover. No way to get up there without being seen.”

I couldn’t believe that they’d gone to sleep. Not with all those lights on.

But if they were awake, then why weren’t they making any noise? It was so quiet out here, we would hear the murmur of conversation if anyone was talking.

“Do you know where their breaker box is?” Griffin asked me.

“I think in the garage,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. He pointed. “We’re going to walk around the house, down the hill, to the left. Stay out of sight, stay back, stay quiet. Keep your gun out. Take the safety off. You understand?”

I nodded.

Griffin went first.

I followed him, gingerly picking my way through the underbrush.

He seemed to be going more slowly too. It was important that they didn’t hear us.

When we were right across from the door to the garage, Griffin halted. He pointed to a tree trunk. “Squat down right there,” he whispered.

I did.

“I’m going into the garage, and I’m turning off the lights. When you see the lights go out, you run for the door. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. Suddenly, I felt very cold. It was as if I hadn’t noticed the chilly night air before. But my voice shook when I spoke, and I realized that I was shivering. The air was pressing in on me, like cold water.

“Safety off?”

I nodded.

Griffin planted a quick kiss on my forehead. “Hold it together for me, doll.” And then he was gone, darting across the lawn so quickly I barely saw him move.

I waited.

How long would it take for him to find the breaker box and turn the lights out?

I heard the sound of a car on the road, in the distance.

A car? This late? Was it Op Wraith, returning to see if we’d shown up?

I saw the headlights then. They cut into the woods, illuminating me where I hid behind the tree trunk.