Total pages in book: 66
Estimated words: 61042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
I didn’t know where I was going. I told myself I needed air and that was true enough. But my feet kept moving outward, away from the inner ring of warehouses where the apartments were, toward the perimeter where the fence ran along the property line. I wanted to see the edges of this place. I wanted to know how thick the walls were between me and Iron.
A voice carried on the cold air and I stopped walking. I knew that voice. I’d been listening to it for the better part of twenty-four hours. I tucked myself against the back wall of a low storage shed and waited. The voice came again, closer, a quiet exchange of words I couldn’t quite make out. Then Griffin stepped into the wash of one of the flood lights, and a step behind him Inferno. The two of them moved along the fence line at a measured pace.
Griffin walked a few steps ahead. Inferno flanked him on the left shoulder. They didn’t speak again, whatever they had been saying when I first heard them had ended, and now they walked in silence.
I pressed flatter to the wall of the shed. I felt the cold metal through the hoodie and shivered. I knew I should go back. Griffin had told me to rest, and I was out here in the dark watching him with what was likely “club business.” If he caught me, I had no doubt any discussion we’d have wouldn’t be pleasant. But I didn’t move. For some reason I couldn’t explain, even to myself, I had to see what happened next. I told myself I needed to understand what kind of men I had agreed to stand behind. The truth lay a little to the side of that. I wanted to see Griffin when he didn’t know I was watching.
They turned the corner and the flood lights caught the side of Griffin’s face for a moment. I saw the set of his jaw, the way his mouth held a hard, flat line. He looked more like the man who’d put a bullet in a Steel Serpents rider without hesitating.
The fence rattled, a single sharp clank, metal on metal like something with some weight to it settling against chain-link. Griffin and Inferno froze in the same instant.
I looked up and saw a man, mid-climb, one leg already hooked over the top rail of the fence, the other still planted against the chain-link below. He’d managed to cut away a section of razor wire so he could use his small, wiry frame to slip through the narrow opening. A knife rode in a sheath on the intruder’s thigh. I couldn’t quite read the back of his cut at this distance, but I didn’t really need to. The way Griffin’s shoulders settled told me everything.
The man saw Griffin and Inferno, too. He scrambled, trying to swing his leg back over to the outside. Unfortunately, he’d already committed his weight to climb over the fence to land inside the compound. He fell but still scrambled to his feet.
Griffin moved faster than a man his size had any right to move. He reached down and grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair in his right hand and yanked. The man scrambled up with a yelp. I hadn’t moved, still standing with my back against the nearby warehouse.
Inferno spoke quietly into his phone while Griffin stood over the smaller man. Then he turned his head and looked back at the fence the intruder had come over, up and down the line in both directions, likely checking for a second climber.
“Hands,” Griffin said. His voice carried just far enough for me to catch it. It didn’t have any heat in it. It sounded like a man asking for the salt.
The man raised his hands and laced them behind his head. Griffin frisked the guy from top to bottom, pulling the knife and tossing it backward without looking. The blade landed five feet away with a soft chunk against the gravel. He unclipped the phone from the man’s belt and turned it over in his palm, thumbed it once, then slid it inside the back pocket of his jeans.
In the wash of the security floodlight, I could see the patch on the back of the man’s cut clearly now. A coiled serpent with the name Steel Serpents on the rocker above the emblem. The name of that club chilled me to the bone since I’d figured out I was on the right track at Enclave Éclipse.
Inferno handed Griffin a zip tie, and Griffin secured the Steel Serpents’ guy. He was young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, with a thin patchy beard along his jaw and a smear of blood at his nose where he’d hit the gravel when he fell. His eyes were open and moving, looking like he’d tried very hard not to appear scared but failed miserably.