Prisoner (Criminals & Captives #1)(72)

Chapter Thirty-Six




Grayson


The guys scale the four-story mansion with ropes. Stone puts a rope ladder down for me—I can’t hack our usual break-and-enter activities with my shoulder like it is. Nate didn’t want me doing this part at all, but he’s never been able to stop me from shit like this.

I’ve never killed a man in cold blood before. In the heat of a fight, yeah. Guys trying to kill me, yeah. But not a man helpless. Except the governor can never seem helpless—not to us. And it’s huge that they reserved killing him for me. I remember the dark day Stone promised it to me. I was pretty f*cked up, and he grabbed my hair and looked me in the eyes and he said, We’ll hurt him bad, but you’ll get to kill him, Grayson. You’ll get to kill him, okay?

A few minutes later we lay on the mansion roof, watching the stars and waiting for Calder to give the go signal. I look over at Stone, next to me in his ragged black hoodie, eyes dark with death. Even gazing up at the cool, crisp sky, he looks angry. Hard. Like he hates the stars.

But he has a good heart—a dangerous heart, but a good heart. I wonder if Abby can see that. I want her to understand him. I want him to understand her.

“Soon,” Stone whispers.

I imagine wrapping my hands around the governor’s throat. I play it in my mind like I have so many times, feeling him jerk and struggle as the life drains out of him. While that doesn’t make me feel happy, it gives me a certain comfort. Maybe even some peace. Hurting and killing the governor has always been a substitute for happiness. Because I knew I’d never have the real thing.

It’s huge that Abby wants to come with me. So huge I don’t know what to do with it, and my pulse races into overdrive when I think of her out there. I don’t like leaving her, but I don’t want her in on the dangerous work of clearing.

I see people saying shit like their wedding day was the best moment of their lives, or having a baby or whatever, but I can’t imagine anything better than when Abby said she wanted to be there for me killing that motherf*cker. Like she’s okay with reaching into the darkest part of me. Like she actually wants to go there. Having a baby or getting a wedding ring or whatever could never hold up to that.

The historical blueprints gave us gold—a set of vertical tunnels for the old-fashioned hot-blast heating system that stretches up to the roof. That old system was later replaced by a radiator system, but the empty tunnels are still there if you know where to look.

Which we do, now.

We did measurements and got the location of an empty tunnel, more like a chute, right under part of the HVAC exhaust array on the west side of the roof.

Stone’s phone buzzes. Time.

Prying the motherf*cker up without making noise is a little bit of a bitch—we muffle the sound with rubberized blankets and smash through the paper-thin veneer of asphalt topping. There’s a subattic. We knew about that, and that it’s wired up like crazy.

The beauty of the hot-blast chute is that it bypasses the wired-up subattic. We pop in handholds so we don’t slide all the way to the basement, and go down to the Sheetrock area on the fourth floor. We make a little too much noise punching through, but suddenly we’re in.

Stone, Cruz and I haul ass down the stairs, weapons at our sides. Cruz breaks off at the wife’s room to hit her with the tranq gun, and Stone and I burst into the governor’s bedroom.

He’s clearly just woken up. He’s cowering in his bed, wearing a motherf*cking sleep cap over his gray hair, holding a .357 in his shaking hand. A bedside lamp casts a circle of light to his side. Enough to see the horror on his face when he recognizes me. He scuttles back to the headboard. “I’ll shoot—I will.”

I’m vibrating with wild energy—maybe it’s rage, I don’t know. I glance at Stone. We don’t need words—we know how to work a man with a gun. He goes to one side of the room, and I go to another.

“Help!” the governor calls, pointing his piece at me, then swinging it wildly to the other side, to aim at Stone. But he can’t shoot both of us.

“You don’t get to call for help,” I say. “That sound familiar? Who else didn’t get to call for help, you remember?”

He turns his gun back at me, aiming at me. He won’t do it. He’s a coward, and he knows the second he hits one of us, the other will kill him. If he was smart, he’d know he’s dead already.

“Put down the gun and get the f*ck out of bed,” Stone growls, standing there all in black down to his massive motorcycle boots. “And take that motherf*cking cap off your head. I want it off now.”

The governor watches him stupidly.

“Now!” Stone’s fixating on the cap thing. You never know what Stone is going to fixate on.

“I have money,” the governor says. “I owe you; I understand. I can set you for life.”

Stone storms to a bookshelf that’s full of framed pictures and fragile-looking things, and with an angry swipe he pushes it all off. Stuff crashes to the floor. He does it to the other shelves, wild with anger. This is what we’re going to do to you.

That’s my cue to fly at the governor, at his shooting arm, forcing it up and to the side where a shot can’t do damage. A shot goes off, but it’s wild. I twist his gun from his hand and wing it at the wall so hard it cracks the plaster. I put him on his face on the bed and pull his arm behind his back, knee in his spine.