Unhinged (Necessary Evils #1)(4)

Still, it was best to act as if he had no idea what Noah meant. “I’m not lying about having money. I can show you my bank balance.”

“I don’t want your fucking money!” Noah shouted, sweat and saliva flying as tears of rage leaked from his eyes.

Adam took two more slow steps in Noah’s direction. “Then what is it you want, Noah?”

He scoffed, then sniffled, wiping the back of his hand across his nose. “To watch you bleed out on the pavement.”

Adam’s brows made a run for his hairline at the venom in the boy’s voice. “I don’t even know you, Noah. What could I have done to make you want to kill me?”

Noah’s eyes went wide, mouth contorting. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

Nope. “Should I?”

“Have you killed so many people that you really can’t remember your victims?”

Yeah. Pretty much. He didn’t plan on sharing that with Noah. Besides, if Noah had been one of Adam’s victims, he wouldn’t still be drawing air into his lungs. “Who is it you think I killed?”

“My father, Wayne Holt.”

Adam closed his eyes, letting his brain file through his numerous past victims, plucking the details as he found the name. Wayne Holt, fifty-one years old, serial predator responsible for the assault and murder of at least fifteen children under the age of ten. Had somehow managed to avoid detection for three decades. Police could never find enough evidence to charge him. Luckily, Adam’s people had better resources. And a much swifter form of justice.

A shock of awareness hit him as he realized he did know the boy, though years had passed. Wayne Holt had been one of Adam’s first kills. Number three, maybe? Roughly a couple of weeks after Adam’s sixteenth birthday. The boy was maybe ten at the time. Adam quickly did the math. Yeah, it gelled. It could definitely be the boy who’d stepped out of the shadows that night, calling out timidly for his father, ending Adam’s fun almost before it had started.

Thomas had been furious that he hadn’t checked for witnesses in the house, but he’d been so excited, so ready to remind Wayne Holt of every single victim and the pain he’d left in his wake. If Noah was truly that boy, there was a very good chance he’d also been a victim.

“Your father was a monster, Noah. Deep down, I think you know that.”

Once more, the gun waved wildly. “Fuck you. You don’t know shit about my father.”

“But I do. I can prove it to you, if that’s what you need. But I don’t think you want to see what I’ve seen. Some things can never be erased.”

“Shut up! You’re full of shit. You’re a…serial killer. You have that bored fuckboi act down, but, really, you’re the fucking monster.”

Adam sighed. What the fuck was he supposed to do about this? About him? He couldn’t kill him. Well, he could. But he wouldn’t. He knew that, deep down. He couldn’t kill him the first night he’d seen him and he certainly couldn’t do it now while he was grieving his father. This was clearly something Noah had been thinking about for a really long time. But he also didn’t want to die tonight.

“You have three options, Noah. You can just walk away and I pretend this never happened. I can make a phone call and show you who your father really was and ruin every happy memory you ever had of him.” Adam closed the distance between them, gripping the gun’s barrel and pressing it to his own forehead. “Or you can pull the trigger and kill me. None of those things will change the truth. Your father was a pedophile and a child killer.”

This close, Adam could see Noah’s deep brown eyes, red rimmed and wet with tears, the freckles dotting his skin, dirt smudging his cheeks and chin. Underneath the anger and the hunger, he was rather unique looking, nothing like the parade of pampered debutantes he was forced to endure every day to maintain his cover.

“What’s it going to be, Noah?” he asked softly. “I really hope it's option one.”

The boy’s eyes darted around the empty warehouse frantically, vibrating with enough energy Adam could feel it in the metal pressed to his skin.

“Make your call,” Noah finally said, sounding miserable. “On speaker phone,” he added. “So I can hear you.”

Adam sighed. “Noah—”

“Do it,” he snapped, cutting off Adam’s plea.

When Noah lowered the gun, Adam took his hands from his hoodie pocket, leaving the knife where it was so he could slowly reach into his back pocket. He extracted his phone and hit the first name in his frequent contacts.

“What’s up, buttercup?”

The female voice on the other end of the line was surprisingly chipper for eleven o’clock at night.

“We’re on an open channel,” he warned.

Calliope wasn’t the kind of girl you put on speakerphone. The sound of long nails furiously typing over keys halted abruptly. “Oh-kay. What’s going on? Are you in trouble? If you’re in trouble again Adam—”

“Open. Channel,” he reminded, cutting off her rant. “I need you to do me a favor. Can you access some information?”

“Does the tin man have a metal dick?”

Adam frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Sometimes, I hate this job,” she muttered. “What do you need?”