Walk Through Fire (Chaos #4)(66)

He was dead to me.

All of Chaos were.

They had to be so I could get on with what was left of my life.

This was what I was intent on doing (after I slept for three days) when the taxi dropped me off behind my house. The driver took my luggage out of the trunk and put it inside the back door. I gave him a good tip. He smiled and I didn’t watch as he got in his cab and rolled away.

I knew Dot had been in to turn up the furnace, straighten up, return my car, and make sure I had some food.

So all I had to do was take off my clothes and drop in my bed.

Which was what I was going to do.

I locked the door behind me and wandered into the living room, sliding the purse from my shoulder to toss on my couch, my feet set on a course for my bed.

“Millicent Anna Cross.”

I stopped dead as my body coated in ice when I heard a voice that shouldn’t be coming at me from my living room. I looked and saw the man sitting in my cuddle chair, facing me, two men standing behind him.

I’d never seen him before.

He was dressed well. Hispanic. Good-looking. And he seemed laid back.

But he scared the holy shit out of me because I didn’t know him, he knew me, and he was in my living room!

I tensed to flee but stopped as my head shot to the side when I felt movement there.

Another man was coming close.

And he had a gun pointed at me.

I felt the blood drain from my face and my eyes drifted back to the man in my cuddle chair against their will because I thought it pertinent to keep an eye on the guy with the gun.

But the man in my chair spoke again and he seemed the type of guy who liked to have people’s attention when he talked. He also seemed the type of guy you didn’t piss off, seeing as he was cool with breaking into a woman’s home with his minions, one of whom pointed a gun at her.

“You should know who I am, of course,” he stated. “I’m Benito Valenzuela. Perhaps your man has mentioned me.”

I stared at him, fighting my body quaking, so aware there was an actual gun pointed at me and scary people I did not know in my living room that both these things felt like physical touches slithering against my skin, making the fight to stop shaking an extremely difficult one.

“Has he?” the man asked.

I kept staring and did it awhile before it hit me he’d asked me a question.

“Sorry?” I croaked. “Has who what?”

“Has High mentioned me?”

Oh f*ck.

Fuck, f*ck, FUCK!

This guy was here because of Chaos.

This man was in my house with his minions, one of them training a gun on me, because of High.

It was then I belatedly saw the crate sitting next to my cuddle chair.

The crate I thought was lost.

The crate with the pictures in it that I’d mourned.

Until two weeks ago.

Now, like a bad penny, it was back.

But now I knew this man had taken it.

Which meant he had an eye on my house. High coming. High going. Pictures of High and me in that crate.

He had the wrong idea.

Fuck.

Fuck, f*ck, f*ck!

“I see he hasn’t,” the man muttered, and my attention sliced back to him. “Chaos. The only thing we agree on is keeping gash out of our business.”

I felt my mouth get dry.

He tipped his head to the side. “You’ve taken a lot of resources.”

“I... what?” I asked when he didn’t say anything further.

“Having a man at the airport waiting for you,” he told me. “Two weeks. That’s a lot of man hours.”

More cold slinked over my skin.

Why would he do that?

“Weak link,” he said softly, something in his eyes changing, and I didn’t like him or this situation before, but that change made me like it even less. “With Arlo out west and the situation here deteriorating, I had to find the weak link. The one with the hot head. The one who understands how the game is played. The last bastion of a lost empire. The one I could nudge to set things in motion.” He lifted his finger, wagged it up and down my way, and whispered, “I’m nudging.”

“I don’t know...” I cleared my throat quickly when the words came out choked. “I don’t know what you think but I don’t have anything to do with Chaos.”

He shook his head, moved a hand, tapped the top of the crate beside him, and said, “High Judd f*cking you on your desk in that pretty little house out back says different.”

Oh God!

“You watched?” I wheezed.

He shook his head again. “Not me, I missed that show. But I heard it was a good one.”

Oh God!

Now I was terrified and humiliated.

“Now,” he went on, “I’ve waited some time for your return and I’d rather not wait any more. You’re home, so you can deliver a message for me.”

Since delivering a message usually included being capable of doing that, this gave me hope that perhaps this scenario was not going to end how I feared it would. In other words, culminating in a variety of horrible, degrading, painful, and possibly deadly ways.

So quickly I asked, “What message?”

Eyes on me, slowly, he stood.

I braced, doing it fearing my body would splinter into pieces, my attention keen on him.