Page 11 of Savage Protector

The first thing I noticed upon entering the small parking area beside the building was her Chevy wasn’t around. It was half past ten. Maybe she’d gone out to run errands. Instinct told me otherwise. The girl worked the late shift at a twenty-four-hour business. She wasn’t used to waking up this early. Perhaps she had picked up an early shift?

Rather than sit in the truck and allow questions to paralyze me, I took action, stepping out and rounding the front of the building, sizing up my surroundings from behind a pair of aviators. The small foyer beyond the front door contained six mailboxes mounted along one wall, five of which featured handwritten names on the metal doors. The other was left blank. It was as good a clue as any.

Jogging up a narrow stairwell to the second floor, I located the apartment in question. It wasn’t easy imagining someone like her living here, with the light that radiated from her or the beautiful smile she flashed so freely around the casino. Granted, it was all in the name of professionalism, but knowing that made her no less magnetic. And she lived in a building whose stairwell and hallways stank of rodent piss and roughly twenty years of stale cooking odors.

Jack might have slowly but surely conditioned me out of my old ways, but that didn’t mean I’d forgotten the tricks I’d learned in those days. Skills, rather, that I still occasionally used in my job. Skills like breaking and entering after knocking on the door and waiting endless moments for an answer. It took nothing—bubblegum would have kept her safer than this shitty, old lock. All it took was a credit card to force the latch aside.

Slowly, I opened the door, cautious in case she was still inside but sleeping deeply. It took nothing but the briefest look around the cramped living room to know what she had done after fleeing the casino last night. Odds were she’d never see her coworkers again.

I searched the place to confirm my suspicions, noting the lingering scent of her floral perfume in the air. Her dresser drawers were empty, the bedroom closet bare, the bathroom free of toiletries.

She was gone.

She ran again.

This time, I had a choice to make. I could either let her go and wish her well, cutting ties with the entire situation, or I could track her down. It hadn’t taken much to find her the first time. I doubted she would present much of a challenge now, fleeing out of fear I had clumsily instilled in her.

Looking at it that way, there was no choice.

There was only action.

The moment Drake answered my call, I got straight to the point. “I’m going to need you to access those bank records again. It looks like she got spooked and ran.”

6

SCARLET

Anoise ripped me from my thin slumber. My heart was in my throat, pounding like a bass drum in my head. Panic gripped me when I looked around at my unfamiliar surroundings—cheap wood paneling, a generic print hanging on the wall opposite the foot of the bed, above a desk made of chipped particleboard. The curtains on the window to my right were pulled over it so only the tiniest beam of light flowed through. In the dim glow, I could barely make out the presence of my suitcases lined up beneath it.

Motel. I was at the motel I found yesterday, where I had checked in and locked the door before I spent the rest of the day peering outside from behind the curtain, staring at the parking lot, waiting. For what? I wasn’t sure exactly. I only knew there could be danger, trouble, and pain.

“You think you can get away from me? You belong to me.” A shiver ran through my prone body as I thought about what he had said, making me pull the thin blankets up around my chin. The bed wasn’t exactly comfortable, and the pillows were flat and a little lumpy, but this was the only comfort I had at the moment, so I tried my best to soak it in.

Where could I go?

What was I supposed to do?

I didn’t have enough money to immediately get very far away. Maybe I could cross the border into California, lose myself there, but what would I do next? I had to be realistic. What kind of job could I find? The cost of living in California was pretty expensive too. Maybe I could drive up to Idaho or over to Colorado. But again, where was the work? It was a nice fantasy, imagining driving from town to town, looking for a job, asking around to see whether there were cheap places to live, but what were the odds I would find something before my savings ran out?

So, what next? Getting away. That was all that mattered.

I had to get far away, so far that he would never find me. Him or his errand boy, Grayson Daniels—most likely a fake name. It was no big surprise when I googled him and found nothing but a few random people who didn’t match his description. Probably somebody who worked for Dominic, somebody I had never met before and wouldn’t be scared of on sight.

Still, I should have known as soon as he beat that man so brutally. That level of violence was delivered so efficiently. It took a certain kind of man to do that. The kind of men Dominic worked with, trusted, knew best. God, it’s all so clear now. So obvious.

A soft footstep outside my room made my heart freeze as I remembered why I woke up. The noise outside. Somebody was out there.

Immediately, my mind went through my options. It didn’t take long since there weren’t any. My only chance of getting out of here would be to shimmy through the tiny bathroom window, partly visible from where I lay on the bed. I wasn’t exactly a big girl, but I doubted I could fit through without making a hell of a lot of noise that would probably alert whoever was on the other side of the door to exactly what I was trying to do.

So then what?

Lie here and wait?

Act like some passive victim?

“Look at you. You think you can stand up to me? Do you think you’re strong enough?” Dominic’s voice was in my head, barely audible over the rapid thudding of my heartbeat.

I couldn’t move. I wanted to get up and throw the door open, but I couldn’t move. It was like being in a nightmare. Only I was very much awake in this room where hundreds, if not thousands, of people had slept. Were any of them as terrified as I was?