Page 4 of Unhinged

“Please, I…”

“I’m sorry it has to be this way.”

He lifted the knife to Carrie's throat, the tip of the blade pressing into the soft flesh. His eyes glowed black in the moonlight, and Carrie forced herself to meet his gaze through the blood-spattered lenses of his glasses. Selah’s blood.

Carrie's pulse raced and instinct took over as her knee jerked up and connected with his groin. A scream stuck in her throat as he thrust her away from him. The back of her legs hit the railing, and she teetered there for a moment before she lost the battle to stay upright.

Suddenly she felt nothing below her but air. She didn’t have time to cry out, didn’t see anything flash before her eyes as she plummeted toward the black water of the river below.

CHAPTER

ONE

PRESENT

The hot midday sun beat down, the heat scorching in its intensity, and a trickle of sweat beaded at the nape of Luke’s neck before slithering down his spine and into the waistband of his cargo pants.

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Lucas Stone gazed at the decrepit storefront before turning to his one-time Lieutenant and friend. “Seriously, couldn’t you have found something a little nicer?”

A few streets away from the heart of industrial Miami, the building was situated amongst factories and warehouses, a decaying pile of wood and steel.

Luke could feel Knox Castillo’s black eyes bore into his even through the dark lenses of his Oakleys.

Knox gave a nonchalant shrug. “Got it cheap after the hurricane wiped everything out down here. Needs some refurbishing, but it has good bones.”

Luke grimaced. If by ‘bones’ Knox meant the structure needed to be placed six feet under, then he was inclined to agree. It would take nothing short of a miracle to salvage this place.

“Besides,” Knox continued, “we need to be close enough to the center of things to be reputable, but far enough away that no one reads too much into it.”

Well, Luke couldn’t argue with that. No one in their right mind would come near this place. He tipped his head in agreement and resumed studying the building. “Is it safe to go in?”

“Gonna find out.” Knox pulled the key from his pocket and pushed open the heavy steel door—or, rather, tried to. It was either blocked or swollen from the humidity and refused to budge more than a couple inches.

Knox put his shoulder against the door and threw his considerably bulky weight into it, but even though it groaned with effort, the door refused to move. Stepping forward, Luke added his own weight, and together they shoved the door open, inch by excruciating inch.

A mixture of foul smells greeted them—mildew and rot, followed closely by the smell of roadkill and feces. Clearly, more than one animal had made its way in and expired, the smell permeating the warm, stale air. Having been stationed all over the globe, they’d experienced worse in some of the third world countries they’d been in. But at least no one was living here—not of the human variety anyway. He hoped.

“Great,” he remarked, sarcasm saturating his tone, and Knox smirked.

Debris littered the floor of the warehouse, a collection of things left over from a time when the building was operational, as well as junk washed in by the recent hurricane. Luke imagined that the building had been vacant prior to the flooding; otherwise, the owners would have taken care of it. Dampness hung in the air, except where it had managed to escape through several broken windows.

“Please tell me you’ve hired someone to clear this stuff out.” So help him, if he had to wade through four feet of garbage to refurbish this building, he was going to choke the life out of Knox.

“Going soft on me, Stone?” A smile flitted at the corners of Knox’s mouth. “To answer your question, yes, they’ll be in here next week, so we should be ready to go within the next month if all goes well.”

“Sounds good.”

To be honest, it sounded like a miracle, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He’d been looking for something to do since being discharged almost two months ago, but civilian life hadn’t appealed to him in the least. There was no way he could go from holding a rifle in the sandy, rocky mountains in the armpit of the world to sitting behind a desk eight hours a day. He didn’t have the patience or people skills for that.

Knox had reached out to him one day, asking if he’d be interested in working personal security. Over the next several months, Vantage Security Group had been formed via FaceTime and several hundred emails—one of which was precisely how Knox had ended up with this Godforsaken building.

Halfway across the world at the time, a realtor had sent—he now realized—extremely doctored photos of the building they were now standing in. In an inch and a half of water, crap, and God only knew what else. Fantastic.

Still, the prospect was better than anything he could have dug up on his own, and he was grateful for that. They had another handful of guys on the way, too, due stateside within the next couple of months. Knox had connections all over the place; some were guys he’d grown up with, others were soldiers, paratroopers, or snipers he’d met and worked with over the years.

The goal was to land a government contract, but in the meantime, they’d start with small jobs, working security for high-end functions or as bodyguards to some of Miami’s elite. They’d take whatever they could to get their name out there, but Knox had a ten-year plan and a vision of putting Vantage offices on each side of the country.

“Reception will go right over here”—Knox pointed to an open area immediately to the right—“conference rooms down this hallway. The gym will go upstairs so we can hold self-defense courses on site.”