Page 64 of Intrepid

The phone chimed, and I stared down at it for a moment, before lifting it to find a text across the screen.

I’ll be ready in fifteen.

* * *

I brought the bike to a rolling stop outside of the apartment building Sera had texted the address for earlier. The world seemed heavier, darker than usual, and brimming with ugliness. The constant throb in my chest was the punishing beat of my heart, reminding me of the bastard who kept it caged. How would I survive the night with her, knowing how it’d all end?

Then again, how could someone so good pretend not to see the evil staring back at her every day? An argument my conscience threw at me every time I questioned myself.

As I killed the engine and removed my helmet, another text chimed.

Need help. Stat!

The way those words bulleted down my spine and had me hopping off the bike like I’d been burned was almost laughable, given the circumstances, but I seemed unable to stop myself. The moment the buzzer signaled access, I jogged through the front entrance, looking up the staircase at the apartment doors around me.

Sera peeked out of the one closest to the top of the stairs, her hair down around her shoulders, against the thin white T-shirt hugging every fine curve.

So fucking beautiful it physically hurt my chest to look at her.

“Hey there. Mind giving me a hand?” She smiled down at me, the innocence behind her eyes sending a message of betrayal like a kick to the gut.

Frustration consumed me as I climbed the stairs, and she led me into the small apartment. I’d already resigned myself to altering the plan. Had convinced my stubborn mind that the fatal blueprint laid out for the night wasn’t possible.

I was weak. Physically incapable of ending her that way, so I planned to end it another way. By killing my complacency instead. Letting her go and making her regret the day she met me.

“Her transport sling is broken, and I don’t want to leave her in the wheelchair. Lilia should be here in ten minutes, but if something happened to her before then, I’d probably kill myself,” she prattled on ahead of me, while we crossed the room to the bedroom.

Inside, a woman sat with her back to me, her short auburn locks, speckled in just a few stray grays, told me she wasn’t quite as old as I imagined. Classic rock droned on in the background, a song I recognized as one of my dad’s favorites. Still The Same by Bob Seger.

“I just need you to help me lift her up onto the bed.” Sera bent forward and stroked the woman’s face with a loving hand. “I want to introduce you to someone,” she said softly to her.

I rounded the wheelchair where she sat, and froze the moment the woman’s face came into view. The room spun around in my periphery, knocking me off balance. I grabbed the back of the chair behind me to steady myself, as I fought the pulsing waves of shock beating through my muscles, numbing them. It’d been ten years since I’d last seen the woman. The night Eli and I took off to the Packard Plant without even telling her we’d left.

“Ty?” Sera’s voice yanked me out of my trance, and I realized by the upswing of her brows that I’d missed what she said before. “This is Jo.”

No. The snap inside my head echoed down my ear canal, the first seam of my tightly knit plan coming apart.

“You … work for her?” I didn’t even know I’d asked the question aloud, until Sera answered, “Yes. I take care of her.”

Snap. Snap. The slow unraveling left my mind scrambling for the loose ends in a desperate bid to hang on to my wits, because shit was about to come apart.

Jo’s head wobbled unsteady, as she twisted in her chair and peered up at me. Her brows flickered for a moment, but her eyes showed no sign of recognition. Why would she? I was a boy when she last saw me. Fresh-faced and innocent.

“Can you grab the other side of her? I just want to lift her into the bed.”

Sera’s voice grounded me, when I felt like my world had shifted off axis. Another snap crackled against my skull, as my head fused together the parts I’d missed over the last ten years, welding them to the loose ends and changing the shape of everything I’d spent months forging and hammering out.

I’d made a point to avoid Jo, but somehow had forgotten about her, too. After what’d happened, I couldn’t face her, couldn’t bring myself to tell her the horrific way I’d disposed of her son in order to save my own life. Even if she’d have forgiven me, I’d never forgiven myself for it. Everything I was—every good thing I’d acquired from my father, his smarts, integrity and righteousness—had fallen into that wood chipper alongside Eli. That one single moment turned an innocent boy into a monster.

Not that it’d matter, if I had told her. An innocent man had taken the fall, and the cops had been paid off to look the other way, so anything I’d said made no difference. Of course, I didn’t find that out until later, and fortunately for him, the lead investigator had already died of a heart attack two years prior, or he’d have made my list, too.

I was a fourteen-year-old kid who’d just lost his father, scared shitless and alone. The real monsters were still out there, and I was positive they were watching me. And maybe they’d been watching Jo, too.

At the time, I’d done what I thought would keep her safe—mentally and physically.

Just hadn’t figured that I’d never get the chance to tell her the truth someday.

Like a robot, I slid my arms beneath the frail woman and lifted her, almost effortlessly, from the chair. Fieriest redhead I’d ever known, whittled down to the quiet skeleton of a woman.