Prodigal Son (Lean Dogs Legacy Book 3)

by Lauren Gilley

  “Shit, she’s leaving,” Tommy said.

  “No, she’s not.” Raven set her kickstand and leaped off the bike, took off down the pavement at a run.

  “Shit,” Tommy said again, and she heard him scrambling to follow.

  A black Mercedes rolled backward out of the garage. The windows were tinted, but Raven saw a slender silhouette behind the wheel, and no sign of a passenger: Ryan herself driving, then.

  Raven made a split-second decision. The most important thing was for that car to stop.

  She threw herself on its bonnet.

  It hurt.

  She landed chest-and-belly first, and the hard, still-cool metal forced all the air out of her lungs in one big gasp. But the car jerked to a halt, and even if she couldn’t breathe, Raven could still move. She pulled down her goggles and slapped a hand on the windscreen, right over Ryan’s shocked face.

  “Wh…wh…wait!” she finally managed, drawing in a big, ragged breath that hurt just as badly as losing it in the first place. “Ryan, stop, it’s Raven. And you’d better not move, ‘cause there’s a gun trained on you.”

  Tommy skidded to a halt near the car’s rear tire and pulled his sidearm, gaping at Raven. “What are you doing? Trying to get run over? You alright?”

  “Fine.” She pushed herself upright with a wince and slid back down to the pavement. “Bond makes that look much easier in the movies. Christ.” She touched her ribs; at least bruised, but not broken.

  “Bloody insane,” Tommy murmured.

  “Thank you.” Raven knocked on the passenger window. “Open up, Ryan. We need to talk.”

  A pause. Then the window buzzed down. Inside, Ryan had gone white as cream, both slender hands locked tight on the wheel, tendons leaping in the backs of them. Her throat moved, a constant flutter, like she was choking or trying unsuccessfully to swallow.

  “Raven?” Her voice just a squeak. The cool, too-good-for-you socialite and fashion empress persona had fled, leaving behind a terrified mortal about to have a panic attack.

  Raven didn’t think she and Tommy, even after her car-leaping stunt, were the cause of that much fear.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Raven said, tone softening. “And the idiot with the gun” – he protested with a soft hey – “is my brother. Clive Mahoney tried to have me killed today.”

  Ryan’s eyes bugged.

  “And I came over here all set to yell and threaten you, but I’m thinking now you’re just as scared to death as the rest of us, aren’t you?”

  “I…I…they said…” She looked haunted. Like she might faint any moment.

  “If these Pseudonym people have threatened you, then we can protect you.” She tipped her head side to side. “Or at least try. We – well, my brothers. They’re going to take them out. I’m staring to think the bloody idiots are running the damn country as this point.” She flashed a fast, fierce grin. “Why don’t you follow us home and we’ll have a nice chat?”

  To her surprise, Ryan nodded.

  Raven straightened and looked over at Tommy. Lifted her brows. “Damn. You might just have to patch me in, bro.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Let’s see about making it back in one piece first.”

  Twenty-Six

  “Carl.” Albie toed the vaguely man-shaped lump of blankets and newspapers with his boot. “Carl. Wake up. I brought you something.”

  The lump shifted. A paper slid away, and a grizzled head topped with a knit cap poked up out of the shadows, bleary-eyed. “Huh…?”

  Albie crouched down beside him and held out his foil-wrapped offerings. “Here. I brought you supper. I need a little information.”

  “Supper.” Carl cleared his throat, hawked, spat off to the side. He winced, and groaned, and sat upright, hitched his back up against the cold brick wall he’d been using for a pillow. “Who?” he asked, blinking.

  “Albie. Albie Cross. Come on, man.”

  “Oh. Albie.” He wiped his eyes with the back of a gloved hand. “Didn’t recognize you.”

  That was fair. Albie was dressed head-to-toe in black, his own knit hat, his silhouette made bulky by Kevlar, and the thick jacket he wore to cover all the firepower he carried.

  But hopefully Carl had recognized some other people.

  He finally noticed the takeout and reached for it. “Supper you said? What is it?”

  “Falafel.”

  He paused in the act of unwrapping the parcel. “What now?”

  “It’s good. Go on.”

  Carl finished unwrapping it like it was a bomb that might go off. Sniffed it, cocked his head.

  Albie sighed and fished a bottle of whiskey out of his jacket. “Here. This is your real incentive. But get some food in you, too.”

  Carl reached for the bottle with a delighted sound, and then happily set to eating, speaking with a full mouth. “What brings you to my humble abode on this fine evening?” Put-on accent, spitting crumbs.

  “Eat first.” Albie leaned back out of range. He settled his weight on his heels, and got as comfortable as possible. Let Carl make a good dent on the food and the whiskey.

  Rain was moving in, the air heavy with its ozone tang, and not just the usual choking thickness of fog. It darkened the night to something dense and true-black around them; smeared the streetlamp light into the unsteady blur you’d see while drunk and staggering home from the pub.

  Carl, no last name to speak of, was what Albie liked to think of as career homeless; he had vague memories of being a boy, dropping coins in an old soup tin, Carl – mostly clean-shaven back then – grinning and calling out a slurred thanks, tipping his paper-wrapped bottle back for a deep swig.

  Albie wasn’t one to judge; people fell on hard times for all sorts of reasons, and some had trouble getting back to their feet. He cut checks to charities every Christmas, and hoped it did some good. But Carl, from what he could tell, wasn’t interested in anything like that. If he had something to drink, and something to eat now and then, an alley to settle in for the night, Carl was happy.

  He saw things, too. London’s various criminal organizations kept him well-stocked in booze and takeout in exchange for information. Even when drunk, his intel almost always proved accurate. Albie thought he might have been a savant of some sort.

  “Carl,” he started, and Carl sighed.

  He swallowed his latest bite. “Knew you were after something.”

  Albie pulled out his phone and opened his photo gallery. Turned it toward Carl. “Have you seen this man around lately?”

  When Phillip talked to Fox earlier, Fox had told them to dig up whatever they could on Pseudonym’s CEO, a man named Morris. Only, they’d already done a cursory scan of the company’s website, and the CEO wasn’t named Morris, but Harry Fenwick. They had a picture, though, and that was what he showed to Carl.

  Carl squinted at the photo, then shook his head, decisive, dismissive. “No, never.” He took another bite of falafel. “This is pretty good.”

  “Uh-huh. What about this one?” Clive Mahoney, this time.

  Another no.

  “You seen anything strange around lately?”

  Carl snorted. “’Course. The whole city’s strange.”

  “No. I mean, have you seen, or heard about, anything really unusual?”

  Carl chewed, and swallowed, lowered his food to his lap and really looked at Albie for the first time, one eye half-shut as he tried to focus. “What d’you mean?”

  Albie sent him a meaningful look, and hoped it was discernable in the dim glow of the nearest streetlamp. “Not just your normal muggings and street fights. Have you seen anything that really stuck out to you? Any people who really stuck out? People who maybe looked a little more professional?”

  Carl squirmed and looked down at his meal, shook his head. But said nothing.

  “Carl, if you have, it’s really important that I know about it.”

  The squirming intensified, until he was rocking side to side. He started humming, softly, and it w
as a panicked sound.

  He was scared.

  “Carl.”

  He lifted his head again, and the light glanced off eyes that had gone wide and glazed. Not just scared, but terrified.

  “You saw something,” Albie said, not even guessing at this point; he knew. “What was it? You’ve never hesitated to spill all kinds of dirt on all kinds of lowlifes.”

  “This is different. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Maybe I have. Try me.”

  Carl exhaled noisily. “Shit. This is how people end up dead in an alley, talking about this shit.” He cast a glance around his sleeping quarters for the night and snorted. Dropped his voice to a rough scrape. “Alright, so it was about a week ago. I’ve been seeing lots of cops around lately – not unis, but detectives, you know. Trench coats, and bad suits, and lots of tensed jaws.” He demonstrated, turning his profile to Albie and clenching his own jaw, the effect mostly disguised by his beard.

  At another time, Albie would have laughed.

  “Someone’s been selling prescription meds the last six months or so,” Carl said. “Name-brand narcotics. Only, the usual dealers, they said they got it from a new supplier. Somewhere fancy, yeah? When the cops started closing in, I thought they were about to make a bust. Only, there was one night…” He shuddered, and closed the foil up over his falafel. Reached for his whiskey and took a gulp, breathless afterward. “One night, there’s these two detectives, and they happen to be in the alley I was in, and they told me I ought to clear out because they were about to ‘apprehend’” – he made air quotes – “someone, and I wouldn’t want to be in the way. I said I’d leave, but I stopped at the edge of the alley, in the dark, you know, and got real still and quiet, and I thought I’d wait them out. I looked back, and then this – this – this shadow. It comes flying down out of the sky. Out of nowhere! Only it isn’t a shadow at all, but a man, dressed all in black. And he killed those cops. Wham! Bam!” He mimed a sequence of sloppy karate chops. “With his bare hands! Snaps their necks, like. And they fall down, and don’t get up, and he lights out of there. Climbs up the wall, Albert. On this cable, and with his feet on the building.” He mimed that too. “Like bloody Spider-Man!”

  Albie’s pulse tripped. “You’re sure they were dead and not just unconscious?”

  “Oh, definitely sure. I walked down there. They didn’t get up for about twenty minutes, so I went to look. I didn’t touch them, no, but I could tell they were very dead. You get that look about you, you know? The empty eyes. And not a drop of blood spilled.” He shrugged a few times, like he was fighting a chill. “Right terrifying.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “I got out of there. The cops might not care if I lie about in dark corners, but how was I to explain two dead detectives to them? No. I walked half the bloody night to get away from that. But people were talking about it after.”

  “Yeah? What’d they say?”

  He looked at Albie with a kind of seriousness he’d never shown before, gaze haunted. “Everyone said it was a ghost that done it. But the ones who really know – say it was a government ghost, if you catch my drift.”

  Fox’s words, tinny and tight over Phillip’s phone, came back to him. “Morgan thinks they’re trying to reboot Project Emerald.”

  Albie was pretty sure they’d succeeded.

  Twenty-Seven

  On a regular day, Fox had to mainline coffee to stay alert, descending otherwise into a lazy fog of indifference.

  When he was working, though, adrenaline cycled through him at regular intervals, keeping him sharp and focused, and, surprisingly, calm.

  He didn’t feel so calm now, though.

  It was taking forever to get back.

  Cass was missing.

  No, taken.

  “–lie.” Eden’s voice from the passenger seat. “Charlie.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going eighty-five!”

  The long stretch of empty dark road, his too-fast heartbeat, panic closing in – it had all conspired to lend a surreal, underwater feeling to the moment. His extremities tingled with numbness, and he knew that was shock setting in. He was outrunning the van’s headlights, but that didn’t alarm him. He glanced down – disorienting sense of everything tilting around him, vision slip-sliding – to the glowing speedometer. He’d been in the States so long that it shocked him a little to see KPH rather than MPH. Eighty-five…kilometers?

  Whatever.

  Eyes back on the road.

  “Charlie,” Eden said, speaking to him like he was spooked horse, or a really stupid child about to throw a tantrum in public. “We don’t have time to get pulled over for something like speeding. You should slow it down.”

  He ground his molars.

  Devin sat forward between the seats. “She’s right, son,” he said reasonably. “I know that you’re a little worked up–”

  Fox slammed on the brakes.

  Awful squeal, shouts, lots of fishtailing. Devin’s face smashed into the center console between the front seats, and Eden threw her hands up against the dash to keep from eating it. Evan shrieked. Stuff slid around in the back. Something heavy smacked against the back of Fox’s seat.

  For a moment, he thought the unwieldy van might flip end-over-end up the road, but he got it locked down and veered off onto the shoulder, gravel spraying out like snow in the headlights, and they finally came to an unceremonious halt.

  “What the hell?” Devin said.

  Charlie took a few deep breaths, hands tight on the wheel. Then he disengaged his seatbelt and rounded on his father.

  “‘What the hell’?” He was seething, but the words came out crisp and cold. “You find out that your daughter – who, let me remind you, is sixteen – just got kidnapped by the same nasty creeps who tortured your old buddy Norris to death, and you’re asking me ‘what the hell’?”

  Devin had a hand clapped over his nose; Fox hoped it was broken. The old bastard stared at him, impassive, unaffected by any of this.

  And that was the thing, wasn’t it? Getting sniped in his own flat, having to run, faking his own murder, going off on this jaunt, finding Norris…none of it had affected him.

  Fox snapped.

  “Is this fun for you?” he asked. “Is this all a big game? Life got boring, and you’re too old to get it up anymore and spawn any more kids you don’t give a shit about, so you thought ‘I know, I’ll get involved with a bunch of scary government-funded lunatics and sic them on my children for laughs’? Have you ever, in your whole miserable fucked-up life, ever, ever thought that maybe you could just settle the fuck down and stop ruining everything for all of us? Huh? Siring a whole brood of bastards wasn’t enough, now you have to make us miserable and get us killed, too?”

  Devin slowly lowered his hand; spots of blood at his nostrils. Calmly: “We’ve been over this, Charlie. You hate me. I get it. But don’t ever suggest that I ever did anything to harm any of you intentionally.”

  “Yeah, then what do you call fucking all our mothers?”

  “Fox,” Morgan started. “I asked Devin to–”

  Fox turned around, popped his door, and got out.

  He walked along the side of the van, past the red glow of its taillights, and kept going, footfalls crunching in the gravel.

  His chest ached – getting worse by the second. A tightening along his ribs, bright, sparking pains that chased across his whole torso. Like that first day in Albie’s workshop, but more intense.

  He halted, staggered a step, and pitched forward to brace his hands on his knees. He wasn’t getting enough air. Opened his mouth to breathe that way, ragged and ineffective. His pulse beat like a drum in his ears, so loud he didn’t hear footsteps approaching.

  Eden’s voice right beside him: “You’re having a panic attack.”

  “No,” he wheezed, “I’m not.”

  “I can see your face sweating from here. Yes, you are,” she said, matter-of-fact. She was cal
m, but not soothing, and somehow that helped. “Breathe through it. Deep breaths. In for a count of four, and out for a count of four.”

  “I might be sick.”

  “You might be,” she agreed.

  “You’re a terrible nurse.”

  “Hmm. And you were a terrible boyfriend.”

  He did the breathing thing. In-two-three-four, out-two-three-four. After a minute or so, he felt steadier, his chest looser. Good enough to tilt his head and glance up at her.

  She stood with her arms folded, her silhouette a line of red from the taillights, face shadowed.

  “You aren’t really still sore about all that back then, are you?” he asked.

  She turned to regard him, though he still couldn’t see her face. Unsettling. “We can’t all be as heartless as you, Charlie.”

  He straightened. His thoughts strayed back to the day he’d arrived in London, when he’d met her in that café: raindrops on the windows, clink of mugs in saucers, Eden slicked-back and chic and unattainable across the table from him. He’d thought her indifferent, then, but that outfit and that cool façade had been her armor. Protection against whatever bad memories he’d stirred up.

  Or maybe good memories. Maybe that was the problem.

  “You really cared about me,” he said, the realization blooming like a sunrise, so bright it left him squinting and wanting to turn away. Lots of people had a lot of emotions about him, but most of them were bad. He’d never had any idea what to do with love or affection. He suspected that was why he’d always resented the hell out of his mother.

  “Of course I did, you idiot.”

  He turned away, feeling the weight of her gaze, a little glad that he couldn’t see her expression. He suspected she was glad of that, too.

  “I’m very good at what I do,” he said.

  She didn’t respond.

  “I’m the one with the level head. I always get the job done – no clutter, no stress. I don’t ever…” The tightness was coming back. “Shit. Maybe I’m finally losing my nerve after all this time.” A hollow chuckle that hurt his throat.