by Finn, Emilia
The girl, Lucy, snickers and turns away. “Told you she would. Come find me when you’re done. I’ll probably be in the weight room.”
“Okay.” Evie turns to me – she knew I’d follow. Her confidence is astounding. “Come this way, Oliver. This is the Rollin On Gym.” She lifts her hands as though to show off the space. “We’re kinda set up in sections. Boxing ring in this section. This is the original ring that has always been here. It’s seen a lot. Dates for our parents, and deaths that we’d rather never see again. My Aunt Kit had her first date in that ring, so it’s special to us all.” She waves a hand toward the walls filled with equipment. “We’re fully stocked, so the only thing you ever need to bring are gloves, wraps, and a mouth guard.” She looks down to my crotch. Then my face. “Probably a cup too, if you’re worried about that sorta thing. You don’t need to buy gloves right away, because we do have communal pairs, but they’re gross, so if you decide to stick, get yourself a pair from the local sports store. Or online. Or wherever. I don’t care where. Make them sixteen-ounce and a decent brand so they don’t wear away too fast.”
She continues walking and gives no reaction to the foursome of fighters standing on the other side of the ring. Three Kincaids and Jon Hart stand in a huddle like it’s no big deal they’re Kincaids.
Aiden turns to watch us for a moment, as though he senses that his daughter – who is not his daughter at all – is nearby. After a fast scan of her, his eyes come to me and move away like he sees nothing important, but only a half-second passes before his gaze snaps back again. His eyes narrow, not in rage, but curiosity.
He sees something no one else does.
“This way, Oliver.” Evie grabs my arm and pulls me into the next ‘section,’ through a short hall and into another room to escape Aiden Kincaid’s beady stare, only to stop in front of a competition-sized octagon.
Two men grapple, while two more stand on the outside and coach them on.
“This is our octagon. No one dated in there as far as I know.” She turns to me. “Don’t be that guy. Come here to train, not to scam on women. The tall one in the red shorts, that’s Sasquatch, and the–”
“Sasquatch?”
She turns to me. “Oh. Ha. Yeah, his name is actually Ben. But we try to disrespect him as often as possible. It’s like a sport in itself. The other one, that’s Oz, and they have beef. This is where they come to settle their disputes.”
It seems I’m at an odd age in my life, because these kids – Evie, Lucy, Ben – appear grown at first glance. They’re all in their teens, but they look older, until I compare them to the grown Oz.
Local deputy, close to forty, he’s the actual grown man in this room. But his opponent, Ben, isn’t backing down. They roll hard, and when Ben gets on top, he swings out and slams a gloved fist to Oz’s jaw so hard, his head snaps around.
“You little fucker.” Oz literally lifts the teen and tosses him a few feet away, only to give chase and jump on top. He rains fists down on the boy’s face, but they’re not as hard as Ben was going, and Ben has his arms up in guard.
“Anyway. They’re always fighting, so we let them do what they’ve gotta do. The guys on the outside; the one on the left is Bry. He’s my cousin, and he’s a prick.”
“Watch yourself, Smalls.” Bry turns with smiling chocolate eyes and a wicked grin that looks just like Bobby Kincaid’s. “I can hear you, and in this gym, we don’t discriminate against the girls. I’ll knock you out.”
“Oh please.” Evie flashes two middle fingers and turns away. “The one sitting is Mac. He died recently, so he’s not allowed to roll.”
“He died?” I grab her arm and swing her back. “What?”
She taps her chest, but despite her easy words, her eyes show grief. “Faulty ticker. He’s okay now, but he’s gotta rest.” Pushing away from me, she walks up behind the boy who still carries a slight gray tinge to his skin, drops a motherly kiss on the top of his shaggy hair that makes the boy in the ring snap his head up to watch, then she passes her water to Mac in a kind of peace offering.
He’s the first person she’s been nice to since I walked in. She’s either into him, or she loves him like family.
“We’re working on it.” She taps the boy’s shoulder and squeezes. “Get better first.”
Turning back to me, she continues the quasi-tour, minus her bottle of water. “Hallway. Girl’s locker room.” She points to her left. “Boy’s on the right.” Then she continues on until we stop at a doorway that leads into another large training room. “This is where we have some classes; yoga and self-defense. And sometimes, a local dancer brings her kids in here because they wanna dance, but they also wanna beat shit up. So she lets them do both.” She pulls away from the door, only to pass another that I hurry past. “Weights room. We don’t really run classes in here. People who wanna do weights already know what they want to do, and they like to do it in private. So you can do your own sets. If you need help, you can ask any of us, but if you’re a total newb, maybe start back at the first room and tell them you wanna lift. They’ll work you up to it.”
“I already lift.”
She checks my shoulders. Nods. “Yeah, you kinda look competent already. What do you bench?”
“More than your body weight.”
She scoffs. “I can bench more than my body weight too.” She pulls away from the door I’ve already passed.
I glance back and catch a fast glimpse of Libby Tate as she works on her sets with headphones pressed into her ears. She looks at Evie’s back for just a beat, but dismisses us when I angle my body and don’t show her my face.
“Alright. That’s pretty much it. We have classes for everything. We have a physical therapist, so if you’ve got injuries, you can book in with her. We have a girl’s self-defense class, so if you ever feel like you wanna get beat up, we have a sign-up sheet for volunteers.”
“Volunteers?”
“Yeah, they need to practice tossing men. We don’t allow men to sign-up until you become somewhat of a regular and we trust you not to be scamming on those vulnerable women. So become part of the family, and then we’ll send you in.”
“Become part of the family?” I lift a brow and study that platinum blonde hair of hers. “Okay.”
“Any questions?”
“Yeah. Do you have parking out back? The lot out front was pretty full just now, so…”
“Yeah.” She pushes away and walks to the end of the hall. Slamming her hands against the security bar and opening the heavy door to reveal the late afternoon sun, she walks out onto gravel and waits for me to pass through. “There’s an alleyway at the back of all these businesses, and enough parking for another twenty or so cars. Here, hold this.” She lets the door swing far enough closed for me to catch it. “If you let that go, it’ll lock and then we’ll have to walk around the block.” She walks across the lot and opens a heavy gate to reveal the alleyway at the back of the lot. “You can park anywhere out here, just don’t park anyone in. If you don’t wanna walk around, press the button there at your back. It’s a doorbell, and the door will be opened, but people will get pissy about it, because it messes with their workout.”
“Okay…”
“So I think that’s about it.” She turns back to me and gives her first smile, as though proud she completed the tour. “That’s our gym. I grew up in this place, so it’s kinda special to me.”
“You grew up here?”
“Yeah. My mom started dating my dad when I was two.”
“When you were two? Your dad ain’t your dad?” I already know the answer to this, but I’ve long wondered what she knows to be true.
“Not biologically, but he’s better than that. Biggie’s my best friend. He’s strict as hell and more stubborn than me, but he’s the best man I know, and if he didn’t marry my mom already, I would marry him.”
My lip curls back. “You wanna marry your stepdad?”
She laughs. “Not in the weird, incestual way. I’ve w
anted to marry him since I was a toddler. He’s the perfect prince, so you can bet, when I do marry someone, they’re gonna have to be better than Biggie.”
“Tall order?”
She gives a confident nod. “So tall, it’s in the next stratosphere. Okay, let’s go back in and get start–”
“So if Aiden Kincaid isn’t your real dad, who is?”
She takes a step back and shrugs. “Um… Some dude named Sean. He’s in prison now, rotting away, and hopefully being violated on the regular.”
“You don’t know his last name?”
“Oh, I do,” she waves me off. “My parents don’t lie to me, so I know everything about him. I just choose not to use my brain space on him when I have so much math homework waiting in my locker. Come on, so we–”
“Wait. You’re only a teenager, right? Sixteen?”
Her eyes narrow with suspicion. “Ya know what? I never said I was sixteen. And while we’re on that subject, I never said Aiden was my daddy. That’s two for two, bub. What’s your deal?”
“You… what? Yes you did. You said Biggie.”
“There are three Kincaid brothers, so it could have been a lucky guess, but I never said Aiden was mine.”
She forces me to make my move. Her bad attitude and general suspicion forces me to do this when it could have gone down easier if only she’d dropped her attitude.
“That’s because he’s not yours.” I release the door at my back, and while my hand is behind me, I pull the pistol from the back of my shorts and swing out so fast, that platinum blonde hair flies and slams against the ground as the girl drops with a heavy thud.
Hurrying, I push the teen’s limbs in close to her body and prepare to carry her to my car just outside the gate she just opened, but then the door opens behind me, and my body goes into panic mode.
This wasn’t supposed to happen yet.
I swing around with the butt of my gun, using it as a hammer that I know hurts, and hit meat and bone as a body slams to the gravel just beside the teen, and the door is once again released and closed.
Libby Tate, dressed similarly to Evie in gym clothes, lays out beside the girl, with blood sliding over her sharp cheekbone from a cut shaped just like the handle of my gun.
I was coming for her later, but this will do.
These idiot women walk straight to their captor. Eyes wide open and muscles still singing from a workout, they walk straight toward their death.
31
Theo
Rescue
The alarms are raised all over town. The cops, the fighters, Checkmate, and every man in between.
My heart aches, and my stomach cramps, because not only is Evie Kincaid missing, but so is Libby. It might not be as bad as my imagination is running, but I have never in my life felt this way except the one other time the most important woman in my life was hurt.
I knew then just as I know now; Libby is hurt, and it’s my job to fix it.
I stand in the Checkmate offices while call after call blasts the lines. Libby was on vacation, but now she’s not, and when the town’s sweetheart and a beloved cop goes missing, word spreads and tensions climb.
Every man I’ve ever met while in this town is called up to help, and though Spence’s girlfriend is literally still unconscious and resting in her hospital room post-surgery, Spence is here walking laps into the boardroom carpet.
“Sixteen years old.” Alex Turner stands at the head of the room right beside Aiden Kincaid and Kane Bishop. The three rulers of today’s empire. “Five feet, six inches tall. A hundred and thirty-two pounds. Her hair is wild and unmistakable. Sky blue eyes. No scars. No ink.”
“It is now seven o’clock, which means she’s been missing for three hours,” Kane says. “The girl was at the gym, which is basically her life on a daily basis. No one checks in every hour to make sure the kids are accounted for, so no one knew she was missing until an hour after she was gone. She didn’t show up for a sparring session with her cousin, which is when the alarms were raised.”
“Elizabeth Tate,” Alex continues. “Thirty-one years old. Five-feet, four inches tall. One-thirty-five. Green eyes, light brown hair. She’s one of us, she’s a highly trained police officer with a keenly honed sense of danger.” His eyes come to me. “Last seen at the Rollin On Gym. We have her on security footage going out the same door Evie did.”
“The girl was last seen giving a tour at the gym. We don’t know the guy. Kit Kincaid was the contact there, and she said she’s never seen him before.” Kane’s words cut into every person’s heart.
We already know he’s the connect. The man, the new guy at the gym is the connect.
“Six feet, two inches tall. Two hundred pounds neat. Gave his address as the hotel in town, but we’ve already been there. That room isn’t occupied, and the hotel staff says that man has never stayed there under that name before.”
My blood sizzles with a kind of awareness. A pulsing, burning knowledge that this is going to hurt.
Alex opens a manila folder and slaps a picture of the blonde teen onto the wall. Evie’s electric blue eyes haunt us all. Find me. Help me.
He reopens the file and slaps a picture of Libby up beside Evie with such savagery my stomach almost rebels.
Finally, with a tight jaw and rough movements, he grabs a third picture, turns, and slaps it onto the wall beside the women. “Oliver Dunne says he’s new to town, because his company,” he looks to me, “Griffin Industries, has transferred him out here for the next little while.”
Waves roar in my head as every set of eyes flip to me in accusation.
“Olly?” I look from Kane, to Alex, to Libby’s official department photograph, and then finally, to the girl’s dad. “Olly is my friend. It can’t… he’s not…”
“He’s our number one suspect,” Alex snaps. “Security footage and eyewitness statements show him and Evie walking out the back door. Two minutes later, Libby follows – she wasn’t out for a stroll. She was on the scent already – the doors close, and now all three are gone. We’re splitting into teams, and we’re going to find him.”
“We’re standing in the offices of Checkmate right now,” Kane declares. “We’re not at the cop shop. This isn’t a police investigation as far as I’m concerned.”
Aiden’s face remains stony as he nods and makes his way toward Kane. He’s going vigilante, and he’s taking a flamethrower with him.
“We apprehend, we disembowel, we get our family back,” Kane continues. “We get them back before they’re hurt. I’m gonna start calling names. We’re splitting into teams that we think will work together the strongest.”
“Griffin!” Alex shouts over the rising noise. “You’re with me first. We need to know our target, and it seems kinda weird that you call this fucker your friend.”
“Cruz?” Kane shouts. “Your new leg?”
“It’s fine. I can do any terrain.”
“Good. I want you, Spence, Bobby Kincaid, and Jon Hart together. That’s team one. Team two is Oz, Romeo, Jimmy, and Blair. Team three is Eric, Macchio, the other Turner, and Mike.”
“Come with us.” Aiden and Alex stop in front of me. “We need to talk.”
“I need to stay here to find Libby. She’s mine.”
“You don’t get a fucking choice,” Alex shouts. “We need to talk about Evie. She’s the one with your friend. Move it, now. We don’t have time for–”
“Come.” Jay arrives in front of us and grabs my shoulder. “We’re team four or ten or whatever number we’re up to; Alex, Aiden, Kane, you, and me.” He looks into my eyes. “The girls are gonna be together, I guarantee it. We need to talk fast, then we’re setting out to find them.”
It takes minutes to move through all the bodies. There are easily more than a hundred people in this one building, and though an attempt at order is being made, everyone is panicking, and no one is listening, so when Kane shuffles our smaller team into his office and snags Sophia on the way through, he closes the door a
nd turns to me.
“I don’t know! Olly is my friend. He’s my driver. He’s been working for me for fifteen years.”
“Security footage shows him walking into the parking lot out back with my daughter,” Aiden growls. “She is a fucking child! No matter his intentions, that is a crime. Stop defending him, and start answering.”
“Who is he to you?” Kane asks. “Specifically.”
“He’s my employee. He’s Oliver Dunne, I call him Olly. He’s twenty-five. I’ve known him since he was, like, twelve… thirteen.”
“How’d you meet him?” Alex demands.
“On the streets. I lived in an alleyway during my youth. That was my stomping ground, and over the years, I saw this kid hanging around. We said hey, but it wasn’t much. I left that place when I was eighteen, built Griffin up, but those streets were still my beginnings, so I visited. This same kid was still there. If I had an errand to run or whatever, I’d give it to him and slide a little cash his way for his troubles.”
“Illegal errands?” Turner prods.
“No, legit errands that I didn’t actually need help with. I was trying to help the kid out, but when you live that life, you know not to accept cash for nothing. So I gave him work and made him earn it. Just little things, like… head up to the computer store and get me more ram. I gave him the cash for the parts, and what was left over – which was always enough for his time and appetite – was his. We did that for a few years. He was still a minor, so I couldn’t just ask him to come home with me.”
“Did he ever give you another name? Any clue to who he really was?”
“No. He didn’t give me any name for years. We don’t much like to talk, so when I needed to address him, I just called him kid. It was fine, it worked for us. When he was eighteen, I pulled him off the streets, gave him a place to live and a salary to keep him happy. He’s been mine ever since.”
“And his family?”
I shrug. “He’s never mentioned them. Not once.”
“Did you ever mention yours?” Soph asks. She’s mostly silent, tapping away at her laptop while listening to the others speak. “Did you ever talk about you?”