by J Bree
“Queenie? What are you doing in our neck of the woods?”
I lean down to put the little plastic booties over my Louboutin’s and she giggles at me maniacally. “I need some information. This is a family matter but I’m willing to pay for Jackson’s time.”
She shrugs and pushes the door wider, ushering me in. “Family means family, you don’t pay for that shit.”
Jackson calls out from deeper in the bunker, “Don’t say that! Keeping you fed is fucking expensive!”
I roll my eyes and Viola does the same. A smirk tugs at the corner of my mouth. “Mounties are weird about money and food, something about never having them wires their brains wrong.”
Viola shrugs and leads me down the hall. It looks much cleaner in here than Lips warned me and from the look Viola gave me I’ll assume she’s been cleaning the place up. It’s not up to my standards but I think the plastic booties might be overkill.
We get to an open spiral staircase into a large, dark room. There are computers everywhere, dozens of them, and there’s code running on the screens of some of them, security footage on others. Jackson is sitting in a gaming chair with a pair of hot pink bunny ear headphones on that look ridiculous hanging around his neck.
“You didn’t mention the place you needed to be was here annoying me.”
I can’t come up with an answer to that because I’m too busy staring at the bin overflowing with empty energy drink cans and candy wrappers next to his chair. I look a little closer at the desk and it’s clear he’s been working too much to take any real care of himself because he looks faintly… greasy.
Disgusting.
Viola snorts at me. “He’s showered, Beaumont, stop wrinkling your nose at him like some stuck-up socialite.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “I am a stuck-up socialite, Ayres, and I highly doubt he’s actually clean. You might have lowered your standards but I’d rather die.”
Jackson chuckles at me derisively and shrugs. “You and Crawford were made for each other.”
Unlikely.
If we were made for each other he would have loved me when he had the chance.
“Can we focus? I’m on a time crunch here and I need to get back to the Crow’s mansion before he realizes I’ve been here.”
Viola rolls a chair over and motions for me to sit before stalking off to find another one for herself. Jackson’s eyes stay glued to her ass the entire time and I kick his chair.
“Focus. I need this information and I’m not paying you to stare at Ayres’ ass.”
He huffs and I send him a copy of the DNA profile I need run through the system. I’ve already had my usual guy no it but when it came back with sealed records, I knew this was a case for Jackson.
“You already know about the fucking Devil, who else is there? I have a file for her daddy, do you want that?”
I shake my head. “The one you gave Atticus? I have it already. I need to know who else flags as a match.”
He stares at me and then starts the search. He starts listing off the siblings, and I mentally tick each one off. Colt, Chance, and Noah are in the system thanks to their rap sheets, Lips is in there because of her hospital stays. Poe was also hospitalized as a toddler thanks to her drug addict mother and Wyatt had his tonsils out.
Nate isn’t in the system.
No surprises there.
There’s a long stretch of silence and then Jackson blinks at the screen for so long I start to wonder if he’s had a stroke.
Then he curses under his breath and runs the search again. “This can’t be right. What the fuck is in that man’s DNA? Is he some sort of super villain or something?”
My stomach drops a little and Viola glances over at me. “What is it Jackson? Stop messing around.”
He scowls at the screen and then sighs, hitting print and I fuss with the hem of my skirt as I wait for the files to print out.
He sighs. “Listen… Senator Blakeley is on the Crow’s hit list. He’s got some pretty big power moves happening at the moment about trafficking and exploitation laws so there’s a lotta eyes on him from our neck of the woods, if you catch my drift.”
I think I do but he’s such a freaking psycho that I have to ask. “Break it down a little more for me. He’s against trafficking?”
Jackson cracks his fingers as he talks like the action is unconscious. “Yeah. He’s been a big hitter about kids going missing, women being taken and sold, and the string of prostitute deaths they’ve been having in DC. He’s been getting traction on a lot of laws that will make things a lot harder for that kind of crime to happen.”
I nod slowly. I’m not sure where he’s going with this but I guess he’ll get there eventually if I let him ramble on. “Why would the Crow want him dead then? I’d say that’s the type of senator this country needs.”
Jackson shrugs and his knee starts bouncing. I don’t understand how he spends his life down here in the dark if he needs to move so much to focus.
“The Crow offered to back him, give him a whole lotta money for his campaign because he does want that kind of man making decisions. Blakeley said no, told him once he had the trafficking thing under control he was going to focus on breaches of information. Extortion, money laundering, all sorts of shit that he knows the Crow has interests in. Told him he wasn’t ever going to be a kept man.”
I nod. I think it’s naive but noble enough.
Jackson turns the monitor around until I’m staring at a screen full of data that means nothing to me. “Blakely’s DNA matches. He’s the other Graves sibling.”
As I walk back through the secret tunnel back up to the house, I use the light on my phone and I almost miss it. I have to turn the light off to make the call but there’s no other sounds in the tunnel so I decide it’s worth it.
“Jackson… where does the other tunnel lead? Is that the way down to the basement?”
He grumbles down the line, “What do you mean, there isn’t a basement.”
Even in the dark my eyes narrow at his bullshit. “Second strike, Jackson. One more and you’ll be dead.”
He chokes on air and sputters out, “There’s no fucking basement! I’ve been through the house blueprints, I know the whole place like the back of my hand. There’s service tunnels and that secret exit you used to come see me but there’s no basement. I swear! I swear on Viola, there isn’t a fucking basement.”
Huh.
I actually believe him. The panic is real in his voice which I know for sure because Viola is in the background of the call trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
So this basement is at the same level of security as mine is… I wonder if his murder board is down here too? He’s always handed me physical documents when I’ve asked for information, he believes in being able to hold photos and files. Well, that and he’s been worried about being hacked which makes sense considering we all know the Coyote.
I don’t have to think about it anymore, I hang up on Jackson and switch my phone to silent, creeping my way back through Atticus’ house to the room he assigned me. I send a message to Illi about finding a possible lead here and then I change into a pair of Lips’ flat shoes. She left behind one of her work bags, or murder packs as Blaise so lovingly calls them, and I was smart enough to bring it along. We’re close to the same size in shoes and clothes. Close enough that I can make it work and even though I feel stupid, I change into her black clothes from the bag too just in case. These clothes are what she wears when she doesn’t want to be seen so maybe they’ll help me stay invisible enough to check the entire basement out before Atticus and his army of suits notices I’m gone.
If not, I’ll just go back again tomorrow.
I grab the knife Lips gave me and taught me exactly how to use and a small torch from her bag, and then I tie my hair up. I feel so strange, like I’m playing dress-ups in her things, but I’m not sure how long I’m going to be staying here and with Atticus and Luca gone it might be my best chance to go and check it ou
t.
I barely breathe the entire way down there.
I almost get caught by one of his kitchen staff, already up and baking bread for the morning, but I’m small enough to duck into one of the alcoves until he walks past. My heart is hammering in my chest, so stupid because it’s not like Atticus will do anything if I’m caught, but I don’t want to lose the opportunity to figure out what the hell is really going on with him and a secret basement?
Best place to hide a murder board.
I get through the wood paneling as easy as the last time and the steps down the second, obscured tunnel are so steep that I have to brace myself against the wall to stop myself from pitching forward. It’s too dark to even consider going without the torch on my phone to let my eyes adjust. I never really felt like this place was the dark fortress that Lips and the guys always complained about it being but this is the creepiest thing I’ve ever done by myself.
I really wish Lips was here.
I count a hundred steps down and then stop because it’s too depressing to think about having to climb back up them once I’m done down here but it’s only about a dozen more before I finally reach the bottom.
The basement is really hot.
The air down here is so stuffy that I have to take a second to breathe properly so I don’t have a panic attack. Then there’s a rattling noise and my heart tries to leap out of my chest.
If there are rats down here, I will die.
I hold my phone out clutched in both hands ready to call Ash, not that he can help me from hundreds of miles away, and then I hear the groaning.
Fucking groaning.
Here I was thinking that if I can grow up in the Beaumont Manor and hang out at the Butcher’s workroom and live with the motherfucking Wolf herself then I wouldn’t be scared of Atticus Crawford’s basement.
I was wrong.
This is terrifying.
Why the hell did I even think about coming down here by myself? I could have very easily convinced Aodhan or Illi to come over and do this with me. I know where the secret entry is, I could’ve just snuck them both in through there.
The groaning gets louder and definitely sounds pained. Who the hell does Atticus have locked down here? The rational part of my brain starts coming up with plausible explanations.
This will be his interrogation room.
It’ll be where he’s keeping someone strapped to a chair.
This isn’t some sort of creepy Collector situation, the groan was too low to be a woman and there’s no way Atticus would be keeping someone chained in his basement.
Except then I round the corner and find a man chained to the floor, a filthy mattress and a bucket sitting with him and a small area partitioned off with a glass wall.
Exactly like Illi had described the collector.
The guy has his back to me but he’s mumbling under his breath, a string of nonsense and garbled sounds, and although he’s emaciated you can tell he was once a big guy. The clothes he’s wearing hang from his rail-thin body and as he rocks gently, I can see his bones sticking out all over him.
None of that makes sense with the Atticus Crawford I grew up with. He wasn’t ever a violent man, he didn’t ever treat me disrespectfully like his brothers did, and he has protected me from anything that ever threatened me.
But my mother once thought the same about Senior.
She never knew the evil things that he did to women, he hid it from her perfectly until she started questioning the way he was raising and interacting with Joey and Ash. His lack of interest in me. The way he very clearly didn’t love us and only ever saw us as possessions.
Could Atticus be the same? Am I blinded by my own childhood crush on him that I’m doomed to do the same as my mother and shackle myself to a monster?
I’m panicking now.
The same panic I had when the doors of that elevator were closing and Lips told me she knew him. The moment the words tumbled out of her lips that he’d built his entire other life that I had no idea of and everything changed. Everything.
My mind is a whirling mess of panic and I need to either vomit or pass out. I turn and find the murder board I was hoping would be down here but it looks nothing like how I expect it to.
I freeze.
Dozens of photos are printed out, all of them connected with black string and thumbtacks just like my board but the photos themselves are not what I was expecting. I thought I’d be seeing my father’s associates and friends, I thought there would be the Crawford’s all up there with the deviant behaviors and buying habits. I was expecting big players on the political fronts and judges, FBI senior leaders and some foreign diplomats.
Instead, I’m looking at my family.
Ash, Harley, Blaise, Illi, and Odie are only the beginning. The entire O’Cronin clan is there and every last one of the Graves siblings.
He even has a photo of Nate.
In the center is a photo of Lips from school, a grin on her face and her eyes crossed out with blood.
Also by J Bree
The Mounts Bay Saga
The Mounts Bay Saga
The Butcher of the Bay: Part I
The Butcher of the Bay: Part II
Hannaford Prep
Just Drop Out: Hannaford Prep Year One
Make Your Move: Hannaford Prep Year Two
Play the Game: Hannaford Prep Year Three
To the End: Hannaford Prep Year Four
The Queen Crow Trilogy
All Hail
The Ruthless
Queen Crow
Standalone Novels
Angel Unseen: An Unseen MC Novel
About the Author
J Bree is a dreamer, writer, mother, farmer, and cat-wrangler. The order of priorities changes daily.
She lives on a small farm in a tiny rural town in Australia that no one has ever heard of. She spends her days dreaming about all of her book boyfriends, listening to her partner moan about how the wine grapes are growing, and being a snack bitch to her two kids.
For updates about upcoming releases, please visit her website at http://www.jbreeauthor.com, and sign up for the newsletter or join her group on Facebook at #mountygirlforlife: A J Bree Reading Group
CONTINUE READING FOR AN EXCEPT FROM
Just Drop Out:
Hannaford Prep Year One
Available now on Kindle Unlimited
Prologue
The forest at the edge of the Mounts Bay, California, city limits are well known for being haunted.
The kids at the local high school have spent generations whispering about the bodies buried in shallow graves, waiting for the wolves to scent them and dig them up for food. There’s even more legends about the souls that walk amongst the towering redwoods. It’s quiet, not silent, but compared to the ever-present sounds of traffic and human experience, it’s eerie and adds to the haunted feel.
While I don’t believe in ghosts, I can feel the souls that linger here.
It’s probably just my guilty conscious giving me the heebie-jeebies as I look over the corpse of my opponent. His blood is still fresh on my hands, cold and congealed, and I wipe them uselessly down my jeans. My clothes are just as stained as my hands, even my face is spattered with the red stains of his life ending. I look like something out of a horror movie, which is about right considering I’ve just bashed a man’s skull in with a rock while a whole crowd of people looked on in sick fascination. There isn’t a person watching that dares to make a noise. The vise-like grip of the Club holds their tongues.
I’m not afraid of being caught.
I’m small for my age. Years of food insecurity have taken their toll, and I was the youngest contender in the Game this season. None of that matters, though; I’ve won. I’ve beaten thirty men and teenage boys to take the victory and the spoils of this war.
I stumble toward the men at the perimeter of the fighting ring. They’re all cloaked in black, hard looks on their faces and black ink etched over their cheeks. My hands
tremble at the thought of wearing those same marks. The marks of the Twelve. But I’ve earned them. I’ve earned the right to stand with them and be one of them.
To be free.
“Congratulations, you’ve won the Game,” the Jackal speaks, and I shiver at the cold tones of his voice, so unlike the warmth he usually extends to me.
I nod my head. I want this over with. I want a hot meal and an even hotter shower.
“Welcome to the Twelve. You’re replacing the Hawk. Who do you choose to be?”
Free. I guess a hawk is a good embodiment of freedom, but it feels strange to take a dead man's name, like climbing into his bed with the sheets still warm. I look around at the other men that make up the Twelve. Their names are what they’re known as on the streets, what their gangs cover themselves with as protection and a warning. I could have that too. I could make myself a queen of my own empire. I could rule the streets and never go hungry again.
I could escape the cycle of poverty my mother has left me in.
My eyes land back on the Jackal, and I lift my chin until I no longer feel like I’m looking up at him.
“I am the Wolf.”