Page 96 of A Love Most Fatal

The first of the bodies is face-down in the dirt, a puddle like oil spread out beneath him.

“Split up,” I say. “You two take the basement and the first two floors, we’ll search the perimeter and floors three to five.”

Leo and Mary nod before taking off quietly behind the building.

I give Nate one more long look. He is trying not to look at the body we just passed, already looking queasy. This is monumentally fucked, but he’s the one who said he could do this, and I would like to believe him.

I incline my head to the gate. We traipse around the building until reaching the front entrance. We step through one of the empty windows and I try not to shush Nate for walking so loudly, but I do give a pointed look at his feet and he tries to move a little quieter.

“Basement is clear,” Leo says through my earpiece.

“Two of ours dead on one,” Mary reports.

We make our way up the stairwell, which is markedly darker than the rest of the building for the lack of windows. It’s only thesound of our sneakers on the concrete steps for two full flights, when we hear a stairwell door above us slam shut.

Nate curses under his breath.

I hold down the little button on the earpiece to make sure it’s on. “Someone’s on one of the upper floors,” I murmur.

Lurking around a building at night with guns and tech is the most spy-like part of the job, but it feels more like walking through a haunted house than anything else. Like the worst part of a horror movie, where you just want the main character to turn back and go home, but they don’t, and we can’t either. Nate was right that I try to avoid this at all costs—lackeys are great for this kind of thing. Eager to do it, too.

We keep climbing the stairs until we reach the fourth landing. It’s better to catch them unawares than to be caught unawares, so I shoulder the door open quickly and aim my gun ahead of me. I don’t see anyone, just piles of construction supplies on the floor and a layer of dust visible in the moonlight.

At least it’s not a cloudy night.

“No bodies on four, heading to five,” I mutter just loud enough that the earpiece will pick it up.

We do a lap of the floor and take the other stairwell to the next. Nate is still behind me, holding his gun with two hands and trying not to be obvious about how much he’s shaking. I would speak comforting words to him if I thought it would help or if I was sure that no one would hear me.

The fifth floor immediately shows more life than the fourth, not least of all the drips of red on the concrete floor and the sounds of struggle around the corner.

I use my watch to text “five” to Leo and Mary before creeping towards the sounds following the path of blood.

It smells acrid up here, something sharp that I can’t put my finger on. It fills my nose and makes it itch, and it gets stronger as we approach.

Nate stays behind me and now I really am wishing I told him to stay in the car, but it’s much too late for that now.

I take a long breath through my nose as quietly as possible before quickly turning the corner and pointing my gun at the sound.

It’s Rafael taped up, nearly hanging out of the gaping hole that should be a window. A long strip of black duct tape covers his mouth and around the back of his head, and he makes frantic noises trying to wiggle away from the window.

He’s alone.

I do a further sweep of the area, which yields no one before Nate and I grab Raf and pull him away from the window. As we do, it becomes apparent that the rope tying his middle is attached to something dangling outside the building, something heavy. When I peer over the edge, it looks like a gas canister.

Nate pulls the tape down from his mouth as I get to work cutting the rope attached to his middle.

“What happened?” I ask. Raf is bleeding from a wound in his leg, a gunshot if I had to guess, and he’s peed himself.

“I thought I was alone,” he explains, nearly hyperventilating. “No less than three cars drove off in a hurry, so I was sure that was it, but then?—”

He’s cut off by the sound of a loud bang on the floor above us, one that rings so loud in my earpiece I have to take it out for fear it’s going to destroy my hearing forever.

I turn to Nate and give him the knife I’d been using to cut the rope.

“Get him downstairs,” I say.

“What about you?” Nate grabs my wrist. “You can’t go alone.”