Chapter 80

EIGHTY

AMETHYST

The next several seconds are a scramble to put on my clothes. My hands shake so badly I can barely fasten my leather skirt. Even my corset crushes my lungs, forcing my breaths to shallow. I’d completely forgotten about Relaney’s existence until now, assuming the strange woman who lived next door on Parissi Drive was still in prison for the cannabis farm she’d created in her basement.

Xero slips on his suit pants and boots, but his shirt is a lost cause since I ripped it open. He exits the summer house bare-chested and helps me into his car.

Silence stretches out for the tense seconds it takes to exit the vineyard. Each bump in the cobblestones sends jolts through my gut and rattles my nerves. I ball my fists so tightly that it hurts.

Worry gnaws at my insides. I clutch at my chest, not believing those bastards targeted my neighbor just to use her as a pawn in Dolly’s misguided vendetta. Hasn’t Relaney suffered enough?

Xero’s car tears out of the vineyard onto a narrow, winding country lane. He’s struggling to stay composed, but his white knuckles and the veins on his temples telegraph his fury.

The fear that gnaws at my insides fights a losing battle against the anger boiling in my veins. My gaze drops to the phone he left on the center console.

“What’s in the video?” I ask, my voice tight.

“Take a look. Maybe you’ll spot something useful.”

I pick up the phone and click the URL, which directs to a private social media page. My nostrils flare. There’s a reason why Dolly didn’t post publicly. This bullshit would probably get her arrested.

The screen lights up with a POV shot of a man walking into a police precinct and signing over some papers. A door at the back opens, and Relaney steps out, clad in a jumpsuit that hangs off her skinny frame.

My breath catches. She’s barely recognizable without her round glasses, and her blonde afro is now a backcombed mess. Dark circles ring her eyes, and she’s lost so much weight that her facial bones have become even more prominent.

“Who are you?” Relaney asks, her voice wavering.

“A friend of Amethyst Crowley,” replies Locke’s snide voice. “She felt really terrible about your arrest and raised money to get you out of jail.”

My heart plummets into my stomach. I fight back a slew of memories from the asylum to focus on Relaney.

Locke’s hand comes into the frame as he guides her through the precinct and towards its exit. The video cuts to her approaching a black SUV. Its back door opens, revealing a grinning Dolly.

Nausea churns in my gut. I glance away at the sight of her psychotic features, only for the scene to shift to Relaney in her living room, clad only in her underwear and hogtied across the three mattresses on her floor. Tears stream down her pale face, and her lips move but make no sound. The dim lighting casts sinister shadows, accentuating her terror.

The camera pans to Dolly, posing with a knife between two masked men. “Show yourself,” Dolly says. “Or Relaney becomes our next star.”

Guilt presses down on my chest, crushing tighter than any corset. I suck in a trembling breath, but it barely reaches the tops of my lungs. Dolly has completely lost her mind. She’s putting every woman connected to me in danger.

“I’m going to be sick,” I mutter. “Relaney got dragged into this nightmare because of me.”

“No, it’s because my father and Dolly are vicious psychopaths,” Xero replies, his fingers tightening on the steering wheel.

We merge onto the highway, and he picks up speed. Streetlights flash by in a blur of white and yellow. I barely register the passing scenery, my mind flooding with intrusive thoughts.

If I’d continued ignoring Relaney, she would never have become a target. I only stayed over at her house because I thought mine was haunted. Now, her life hangs in the balance.

Tears sting my eyes and blur my vision. “You’re wrong. She got arrested because of me.”

“She was growing cannabis in her basement,” Xero says, his tone gruff, but barely penetrates my fog of guilt.

They only discovered the weed farm because Xero murdered Chappy. If he hadn’t been so psychotically overprotective, then the police wouldn’t have searched her house and arrested Relaney. She would still be surrounded by her strange men.

I shake off that thought. This isn’t Xero’s fault. Not completely. The blame lies with Delta and his cohorts.

Xero places a finger on his Bluetooth earpiece. “Tyler just hacked into police surveillance to obtain their registration. Jynxson and Camila are already en route to intercept Dolly.”

The journey takes forever. Lake Alderney is nearly thirty miles away from my neighborhood and the highway seems to stretch into eternity. The tension inside the car climbs with each passing second, thick enough to make me choke.

Suddenly, Xero’s phone vibrates with a notification, which pierces my heart with an icy shard of trepidation.

“Accept body cam from Jynxson?” I ask, glancing over at Xero, whose gaze is still fixated on the road ahead.

“Do it,” he says.

I tap the YES button and brace myself for what I might see. It’s footage of Jynxson moving behind Camila through a darkened hallway lined with skulls.

“They’re approaching the house from the catacombs,” I say. “Will they be able to access Relaney’s crawlspace?”

He grunts. “Through a hatch.”

It’s probably how Xero entered Relaney’s house whenever I visited. I don’t dwell on that thought for long, because another notification comes up from Tyler. When I accept it, an additional screen appears on the phone, displaying drone footage of Parisii Drive.

“They’ve surrounded Relaney’s house,” I murmur.

As two more notifications bring up screens of operatives approaching my old road via vehicle and on foot, Xero directs them using his Bluetooth headset.

I sit back in the front passenger seat, feeling powerless. Everyone is storming Relaney’s place, and all I can do is watch from a distance.

One of the screens displays footage of someone attacking number 11’s front door with a battering ram. The wood splinters, sending shards flying in all directions. Another figure tosses in a smoke bomb that fills Relaney’s hallway with thick fog.

“Spring team, proceed with caution,” Xero says into his Bluetooth.

I switch to a screen from the drone’s point of view as it hovers above number 11. Its infrared camera picks up heat signatures scrambling around the house. Red figures charge into its interior, while a trio of green markers remain stationary. I can only guess one of them is Relaney.

“What does it mean if a heat signature is green and unmoving?” I murmur.

Xero glances across the front seat at me, his steely gaze softening. “Either they’re tied up, unconscious, or already dead.”

“If they were dead, wouldn’t they be cold?”

He shakes his head, turning his attention back to the road. “A human body can stay warm for at least three hours.”

Choking back a sob, I glance down to the screen, willing Relaney to move. A fresh wave of red figures approaches the building from the catacombs, then they stop moving.

My brow furrows. If Relaney is green, then what color are Dolly and her henchmen?

“What?” Xero roars and clutches his earpiece.

I jerk backward. “What’s happened?”

“It’s Jynxson.”

Heart hammering, I switch to the other screen displaying Jynxson’s body camera. It’s filled with twisted metal and piles of debris.

“All I see is rubble. Is he trapped?” I ask.

“Yes. Rewind,” Xero snarls.

I scroll back the stream of the body camera, passing the footage of rubble, debris, smoke and dust. The image shakes as the feed rewinds, stopping at a moment when Jynxson is still on his feet, charging out of the catacombs and into the concrete tunnel stretching beneath our backyards.

He’s running fast, his breath echoing in the enclosed space. Ahead of him is Camila’s smaller figure. Two people appear from the shadows at the far end of the tunnel. It’s a man and a woman, dressed in identical armor.

In the feed, Camila and Jynxson skid to a halt, then the smaller of the newcomers tosses an object. In the blink of an eye, the speakers fill with the sounds of explosion, and the screen fills with white light.

The body camera feed shakes violently, as if Jynxson is thrown off his feet. Debris falls all around him, obscuring my view of Camila.

“Someone must have thrown a grenade,” I yell. “Jynxson and Camila are trapped.”

Xero leaves the highway, and we speed through the streets. The city becomes a blur as we race toward the house. Xero directs his team through the Bluetooth, his voice terse.

I breathe hard, my gaze fixing on a third screen displaying drone footage of a helicopter hovering over our backyards. If Xero wasn’t busy driving and coordinating his troops, I would ask if this was his rescue team or another threat.

The answer comes when the drone fires on the helicopter, and two figures emerge from a crater in the ground. As the shorter one, who I suspect is Dolly, sprints toward a ladder dangling from the helicopter and ascends, the taller one secures a small, unconscious figure into a rescue harness and attaches it to the ladder’s lower rung.

“They’re escaping,” I say with a gasp.

The drone follows the helicopter, displaying footage of the man climbing the ladder after his smaller colleague, then reaching the top where he helps hoist the unconscious figure into the aircraft. The cabin crew pulls them in before turning gunfire on the drone until it spirals into a free-fall, the feed whirling before blinking out completely.

“They shot the drone,” I rasp. “And they took someone into a helicopter.”

“It’s Camila,” he grits out. “They’ve abducted my little sister.”