Chapter 1

ONE

TAVISH

Sometimes I wonder if the people I’m watching have any idea that their life is about to turn to shit.

Like are they just going around, being absolutely miserable assholes and thinking, “Boy, I bet I’m going to live a long fucking life while destroying the lives of people around me”? Or are they paranoid someone’s going to put a bullet in the back of their head and end their miserable existence like they’ve done to all the innocent people they’ve destroyed?

Let’s take this asshole here, for example. He’s beaming at everyone he’s talking to because they have absolutely no damn idea how many people he’s terrorized before murdering them.

He just smiles and they laugh and laugh as he passes their cat or dog back to them. He probably started killing little animals, many do, and it’s likely why he went into the veterinary field, so he had access to unwanted pets.

What a sick fuck.

But after today, he’ll never have to worry again.

Well… I assume today. There’s always the chance that I’ll fuck up and he’ll slice and dice my ass up first.

An older woman heads toward the clinic and he just fucking jumps up and rushes over to hold the door for her and her giant dog, probably assessing whether or not she’s worth killing. She seems to be a bit old for his tastes. He likes them significantly younger.

So I sit in my car and wait and watch until the final client heads home for the night, leaving only him, the vet he works for, and some other vet techs.

I’ve noticed that he takes the trash out every night before heading to his car, so I start my car and move it to a different road where no one will see as I drag him over to it. The trunk is all ready, a beautiful first-class ride reserved just for him.

Then I wait and watch. And when he heads out through the back door, I’m already walking toward him.

He lifts the lid of the large metal dumpster as I get close, and it’s like something in him tells him that I’m coming. He hesitates before leaning back to look at me. Has his desire to hunt made him more proactive? More paranoid?

But I’ve watched him long enough to know that he’ll put on a good act for me.

“Heya!” he calls, sounding irritatingly cheerful as I walk up.

“Evening,” I say. “My car stalled, and I saw you out here.”

I point at it and his dark brown eyes shift over to where my car is parked. From what I’ve read up on him, he’s twenty-eight and is half Latino on his mother’s side, but I couldn’t find much else out about him. He’s probably been doing his best to keep his head down so he doesn’t draw any attention. Clearly, he wasn’t careful enough.

“Oh! You need a phone to call someone? Or you need a ride? I’d be happy to give you a ride.”

I’m sure you would. But you’re sorely mistaken if you think you’re going to end my life.

I plaster a smile on my face, laying into my accent which weirdly makes people gravitate toward me. “Would you really? That’d save me so much trouble, you don’t even understand,” I say as I reach out, grab the back of his head, and slam it right into the side of the dumpster. Dazed, he stumbles back before he reaches for something—does he have a gun or weapon on him?—but he doesn’t have time to before I slide an arm around his neck.

I squeeze it tightly, so he’s well aware that I am in control of this situation, as I press a gun against his head.

“There are only two ways this will go,” I say as he looks up at me, stunned. I bet he never fathomed his prior deeds would catch up to him. “You’re going to be so motherfucking quiet not even a damn owl will hear you or?—”

He’s tense, trying to figure out how to get the upper hand in this situation as I hear the back door opening. I drag him fast to the back of the dumpster where I crouch down, pulling him with me, so neither of us can be seen as I listen to the sound of someone’s shoes crunching on the gravel as they make their way over.

Why the fuck is someone else coming out here? Can he not even take the trash out correctly?

I press my mouth against his ear. “If you make a fucking peep , I will put a bullet right into this head of yours. You wouldn’t enjoy that, would you?”

He’s frozen in place, not even choosing to answer how much he wouldn’t enjoy that. I can hear footsteps as I try to think about what I’ll do if he does call out. My client wants him alive, hoping he’ll tell him what he did with the body of my client’s daughter, but if he shouts out, I can’t let him go. And I don’t necessarily want to shoot anyone else. Although, I can threaten them with ease and likely won’t have to harass a bystander.

They’re getting closer as we remain pressed up against the back of the dumpster. One of my hands is clamped over his mouth, my other still on the gun. He’s frozen in place, eyes wide. Maybe he’s concerned that if he does call out, I’ll reveal all of his nasty secrets for others to hear. There’d be no coming back from that. This man doesn’t live in the shadows like I do. He can’t just “disappear” if his secrets are revealed. He has a house here, a family, he has so much shit that he would never recover even if the police couldn’t pin all of the deaths on him.

The dumpster lid opens, and I hear the bag of trash fall in it before it slams back shut.

His eyes are darting around, he’s thinking as fast as he can, aware that his one chance at life is getting farther and farther from him.

I dig the gun into the side of his head, prepared to remind him why making even a fucking peep is a horrible idea.

And then the person is gone.

“Bravo, splendid job on keeping your head from having one extra hole in it,” I say. “Now off we go. We have a date with Death.”

I have to stop cupping his mouth to give him a little shove. I need to drag him along to the car before someone notices he’s missing and starts looking for him.

“W-Why?” he chokes out.

“Just take a wild guess,” I say. I love it when they act so confused. Like they have absolutely no idea that what they’ve done to so many others could happen to them. But men like this… men who kill for sport think they’re gods who could never be touched.

“P-Please,” he whispers.

“Did you stop when they begged? Did you ever listen to their cries? Or did you just enjoy them? Trust me, I’m going to like it when you cry,” I say as I reach the car where the trunk is already open and ready. I pick up the tape and wrap it over his mouth. Then I shove him forward and start taping his hands behind his back. I get them nice and tight before tipping him into the trunk so I can work on his ankles.

Panic starts to set in now and he begins to flail and thrash. Did he finally realize what’s going to happen to him?

There’s plastic in the trunk so he doesn’t get blood anywhere from where his head had smacked against the metal dumpster, but it makes a noisy racket as he flails about.

There’s so much mumbling and a decent amount of thrashing as I tip him the rest of the way into the trunk and slam it shut. I’ve removed any possible way for him to get out, so I get into the front seat, pleased with a job well done.

He explodes in the trunk, kicking up a storm, making it bounce all over the place.

“Now, now, no sense in wasting energy. I have a quick stop to make, and we’ll be on our way!”

He oddly doesn’t seem as thrilled by this as I am. I guess with death waiting at the end of the ride, I don’t blame him. Karma truly is a bitch.

The drive is rather short and when I arrive, I park right in front of the building I need to go into since the street is pretty quiet this time of night.

It’s a detective agency called Wellstone, which is owned by my nemesis as well as the man of my dreams.

The real issue with this situation is that my nemesis is married to the man of my dreams. But sooner or later, that sexy man has to realize what a grave error he’s committed. There must be some level of confusion for him to have chosen to marry such an obnoxious man.

I strut up to the front door, pretending not to notice the way my car is bouncing about and hoping that no one driving by takes notice of it.

“That… seems concerning,” Jackson, the man of my dreams, says as he opens the door and looks out at my car.

“What the absolute fuck?” Leland, my nemesis, growls as he comes rushing out and looks at the trunk. “What the fuck did you do and not invite me to?”

I scoff at the very idea. “Why the hell would I invite a weasel like yourself?”

The man gasps, like I’ve possibly said something wrong when I’ve said something a whole lot right. Especially when it comes to that dreadful man whose goal seems to be irritating me.

I met Jackson and Leland on a mission I was hired to do a while back. While they were both working as private investigators at that time, it didn’t take long at all to realize that Leland wasn’t your typical PI. When he wasn’t busy being an absolute irritant, he was quite skilled.

Not that I would ever tell him that.

Leland grumbles some more. “You know I love abducting people and throwing them in trunks. You would dare deprive me of that and come here to irritate me? I even have a song for it.”

“Jackson called me here,” I say as I waggle my eyebrows at Jackson. Oddly enough, the handsome man ignores it. It’s simply because he doesn’t know what he’s missing out on. He has absolutely no idea how much better life could be with someone who isn’t so strange.

“He needed some information from Cassel, which is why he’s here,” Jackson clarifies as he holds out an envelope that I take as the car gets bouncing real fucking good.

“Do you have a fucking mountain lion in there?” Leland asks.

“Serial killer,” I say.

Delight spreads across Leland’s face. Too bad I can’t delight Jackson like that. “Ooh, what are you going to do with him? Are you going to hunt him down? Chase him? Call him bad names? I am the master of torture timez if you’d like some pointers. I can actually volunteer to torture him for you.”

“If I wanted to torture him, I would simply make him talk to you,” I inform him.

Leland is beaming now, but it looks rather feral. “Oh? Too bad the man you wanna peruse with your eyeballs loves hearing me talk,” he says as he wraps Jackson up in a hug. “He loves my jokes and my body and every part of me.” Then he kisses him rather loudly on the cheek, making me narrow my eyes at the display.

It does make me rather concerned that my taste in men needs some work. It’s really not that I’m that interested in Jackson. It’s that anytime I’ve declared I am, it irritates the hell out of Leland, which gives me a lot of enjoyment.

“So… I’m minorly worried about what you do plan to do with him,” Jackson says.

“The guy who hired me wants to have a chat with him. He’s hopeful that he can find out where he buried his daughter,” I explain.

“Tell him if he’d like him to suffer, you know a man,” Leland says, pointing both thumbs at himself. “I will set him loose on my thousand-acre farm and hunt him down.”

“You don’t have a thousand-acre farm,” Jackson states.

“Yeah, but I’ve been thinking about getting one so I can hunt down our future enemies. I would invite Tavish over with the promise of seeing your naked booty, and then I would hunt him down and watch him cry when he realized that there was no Jackson booty for him because your booty is all mine.”

Of course he would. “Someday, the trauma you’ve inflicted on this man will wear off and he’ll realize he’s better off with a bear like me instead of a little weasel like you,” I say as the car kicks up a good bounce.

Leland gets in real close, eyes scrutinizing me. I’m not a dumb enough man to deny that he could kick my ass if he chose to, but I stand my ground and enjoy his reaction to my goading. Cannot look like a weasel now, can I?

“Jackson loves the way I taint him. Dontcha, babe? Dontcha love my tainting?”

“Yes, I love your tainting,” Jackson says, sounding like a robot.

Leland is thrilled by this. “Tell him how hard you like to be tainted.”

“So fucking hard.”

“Yeah? Just how hard?”

“Like as hard as hard gets.”

“That’s right.” Leland is pleased.

I laugh. “Sounds like you’re tweaking the poor man’s nuts if he’s not reciting your ludicrous shit just the way you want it.”

“Oh, I’ll tweak his nuts, all right. I’ll tweak them so fucking good.”