2

Adam’s brows made a run for his hairline at the venom in the boy’s voice. “I don’t even know you, Noah. What could I have done to make you want to kill me?”

Noah’s eyes went wide, mouth contorting. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

Nope. “Should I?”

“Have you killed so many people that you really can’t remember your victims?”

Yeah. Pretty much. He didn’t plan on sharing that with Noah. Besides, if Noah had been one of Adam’s victims, he wouldn’t still be drawing air into his lungs. “Who is it you think I killed?”

“My father, Wayne Holt.”

Adam closed his eyes, letting his brain file through his numerous past victims, plucking the details as he found the name. Wayne Holt, fifty-one years old, serial predator responsible for the assault and murder of at least fifteen children under the age of ten. Had somehow managed to avoid detection for three decades. Police could never find enough evidence to charge him. Luckily, Adam’s people had better resources. And a much swifter form of justice.

A shock of awareness hit him as he realized he did know the boy, though years had passed. Wayne Holt had been one of Adam’s first kills. Number three, maybe? Roughly a couple of weeks after Adam’s sixteenth birthday. The boy was maybe ten at the time. Adam quickly did the math. Yeah, it gelled. It could definitely be the boy who’d stepped out of the shadows that night, calling out timidly for his father, ending Adam’s fun almost before it had started.

Thomas had been furious that he hadn’t checked for witnesses in the house, but he’d been so excited, so ready to remind Wayne Holt of every single victim and the pain he’d left in his wake. If Noah was truly that boy, there was a very good chance he’d also been a victim.

“Your father was a monster, Noah. Deep down, I think you know that.”

Once more, the gun waved wildly. “Fuck you. You don’t know shit about my father.”

“But I do. I can prove it to you, if that’s what you need. But I don’t think you want to see what I’ve seen. Some things can never be erased.”

“Shut up! You’re full of shit. You’re a…serial killer. You have that bored fuckboi act down, but, really, you’re the fucking monster.”

Adam sighed. What the fuck was he supposed to do about this? About him? He couldn’t kill him. Well, he could. But he wouldn’t. He knew that, deep down. He couldn’t kill him the first night he’d seen him and he certainly couldn’t do it now while he was grieving his father. This was clearly something Noah had been thinking about for a really long time. But he also didn’t want to die tonight.

“You have three options, Noah. You can just walk away and I pretend this never happened. I can make a phone call and show you who your father really was and ruin every happy memory you ever had of him.” Adam closed the distance between them, gripping the gun’s barrel and pressing it to his own forehead. “Or you can pull the trigger and kill me. None of those things will change the truth. Your father was a pedophile and a child killer.”

This close, Adam could see Noah’s deep brown eyes, red rimmed and wet with tears, the freckles dotting his skin, dirt smudging his cheeks and chin. Underneath the anger and the hunger, he was rather unique looking, nothing like the parade of pampered debutantes he was forced to endure every day to maintain his cover.

“What’s it going to be, Noah?” he asked softly. “I really hope it's option one.”

The boy’s eyes darted around the empty warehouse frantically, vibrating with enough energy Adam could feel it in the metal pressed to his skin.

“Make your call,” Noah finally said, sounding miserable. “On speaker phone,” he added. “So I can hear you.”

Adam sighed. “Noah—”

“Do it,” he snapped, cutting off Adam’s plea.

When Noah lowered the gun, Adam took his hands from his hoodie pocket, leaving the knife where it was so he could slowly reach into his back pocket. He extracted his phone and hit the first name in his frequent contacts.

“What’s up, buttercup?”

The female voice on the other end of the line was surprisingly chipper for eleven o’clock at night.

“We’re on an open channel,” he warned.

Calliope wasn’t the kind of girl you put on speakerphone. The sound of long nails furiously typing over keys halted abruptly. “Oh-kay. What’s going on? Are you in trouble? If you’re in trouble again Adam—”

“Open. Channel,” he reminded, cutting off her rant. “I need you to do me a favor. Can you access some information?”

“Does the tin man have a metal dick?”

Adam frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Sometimes, I hate this job,” she muttered. “What do you need?”

“I need you to send me the evidence file for Wayne Holt.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Why? That case is over a decade old.”

“Just do it. Everything.”

“Even the—”

“Yeah, even that,” Adam snapped before taking a deep breath and letting it out. “Sorry, Cali. It’s been a long night. Can you please send it?”

“Yeah. You got it, dollface. Give me five.”

With that, she disconnected, leaving Adam and the boy far closer without a gun barrel between them. “You should go,” Adam said, his voice pleading. “You don’t want to see what we’ve seen. I promise you, we had more than enough evidence to convict your father.”

Noah’s face contorted, almost like Adam’s words caused physical pain. “Then why didn’t you go to the cops?”

“Your father was good at covering his tracks. The police have to worry about warrants and chain of custody. My people don’t. We just have to find the truth.”

“We? Who even are you? You aren’t much older than me. You were barely old enough to drive when you killed my dad. I’ve done my research. What idiot would hire a kid to kill an adult?”

“Nobody hired me. This isn’t a job. I don’t have benefits and a 401k. Please, Noah. Just go.”

Adam’s phone chirped. He flicked to his email and the encrypted file blinking at the bottom of it. “Last chance.”

Noah snatched the phone from Adam and stabbed a finger against the play button. Adam turned away. He couldn’t watch the video again or the boy’s reaction to it. Luckily, the video had no sound. Hearing Noah’s reaction was bad enough. The way he sucked in a sharp breath, the strangled cry that sounded like a wounded animal, and, finally, vomit splashing onto the concrete as Noah lost the contents of his stomach.

Adam fought the urge to comfort him. What the fuck would he even say? Hallmark didn’t make ‘sorry your dad was a piece of shit’ cards. Though, given the prevalence of shit dads out there, maybe they were really missing out on something. He turned back around and gently took his phone back. It slipped easily from the boy’s fingers. “He’s not worth your tears or your vengeance. Even if he never touched you. He needed to go. I’m sorry you got hurt in the process.”

Noah glowered at him. “Yeah, I’m sure it’ll keep you up at night.”

Adam just stared as the boy turned and walked away, shoulders slumped, head down. He reminded Adam of a dog who’d been beaten.

Noah’s face was a constant companion on Adam’s walk home and even hours later as he lay in bed. What had happened to him after his father died? Was he fed? Did he have a roof over his head? Was he somewhere alone, two seconds away from swallowing a bullet?

Adam knew better than anybody that childhood trauma came back to haunt you at the most inopportune moments, in the most incongruous ways. And once somebody turned the key on that part of the brain where those memories lived, it was almost impossible to stuff them back down again.

When the sun came up, Adam hadn’t slept a wink. He ground his palms into his eyes until sparks danced behind his lids. He was supposed to meet his father and Atticus at the club for breakfast. He knew he should tell them about Noah. They needed to know that someone out there knew who Adam really was. But he didn’t want to tell them. He didn’t want to tell anyone. Some weird part of him wanted to keep Noah all to himself.