Page 180 of Dance of Devils

A rough hand grabs the back of my hair, shoving me down to my hands and knees on the blacktop, a cold, furious, all-too-familiar voice snarling in my ear.

“Miss me,bitch?”

I scream as James yanks me up by the hair and shoves me toward the open trunk of a car.

“I think we’ve got alotof catching up to do, don’t you?”

I scream again as he shoves me into the trunk and slams it shut, drowning me in darkness as terror rips me apart.

44

KIR

I bracemyself as I take the corner so fast that the Aston Martin almost goes up on two wheels. The car fishtails, my lips pulling into a snarl as I wrestle control back and gun the engine, hurtling toward Greenpoint.

They say bad things happen in threes. The first was the call from the guy I’d been paying to keep an eye on James in the oilfields in northern Canada. His early reports, when James first arrived, brought nothing but smiles to my face: James had gotten the shit kicked out of him on day one for not respecting the pecking order in the chow line, then gotten his ass beatthe next day, too, when word started to get around that he was a predatory sex pest.

Delightful tales involving various other oil workers kicking the shit out of him kept up for the last couple of weeks. Then, twenty minutes ago, I got a call that didnotput a smile on my face at all.

Apparently, James’ beatings got so bad that he was sent to the infirmary. And twenty-four hours later, the doctor realizedJames wasn’t there anymore.

I tried to tell myself that New York would be the last place that fucker would come, being that he barely escaped charges for propositioning a minor—who’snotactually a minor, but he doesn’t know that.

But that was before thesecondcall I got, from Maya, Brooklyn’s friend from The Mirage. She’s the one who filled me in that Brooklyn had come to see her, and that they’d planned to get drinks after Maya’s shift, but then Brooklyn had vanished, and when Maya went looking for her, she’d found her phone cracked on the pavement in the back parking lot next to some tire skid-marks.

Venom and fire roar through my veins as I scream around another corner, blast through a stop sign, and screech to a stop behind The Mirage.

Bad things come in threes…

If he’s hurt her…if he’s touchedone fucking hair on her head…

I shut off the engine and jump out of the car.

“Kir?!”

I’ve only met Maya once, when I went to her apartment looking for Brooklyn. But I can tell instantly that she cares about Brooklyn almost as much as I do. She looks freaked the fuckoutas she sprints over to me from the back door.

“Right there,” she blurts, pointing to a spot on the blacktop. “Some of the girls in the dressing room said she’d gone outside to make a call, but that’s where I found her phone.” She looks up at me with wild, pleading eyes. “I don’t know what…I don’t…oh myGod?—”

“Breathe,” I growl, forcing calm that I don’t feel into my voice. “Did you ever know James?”

Maya’s face says it all.

“Yeah,” she hisses. “I knew the motherfucker. But I heard he was dodging something gross like trying to pick up a minor and ran to Siberia or something?

“The Yukon,” I growl. “And he’s not there anymore.”

Her face pales. “What?”

“He left the mining camp he was hiding out at, and….” I glance down at the tire marks on the ground before my gaze locks with Maya’s.

“You think this wasJames?!” she blurts, horrified.

“I think if you knowanythingabout him, you need to tell me.Now,” I growl. Then I point to the camera over the back door. “Does that work?”

Maya nods. “Yeah. Come on.”

In the office, she calls up the footage and rewinds it. My blood turns to acid and her breath catches as we watch that piece of shit sucker-punch Brooklyn in the stomach twice, then drag her over to the car and shove her into the trunk.