Page 104 of Deadly Obsession

I have a feeling he and Noah are together.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Sage asks about ten minutes into the drive.

“Nothing good,” I grumble.

Twenty minutes later, the driver pulls onto the street where I used to ride my bike. We pass familiar homes, many left abandoned. I instruct the driver to park a block away where a few of my soldiers are staked out, watching the property.

I barely recognize the home where I grew up. It’s been condemned for years, and the last time I was even here wasin my early twenties. It holds too many horrible memories. The only reason I haven’t bulldozed it to the ground is because it’s one of the few places I have left of my mother.

Her handwriting remains on door frames when she used to measure mine and Lance’s heights throughout the years. She also loved to paint and draw and decorated my room with snakes and wildlife, because I loved nature shit when I was a kid. Still do. It’s why I have it tattooed all over my body. Lance’s room was decorated in robots and alien drawings because he loved science fiction books and movies.

But the negative memories outweigh the positive ones.

“Stay here a sec,” I say to Sage and get out, my gun drawn. I spot my uncle and approach him. “Report.”

“About six men outside, captured or dead. Six more inside.” He pauses, and I sense he’s leaving something out.

“Say it.”

“It’s Percy... One of the QBM soldiers spotted him in the basement with Noah and Lance. Noah is tied up. Lance was unconscious but appears to be alive.”

My eyes move past my uncle to the rundown three-story home with peeling yellow green paint and dark forest green sidings falling off the walls. Vines snake their way up the sides and the windows are either cracked, broken, or missing.

A ghost of a home with the ghost of the man who abused me inside.

Except, he’s still alive?

“Impossible. How?”

An ache forms in the back of my throat, pressure building behind my eyes. The fucker’s been alive this whole time. I’d always been suspicious of his diagnosis the moment he refused to let us see him on his deathbed.

He faked it all.

But why?

“Elias,” my uncle urges, recognizing I was seconds away from having a mental fucking breakdown.

He’s seen me at my worst. He’s the one who arrived with my father that night twenty years ago and pulled me from my mother’s body. He’s the one who sent my ass to rehab when I tried to drown my new responsibility of taking over the QBM with drugs and booze to the point that I almost died.

My phone rings, and I scramble to answer, hoping it’s my brother saying they somehow escaped and they’re fine. Disappointment sinks in when ‘unknown number’ flashes across the screen. I only give this number out to a select, trusted few so I answer.

“Carter,” a deep voice bellows from the other end.

Lenetti?

How the fuck did he get this number?

“Got a strange call from someone claiming to have Noah. They sent me an address in Fresh Meadows.”

My heart skips a beat, and I swallow to wet my dry throat.

“The fuck did you say?”

“Fresh. Meadows. Got wax in your ears, boy?”

I ignore his condescending words. “What the fuck does that have to do with me?”

“Are you dense? That’s QBM territory. Did you really think you could set me up by sending me to your childhood home?”