Page 22 of Drag You Down (Bloody Desires #2)

GAbrIEL

I t’s light outside when Ichabod wakes me with his loud purring directly in front of my face, kneading my chest with his paws.

That’s his way of waking me up and demanding food. I groan and roll away from him?—

And immediately notice the problem.

There’s nobody else in the bed with me. I sit up and look at the spot Levi had been in last night.

Completely empty. A glance around the room reveals that his clothes are gone too.

“Levi?” I call out. “Little lamb?”

No response.

Maybe he got dressed and is sitting with coffee in the living room.

Except there’s no smell of coffee, and when I go out there, still completely naked, I’m met with an empty living room.

I stand, staring, completely dumbfounded.

He’d agreed to stay. He’d said that, right? He wanted me, he wanted what I offered him. He wanted me to take care of him.

No, he needs me to take care of him.

And here’s more proof. A rational person wouldn’t have left in the middle of the night, especially not when the alternative to this luxury is a shitty apartment in a rundown part of the city.

Ichabod rubs his head against my feet, reminding me that he still needs to be fed.

I glance at the automatic feeder, which still has plenty of dry food in it.

“Spoiled,” I grumble out of habit as I get the can of wet food and serve it to him. He immediately buries his nose in the food bowl.

I notice my wallet sitting out on the kitchen counter. When I open it, all my credit cards are still there, and none of the cash has been taken.

Levi left without taking anything? My worry ratchets up. If he’d taken money, I would at least know that he could make it back to that apartment. But without cash and no phone, how far could he even have gotten?

I go back to my bedroom to pull on clothes as fast as I can. I probably need a shower, but I don’t have time for that.

Once I’m dressed, I call Dom.

He picks up after the second ring. “This had better be the biggest emergency of your life,” Dom growls. “I had a long fucking day yesterday?—”

“I lost my lamb,” I say, then quickly correct myself, “The boy I had with me last night. Levi. He left. I need to find him.”

There’s a long silence on the other end. “Wait. You hooked up with somebody and he left? He did a walk of shame on you?” He starts laughing. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

My vision grows hazy with fury, and I wonder if anybody would miss Dom. If I carved him up and left his corpse in a ditch, or bury it in the woods… Just another dead cop. Who cares?

But while the police in New Bristol never seem to care about protecting the innocent, they go all out in protecting and avenging their own.

I can’t afford the hassle.

“It’s not funny,” I snarl at him. “He had no money and no phone. He doesn’t know the area.”

“Whoa. Chill,” Dom says, no longer laughing. “Hate to break it to you, Gabe, but some guy voluntarily leaving your bedroom isn’t a crime.”

Yes, it is , I think, but I have enough sense not to say that out loud.

“I know. But I’m worried about him. He’s… innocent. Naive. The city won’t treat him right.”

The only one who can treat him right is me. He’s mine.

Dom sighs loudly. “Okay, if you’re hung up on him, figure out where he might have gone and go there? I’m not at work right now, and I won’t go into work right now. I deserve at least another five hours of sleep. But if you don’t find him by the time my shift starts, I’ll try to help.”

That’s as much as I’ll get out of him.

He’s useless. He’d deserve to be cut apart, piece by piece, while he screams and begs for forgiveness. I’d teach him exactly how insignificant he is in comparison to Levi.

But I still need him as a friend.

He’s the only person I can currently call a friend.

“Okay. Thank you,” I say reluctantly. “I’m going to go look for him.”

He can’t have gotten far, right? But if he was trying to get back to Zachariah’s apartment building, he’d have to go south.

I flip my phone over to the pictures of Levi I’ve taken. Some are from when I was surveilling his apartment, and a few are from last night while he was asleep.

He’s so beautiful. He’s so good.

Everybody will want to tear him apart.

Well, they can’t have him. He’s mine.

If anybody touched him last night, I’m going to cut them apart, bone by bone. They’ll feel every single moment of their sins before they die.

I might need to buy more bone saws.

I waffle for a moment—too long, too long—before deciding I’m better off searching by car. Even with the morning traffic, I’ll be faster by car than on foot, and I need a way to restrain Levi and keep him with me once I do find him.

The obvious choice is to search the roads to his apartment building. I set my phone up to show me the camera feeds in his apartment, then I start driving.

At the first light, I scroll back through the feeds just to be sure Levi didn’t make it back yet. I notice his sister entering and exiting the apartment multiple times. That’s more often in one evening than she’d done in most of the past week.

Ten minutes ago, she’d gone into Zachariah’s apartment.

I don’t think Levi is home yet.

A car honks behind me, reminding me to keep driving. I step on the gas, for all the good that does me.

I need to call in sick to work. I’ll tell them I’m working from home. It’s not like it makes much of a difference. Day trading can be done anywhere, and if some client doesn’t earn an extra fifty thousand dollars today, who cares?

My eyes scan the sidewalks, hoping to find some sign of Levi, but it’s the usual crowd of men in business suits, women in expensive dresses, and the couriers zipping past them. Levi would stand out among them.

I get frustrated when I reach the bridge. I’d hoped to find Levi before I crossed the bridge. I need to decide if I want to expand my search here or try closer to his apartment.

In the end, traffic decides that for me. There’s no quick way to redirect myself, so I continue onto the bridge. The morning traffic is slow but steady, everybody crawling along at fifteen miles per hour. I glance at my phone again, but there’s no more movement in the apartment halls.

I growl in frustration, and I imagine how I’m going to gut Zachariah when I reach the apartment, never mind whether Levi is there or not.

I’ll do it in that basement of his, the one that had Levi so scared.

And then, as the clouds part to let in a bit more sunlight, I spot Levi walking on the sidewalk of the bridge.

My heart beats faster and my mouth goes dry.

My lamb.

I pull my car into the sliver of a shoulder the bridge has and park, quickly hitting the off switch. I jump out, slamming the car door behind me, and jog the short distance to Levi.

Cars start honking, but I don’t care.

“Little lamb!” I shout as I close the gap between us. “Levi!”

Levi stops in his tracks and turns to face me, his arms coming protectively against his chest. I don’t know what to make of his expression, but I can see him swallow hard as he looks at me. “Gabriel,” he whispered. “You came.”

He looks completely disheveled, his hair pointing in every direction, his clothes wrinkled and filthy. He doesn’t come toward me, so I close the distance between us instead.

“Of course I came,” I say, pulling him into my arms. “You scared me, little lamb.”

“I didn’t mean to,” he says. His entire body is trembling, and I rub my hand along his back.

“Did anyone touch you?” I demand, feeling for new injuries.

The only thing I can feel are the scars he still bears from Zachariah’s “penance.”

“No,” he says quickly. “No, everyone was really nice.”

Everyone .

“Who is everyone?” I ask. I have to raise my voice because of all the damn honking.

“The people under the—” he begins, only to shake his head. “Never mind. I’m fine. I got lost, that’s all.”

Of course he did. He’s still innocent, still in need of my protection and care.

“Well, I’ve found you.” I smile at him. “Let’s go home. You need another shower. I’ll pamper you. I’m sure Ichabod wants to cuddle with you, too.”

“I can’t go home with you,” Levi says, not smiling back at me. “Eve is going to be frantic.”

I think back to how often she’d been going in and out of the apartment in the surveillance footage.

“She won’t even notice,” I say. “She’s busy with Zachariah, I’m sure.”

Levi recoils from me, but his eyes narrow. “Of course she’ll notice. I’m never gone like this. She worries if I’m gone for a few hours.”

“She doesn’t worry when you’ve been whipped bloody,” I say harshly.

There are people yelling in the background now, the ever-present noise of New Bristol.

“You don’t know anything about her,” he says, every bit as fiercely. “You don’t know anything about me .”

I meet his gaze. “I know that you are too good for this world, Levi. I know you’ve been taken advantage of all your life. I know that you’re being abused. I know that you’re afraid of the dark.”

“I’m not being taken advantage of or abused!” he retorts, his voice raising in volume. We’re attracting more attention from people on the bridge, who are slowing down to look at the spectacle. He takes a step back, away from me. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m not.” I grab his wrist. “Zachariah Carpenter is a con man, Levi. He went by the name Joshua Baker before. I have a paper trail of several other names he used. He had a cult out near Calamity City fifteen years ago. It looks like he decided to run the same scam again.”

He tries to pull away from me, but I only tighten my grasp on his wrist. “That isn’t true. You’re trying to make me doubt, and it isn’t going to work.”

“If he’s such a great man, why do all of you live in poverty while he has all the luxuries?” I ask. “Why does he have several wives? Not legal wives, of course. Polygamy is illegal in this state. What does God say about breaking the law like that?”

“You don’t know anything about what God says,” he retorts. For once, he doesn’t seem to have a bible verse at the ready. “You act like you do, but you don’t understand.”