Page 15 of Rogue's Path

“Everything will be ready. You don’t have to worry. We won’t let anything happen to your women.” Havoc plays nice.

“It better not. If Dahlia gets so much as a paper cut, you’ll be begging me to kill you.”

***

“Why did we take this job?” I ask as soon as we step out onto the brick sidewalk.

“Lots of money. And a lack of fear.” Havoc is lying through his teeth.

“Hopefully, Vex’s wife isn’t as much trouble as they seem to think.” Because if she is, we might have just signed our own death certificates.

“What do you think is up with that kid?” Havoc looks towards the lanky kid from before.

Everett is walking down the other side of the street, playing with a phone like every other teenager in existence.

“He’s smart. Smarter than they want us to know.” Which is saying something.

“Wanna go recruiting?”

Recruiting… Havoc means steal him from the Deathadders. “Sounds like fun.”

We walk over.

“Hey, Everett. I’m Havoc, President of The Children of Chaos Motorcycle Club, which also owns Chaos Rides. We were wondering if you would like a job.”

The kid stops and stares at us. “Doing what exactly?”

Havoc gives me the look.

What could we have a smart kid do that he wouldn’t find boring? “Learn to build the most unique custom bikes on this side of the country. We teach our interns every step of the process, from design all the way to fabrication.”

“Not interested. I already have an internship. And my boss doesn’t take kindly to poaching.”

“Maddox would be fine with it,” Havoc lies with a straight face.

“He’s not my boss. Rage Vincenti is.”

The billionaire mob heir? Poaching this kid sounds like a very bad idea. Almost as bad as protecting Vex’s wife.

Next time Maddox calls, Havoc better not answer.

Why Is He Here?

Dylan

When I left Dahlia’s house a few hours ago to get ready for the evening’s festivities, it was a tranquil space. Now it’s a buzz with life and happy chatter. Dahlia mentioned she’d invited friends to go on this wild evening of bar hopping and challenges, but I never imagined she’d have made this many friends in Urbium in such a short time. Half of them I know from our writing group. The other half, if I had to guess, are a mixture of old money and attitude, which shouldn’t work. Somehow, the tight glittery dresses and stilettos go really well with the pearls and diamonds around their throats.

A room full of vastly different women begs to become a mystery novel. All we need is one person to die. Probably by poison, since women love to use it.

The oddly happy one in the fifties floral dress coated in sequins could sip her glass of water with cucumber in it and suddenly start choking. The glass slips from her fingers, shattering into a million pieces as she clutches her chest, foaming at the mouth. Her carefully applied lipstick never smudges as she dies in front of our eyes while the killer silently crows about finally exacting her revenge.

Trite. Complete garbage.

Maybe it’s the other one that dies. The odd one who’s taking notes at a party. She’s pretty in a different way from the rest of the women. Her body is a mixture of angles and points.Like someone forgot to smooth out the edges when they put her together. Yet when she moves in just the right direction, all those angles shift and form these breathtaking shapes that photographers long to capture. Her death would be subtle. Maybe a build-up of poison over many days. She hasn’t been sleeping well or eating well, but she pushed herself to come to the party only to have her system finally give out as she walks to the bathroom.

The group would rush to her side, shimmering around her like a disco ball, reflecting the light as it fades away from her eyes. All of us would be suspects even as we wailed over her still corpse. Her beauty lost forever from the world because of the information found in that silly zebra notebook. She knew it was important, so she concealed it in a secret code that could only be cyphered after finding the key, which she hid under a floorboard in Dahlia’s library.

The book would definitely spend some time there. I need a library in my house. All of my guestrooms are empty. If I ever finished decorating them for company, people might think I want to see them. Or them to see me…