Page 1 of Whips and Chains (Saint View Murder Squad #2)

VIOLET

“ T hree…”

My heart thumped against my chest, terror climbing its way up my throat. I stumbled, my back hitting the cold steel wall of the abandoned warehouse.

The man came at me, his footsteps faster and faster. Bloodied knife still clutched in white-knuckled fingers.

“Toby!” It was a desperate plea to my best friend. A feeble attempt to snap him out of the instinct that had convinced him only one of us could make it out of this alive.

It did no good.

Tears streamed down his dirt-smudged face, but he didn’t see me.

He didn’t see Violet, the girl he’d made it through high school with.

He didn’t see the woman who’d sat on the couch beside him for the best part of his twenties, eating candy and watching Grey’s Anatomy until we both knew every scene word for word.

All he saw was survival.

All he heard was the unknown, unseen threat that whispered in his ears from speakers hidden high above our heads, promising his death if he didn’t kill.

“Two…” the distorted, robotic voice taunted us.

I twisted, trying to get away, but there was nowhere to go. No safety to be seen in dark corners. No one coming to save me. No one to hear me scream.

Toby grabbed my arm, the deadly knife between us, covered in blood from the man who’d already lost his life tonight and now lay headless in a pool of blood across the room.

The speaker let out its final warning.

“One.”

Toby’s dead eyes were the last thing I saw. The best friend who’d loved me so fiercely was gone, replaced by a man I no longer recognized.

I closed my eyes, giving in to a fate I never could have imagined, even in the worst of my nightmares.

In the cold warehouse, the psychopath watching us finally fell silent, waiting for my final moments to play out.

I waited for the plunge of cold, sharp steel that would end my life.

Waited for the pain.

Toby gurgled.

An out-of-place sound in the silence of the room.

My eyes flew open just in time to see him slump to his knees in front of me.

The knife stuck firmly in his neck.

“No!”

He collapsed completely, his head hitting the concrete floor with a sickening thud.

But it was nothing compared to the horror of that knife, wedged firmly in his neck, blood running from the wound, instantly covering his throat and collar.

I fell to the floor beside him, instinct taking over through the panicked screams inside my brain. I pressed my fingers around the wound, horrified when they came away sticky and wet.

Toby’s eyes stared up into mine.

The Toby I knew, not the cold, checked-out man from just moments earlier. The Toby who had loved me for a decade. The Toby who was more my family than anyone else.

The Toby who had just sacrificed himself so I could live.

“What did you do?” Tears blurred my vision, but I could do nothing to wipe them. I needed my hands for the desperate bid to save my best friend’s life.

Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, and he tried to speak, but no sound came out. Just gurgles while he choked on his own blood.

I sobbed harder. His life was slipping away in the blood draining from a gash too deep for me to stem.

Anger suddenly coursed through me, powered by adrenaline.

I shook my head at him. “You are not dying here tonight, Toby Horton. You hear me? I won’t allow it!

You’re going to hold on until help comes and then you’ll get all fixed up and we’ll be back on that couch watching doctors fall in love until we’re old and gray. ”

My shouts echoed around the empty warehouse.

But no matter how hard I pressed at his neck, no matter how much I willed him to hold on, I could see the inevitable.

This wound was going to kill him long before anyone would find us. There was no help for me to get. Our phones were useless, and the warehouse doors were locked until one of us died.

A blazing anger for the psychopath watching us roared inside me. But I pushed it away, knowing that pain and fear and resentment would have to wait.

Because my best friend was dying right in front of me. And all I could do now was comfort him.

Tears rolled down my cheeks. “Did I ever tell you the first moment I realized you were the best friend I was ever going to know?” I tried to smile at him reassuringly.

He stared up at me, eyes wide with fear, hands fluttering and jerking as he struggled uselessly.

“It was the day you brought me one of your jackets. We were maybe sixteen, and I’d outgrown the one I’d had, and my foster parents had refused to buy me another.

They kept insisting they weren’t going to buy me more clothes if I just kept getting fatter and I would have to lose weight instead.

So I’d been going to school in layered long-sleeve shirts through most of the winter.

I don’t think anyone else noticed. Or maybe they had and assumed the fat girl was always hot and didn’t need anything warm. ”

I removed one hand from the gash on his neck because I knew it wasn’t really doing any good.

Instead, I brushed his hair off his sweaty forehead, ignoring the stripe of blood it left across his brow.

“But not you. You noticed and without being asked, you helped. You brought me a jacket that was warm and so clean it smelled like heaven. You told me it was old, from the back of your closet and you never wore it anymore, so it was no big deal. But I found a receipt in the bottom of the bag you gave it to me in, and realized you’d bought it for me.

It wasn’t expensive, but that shitty job you’d had at the bakery had paid so badly, it was probably months’ worth of your wages. ”

One of my tears landed on his cheek. “You’d been saving up for a car.

Remember the one you always talked about?

That old black thing Mr. Chen down the road said you could buy from him because you spent so much time staring at it every day when we walked to school?

You wanted it so bad. But you always put me first, even back then. ”

And he’d done it again tonight, in the most selfless act I could have ever imagined.

He was a better person than I could have ever hoped to be. He might have been the friend who gave me shit about my favorite color being pink or my cheap taste in wine, but he was also the friend who would lay his life down on the line for me.

Literally.

Tears streamed down my face, half a lifetime of memories all featuring him flashing through my brain in a blinding display of friendship I’d been so lucky to have. I pulled his head up onto my lap, cradling him as his breaths stuttered, slowing, his end drawing near.

His lips moved, his voice barely audible.

I shook my head. “Don’t try to talk.”

But Toby, stubborn as always, ignored me and tried again.

I bent my head, bringing my ear closer to his lips so I could hear the barely whispered words.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I whispered back.

His lips moved again. I strained to listen, but I couldn’t catch his words.

The light in his eyes drained away, and his body fell limp.

It took a long moment for me to comprehend that he was gone.

A howl of pain lit up inside me, but when I opened my mouth, it wasn’t a sob or tears or even screams that came out.

It was red-hot, blinding anger.

I pushed to my feet, spinning around in a circle, glaring at the shadowy ceiling where I knew there were cameras watching every movement I made. “You happy now?” I shouted to the madman who’d set this whole thing in motion. “Are you fucking satisfied, you sick piece of shit?”

A mechanical whirring came from the door. The distinct sound of the lock disengaging.

But I didn’t run for it. I didn’t even reach for the handle.

Instead, I slumped down on the floor with my best friend and held him until I went numb.