“Okay, okay, everyone stay calm,” Mal orders as the phone starts to shiver in my hand. I clutch at it tightly staring at the new email on the dashboard. I know what it must contain. It has to be another video of my lower being tortured because the sadistic fuck who kidnapped her wanted to hurt us both in the worse way possible for some diabolical reason. It had to be something that would rattle me as well as anyone looking to the core. “Jace, buddy, what are we going to do about this?”“I…I should click on this,” I tell them, although my hand does not move to accomplish that action. My rational thinking, which seemed to have escaped me as soon as the email came, seems to return to me because I add in a steadier voice, “But what would the police say?”“You said that the email was rigged to self-delete after the very first click, right?” Mal asks, and I nod.“Yeah, that’s what happened to the last one, I think this one is the same as well.”“It would be stupid to let it slip,” Erikkson

I see red. The only thoughts running through my mind are ‘get out, get out, get out, and go find her!” and that’s all I want to do. But there are two people holding on to me, two men keeping me away from helping my lover who is being tortured in the cruelest ways! He’s breaking her goddamned fingers for fuck’s sake and God knew what he’s done to her when he was not recording, and the contents of the video had been done already, the harm had been done, we were too late already!“Let go of me!” I roar at Erikkson and Lemon, pulling on my own arms to dislodge them as Coraline screams on screen, her voice warbled as if she’d been drugged like she is in so much pain, but her own body is betraying her in trying to get the noise out. And the sadistic bastard doing this to her does not stop there, instead, he takes the hammer and brings it down on the middle of her hand again, right on the phalanges and my lover cries out, and I roared from the bottom of my throat. It’s an animalistic sound t

I don't know how exactly he does it, but Gerald appears right in front of Mal's apartment as soon as I give him a call. When I called him and verbalized my request, he was understandably distraught. But something in my voice must've convinced him that I was not fucking around or trying to play a prank on someone God forbid, he tentatively agreed to meet the request. That was about half an hour ago.It's dark in the night now and when I find him, he's shooting glances at the dubious characters who seem to be sizing him up. And Gerald has had the sense to not use a flashy vehicle to come, instead, there is a very beat-up Honda right behind him. The kind of Honda that looks like it's two steps from breaking down. "Where the heck did you find this thing?" I question him, boggling at a car, and Gerald shrugs. He's even dressed in a way that's in total opposition to what he usually wears. I could count the times Gerald dressed in casual clothes with the fingers in my hand, and it has alwa

“I realize that I’ve spoken out of turn,” I tell Erikkson when I corner him a moment later as we clear away the dishes from dinner, still at Mal’s apartment. “I mean, I know for certain that Lemon is going to help me, and Gerald might come around, and Mal is in on this…but I sort of dragged you into this whole thing and now I’m suggesting going completely off the rails without even conferring with anyone. I know Gerald got a good lot to say about that judging by the way that vein above his eyes is starting to twitch, but I can’t tell if you-““Jace,” Eriksson races his hands, palms forward with a twinkle in his eyes and a barely suppressed smile, “you don’t have to ramble about this, kid. I knew from the moment you told me about this that we might have to embark on this path, and when I heard what the detective said over the phone, I confirmed it. The truth is, I’m tired of the law enforcement in this city too.”I blink at him in surprise “You are?”Erikkson huffs out a breath of anno

After that bizarre conversation with Gerald, we decidedthat it would be for the best if we took the whole operation to the estate. There is security there and no one would expect an operation like the one we're trying to do to take place in a billionaire's house. Also, as Mal stated after we moved, apparently the internet connection of the Wi-Fi was faster than his own too, so it was a plus. As it was the middle of the night, we could cut off the cameras that we'd hacked into because we were certain that the kidnapper wouldn't enter the place at that time. Because I only had one computer in my place and as it was not as powerful as Mal's was, we knew we had to pack up his devices and transport them back to my place. So that is what we did. Erikkson had to leave because he had work to do but promised that he'd swing around the next morning to see how it was going. Mal, Lemon, and I packed the devices that Mal needed into cardboard boxes and brought them to Gerald’s beat-up Honda. For