Syn. Read online

  One of the four men shifted, his body angled toward Winter. Iris wasn’t sure whether it was because she had tears in her eyes, or because her hands were now shaking that he reached into his pocket and pulled out a syringe.

  They wanted to take her alive …

  Iris scrambled backward, though there was nowhere to go, but heavy hands quickly grabbed hold of her, and no matter how she struggled, she couldn’t get free.

  The sharp sting of the needle penetrating her arm made her grit her teeth against the pain, but as quickly as it came, it faded.

  Just as the rest of the room did.

  Cold.

  It was the first thing that registered in Iris’s mind as she woke up, a headache pounding behind her right eye and her mouth as dry as a desert. Flashbacks of the night came rushing back, and despite the pain she was in, she still struggled to sit up.

  Blinking to clear her blurry vision, the shape in front of her started to shift and sharpen until it formed a man.

  He straddled a backward facing chair, dangling a mask from his left hand. He still wore the gear he’d been in earlier, but without his mask, he looked less like an assassin, but still looked as if he could kill her without blinking.

  “Good,” he said, “you’re awake.”

  When she looked from his mask back to his face, he did the same before shrugging. “Yeah, I rarely take it off, but special circumstances and all.”

  He scratched at his beard, the slight angle of his jaw allowing her to see the X tattooed on the side of his neck.

  “Like I told your friend, I can’t help you find him.”

  “Can’t or won’t, because your answer will determine how I respond.”

  “Either way, you leave disappointed. I doubt that means anything good for me.”

  “Look, I really couldn’t care less about the unstable bastard, but you see, Winter does. And since she does, my brother does, so that means it’s my duty to get an answer for him. By any means necessary.”

  “Good luck with that,” Iris replied, summoning as much bravado as she could.

  She had never been tortured and doubted she could be as strong as Synek was in the face of it.

  The man seemed to study her for a long minute without speaking. “First question I always ask. Are they worth dying for?”

  She knew who he meant, though she didn’t offer a response.

  “But before you answer, think about that for a second. Because I’m not just going to put a bullet in your head. You’re not gonna go peacefully. It’s going to be slow and more painful than you could even imagine. Are the people you’re protecting worth all that?”

  “No, the question would be whether my life is worth his, because you have to understand something. Whoever the fuck you are, they’re still going to kill Synek. Whether that’s today or tomorrow, it’s going to happen. If anyone tries to stand in the way of that, they’ll kill him sooner, then kill whoever steps out of line. I can’t risk that.”

  “For who?”

  “The Wraiths,” she finally answered.

  He smiled, flashing his silver-capped canine. “Easy enough, no?”

  The door swung open in a flurry of motion that made them look back. Winter came in, visibly more composed than she had been earlier. Another man was with her—the biggest of the four who had been in Iris’s apartment.

  The one who’d been interrogating her looked from the other man to Winter before shifting off the chair and offering it to her. Then both he—and the brother he must have meant—flanked her on either side.

  “We might have gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m Winter, these two are half of the Wild Bunch, and you’re Iris Adler.”

  The man to the left had planned to physically harm her, or maybe it had been merely a diversion until Winter could finish digging into her life.

  Winter knowing her name didn’t bother her as much as her knowing her last name. She made it a point never to mention it to anyone. Though the Adler name wasn’t as well-known as it had been years ago when it had been in nearly every paper in the state, it only took one person’s curiosity to ruin the anonymity she’d built for herself.

  “You’re a hacker,” Iris guessed.

  “I’m the hacker. A little bit of aging software to guess your age, then search through birth certificates from that year. It took a while, but I found you. Born at St. Mary’s, right?”

  What did she know?

  What did she know?

  “I don’t believe in torture, and from what I’ve read up on you, I don’t think it’ll be necessary. Do you want to know why?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “I have something you want.”

  A humorless laugh escaped her as Iris shifted in her chair, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “I doubt that.”

  “Governor Michael Spader. Born June 22, 1961. Elected to office in 2012. Up for re-election this year.”

  Her heart tripped over itself. “A search on Google could get you all that.”

  “His first mistress was a woman named Melody Martin. She was seventeen when they first started dating—eighteen when he got her pregnant and forced her to abort the baby.”

  “You couldn’t possibly know that,” Iris whispered, even as her mind seized on the details. No amount of research had gotten her anything remotely close to what Winter was sharing.

  “I don’t know what your interest is in him, but I will give you everything I have”—she held up a memory stick—“if you give me a location.”

  She might as well have been holding up her weight in gold.

  Iris couldn’t think of anything she wanted more than that flash drive in her hand. She couldn’t take her eyes off it even as she said, “You don’t understand what they do to people who cross them. You don’t know what she will do.”

  “Oh, I know very well what the Wraiths are capable of. They killed my uncle and would have killed me had Syn not saved my life.”

  That statement both coincided and contradicted everything Iris thought she knew.

  “If he killed your uncle, then why are you protecting him?”

  Winter’s brow shot up. “What the hell are you talking about? Syn didn’t kill him.”

  That wasn’t how Rosalie relayed it to them.

  She’d called it a bloodbath—said that Synek had finally snapped and killed everyone in the room, including men who were supposed to be his friends. Which was what threw her off, Iris now realized.

  If he’d completely lost his mind, why had he seemed so coherent now?

  “Listen,” Winter said, her voice softening. “I don’t know what your deal is, and from what little there is to find about you on the dark web, you’re supposed to be some sort of bounty hunter, right? You turn bad people over to worse ones. Syn isn’t who he used to be.” She seemed to think better of that. “He doesn’t hurt innocent people anymore. Once he got out, he changed. Do you even know what happened that day?”

  “No,” Iris answered, thinking of all the times she’d asked.

  “Do you want to?”

  Yes, yes, she did.

  Chapter 9

  His body had turned into one gigantic nerve—a nerve only tuned to pain.

  Synek hit the ground hard, the breath knocked out of him as he barely caught himself before his face slammed against the concrete floor.

  He wasn’t sure how long he had been locked in this room, or even when Iris had slipped inside without anyone noticing. That visit had helped to bring him back from the dark recesses of his own mind.

  He could focus when she was standing across from him—and as much as he wanted to make her pay for what she had done, he’d needed the distraction. But whether she felt remorse or had doubts for what had happened didn’t matter. She was still going to pay for what she did once he got free.

  If he got free because with the way things were looking now … he wasn’t so sure anymore.

  “Come now, puppy. Get up.”

  Rosalie’s voice filtered
in through the fog in his mind, dragging him back to the present far more quickly than he would have liked. When the torture first started, it had been far too easy to let his mind run away with itself, but he couldn’t escape when he was too focused on the pain.

  But while she was still the same bloodsucking tick she’d been from the moment he was brought into this place, since he couldn’t fight back physically, he did the only other thing he knew would get a rise out of her—he ignored her.

  The more she talked, the less he responded until he hadn’t said anything at all during this last bout.

  He didn’t even scream as he was tortured, merely ground his teeth and bore it, refusing to even give her that much.

  Dragging in a painful breath, Synek managed to get one hand flat on the floor and used what little energy he had left to push himself back up to his knees. His vision was blurry and tinted red, but at least he wasn’t on the ground anymore.

  Down, but not beaten.

  Rosalie stood across the room in a mesh miniskirt and over-the-knee boots. He wondered, not for the first time, what he had ever seen in her.

  She’d always been sadistic with a penchant for violence that rivaled his own. She was insatiable, and though he’d been the steady dick she preferred, she hadn’t minded taking others in her bed. Even when he had.

  When she thought he was upset by it, she’d do it more often just to get a rise out of him.

  Fucking hell, he’d fed off that for years until the appeal no longer did anything for him, but while he’d been happy to get shot of her and the whole lot of them, she still wanted to dig her nails in and drag him right back to where he didn’t want to be.

  “Say yes,” she told him. “Say yes and all this goes away.”

  He merely blinked.

  “You don’t want to have this attitude when he gets here, do you?”

  He?

  If she was this excited about someone coming in here to disrupt her torture session, that could only mean it was someone he didn’t want to see—someone who was capable of far worse than she could ever mete out, because while she could instruct others on how to hurt him, this someone else had taught him the varying ways to make someone scream.

  Before his thoughts could carry him away, a sudden blast of water slammed him in the face, and no matter how he twisted or turned, there was no avoiding it. It kept on for ages until he was sure he would drown, but as his lungs started to burn, the water shut off again.

  One of Rosalie’s lackeys stood in the corner with a dripping hose in his hand, a shit-eating grin on his face.

  Fucking bastard would die first.

  “Wouldn’t want you disappearing into your head before he gets here,” Rosalie explained with a shrug.

  Synek didn’t get a chance to utter a response before the door swung open, bouncing off the wall. He expected a giant of a man, one who was as tall as he was wide, but instead, he found a stooped over old man in a wheelchair.

  In the years of Synek’s absence, the man before him had to have lost over four stone, though his presence was still felt. His milky white eye still seemed to stare directly at you, and the grisled frown was right where it had always been.

  “Jesus, Johnny,” Synek muttered, finding his voice again. “Why don’t you just die already?”

  If he’d heard the remark, his old boss didn’t comment on it. “You can run, but you can’t hide,” he replied in the thick smoker’s voice he’d had for as long as Synek could remember.

  Unlike the others who had painstakingly made sure they were never within reaching distance of him, Johnny rolled right up to him. Even if Synek hadn’t been shackled to a wall, Johnny wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone.

  “I wasn’t hiding, though, was I? You’ve just got a shit team of men, mate. Always have. I could’ve circled the lot of ’em and waved ’ello and the little shits would’ve tucked arse and run in the opposite direction. What’s that say? They fear me more than they fear you?”

  His accent always thickened when he was lightheaded and close to passing out, but Synek couldn’t think about that now. For all Johnny knew, he was just trying to piss him off.

  Johnny shook his head. “I gave you the world, and you spat in my face.”

  This shit again … “And I thanked you in bloodshed and carnage. Make no mistake, Johnny boy, you wanted more than I could ever bloody give. That’s the truth, innit? I’d have taken on an army if you’d asked it, but I gave you my limits. I told you the line I wouldn’t cross.”

  That was the rub, though Johnny could never and probably would never see it that way. He expected loyalty and clear and obedient consent. He wanted his men to die for him.

  Synek might have danced with death every chance he got, but the day he chose to cross the final line, the decision would be his. No one else’s.

  But after his remark, confusion lit up Johnny’s one good eye—as if he had no idea what he was talking about.

  Whatever doubt there was, however, was forgotten quickly enough. “A fucking waste. All that talent and you threw it away for a little cunt.”

  A reaction was what he’d been looking for, and if he hadn’t been so bloody exhausted, Synek would have seen it for what it was, but with pain echoing through his body and smirking faces all around him, he gave Johnny was he wanted.

  He reacted.

  Before either of them realized what he was doing, Synek lurched forward, brought up short by the chain, his fingers mere inches from the man’s neck.

  “Call her that again and I’ll be shoving my fist up your—”

  “String him up!” Johnny ordered.

  This time, Synek didn’t go quietly.

  The moment one of them was in reach, he lashed out, using the man’s stunned surprise to his advantage. He used his forward momentum to slam the man’s face against the wall, dropping him with relative ease. Another ran at him, landing a few solid blows to his already sore ribs, but Synek grabbed him by the face and dragged him forward, latching onto the man’s ear and biting down.

  His screams echoed in the tight space, growing louder as Synek ripped out a chunk before spitting it out along with a mouthful of blood. But then three came at him at the same time, and in his weakened state, there wasn’t much he could do to fend them off.

  Before long, he was right back in his former position, his chains shorter now.

  Johnny was still in the room, annoyance flaring in his good eye. Rosalie stood to his left, her mouth slightly parted, pupils dilated.

  Crazy fucking bitch.

  “You made the wrong decision that day, son,” Johnny said as Rosalie handed him the Taser meant for livestock. “But you’ll learn that soon enough. I don’t give a shit if I have to spend the last few moments of your life reminding you of that fact.”

  Synek drew in a breath, the sound of the crackling static managing to make his heart skip a beat.

  This would hurt.

  “Go and fuck yourself, Johnny.”

  Not a day went by that he didn’t think about the decision he’d made that day. Of sparing Winter and walking away from everything he knew for something else that wasn’t guaranteed.

  And not a day went by that he knew he would make the same decision all over again.

  Then …

  The scent of blood lingered in the air.

  Synek came awake slowly, his limbs too stiff, his skull pounding as he squeezed his eyes shut and willed the pain away as if that would actually help the mother of all hangovers he had.

  Too much, he thought as he rolled to his feet.

  Too much vodka. Too much fucking. Too much everything he’d done the night before because in the end, it had done fuck all to help the constant barrage of memories that plagued him day in and day out.

  When he started with the Wraiths, it had been far too easy to slip into the role of executioner and swallowing down a shot or two of vodka to erase the images of what he’d done. As time passed—as more bodies piled up—he’d grown to need more to t
ake the edge off.

  But nothing he took was ever good enough to completely quell the demons living inside him, not unless he wanted to dig into something stronger that would almost certainly guarantee he’d start chasing other ghosts.

  Instead, he pushed himself to the breaking point until the only thing left at the end of the night was exhaustion.

  But memories weren’t the only thing he’d been trying to forget the night before.

  The Kingmaker’s visit still lingered at the forefront of his mind, and the thought of what the man wanted him to do played like a loop inside his head. It was one thing to disobey an order given. It was something else entirely to betray the Wraiths.

  That shit wasn’t taken lightly. And considering he knew what the Wraiths did to people who went against them, he didn’t even want to consider the possibility that he would even get away in time.

  But the Kingmaker, whoever the fuck he was, had guaranteed it.

  Synek hadn’t trusted that at first, but it had only taken one whisper of the man’s name to learn that he was just as powerful as he presented himself to be—maybe more so.

  “Jesus, you look like shit.”

  Synek groaned at the booming voice above him, squinting an eye open to peer at the man standing over him. In all the time they’d been in this place, he didn’t think he had even seen Bear smile, not once. Sure, his expression softened when he was trying to get one of the girls to climb in his lap, but even that was a poor excuse for a happy expression.

  Gradually, as his fucked-up brain began to piece together everything around him, Synek realized what had woken him. The booming he’d thought was his own brain trying to escape his skull had actually been Bear at the door, knocking with one of those giant fists of his before letting himself into Synek’s room.

  “I locked that door,” Synek grumbled, rolling over and scrubbing a hand down his face.

  “And I picked it,” Bear said with a shrug, the only person who could get away with it.