Page 7 of Dollhouse

Exactly like Bo.

FIVE

Three long dayslocked in my office, scanning our systems and wracking my head have left me no closer to finding the rat in Mercy. No closer to solving the puzzle of who betrayed the organization. Who’d betrayedmy family.

It has to be a member. Nobody else knew where we brought Emma and Bo after the kidnapping. All Eric and his syndicate of jackass pricks should have known was that I had them. The entire fuckingpointwas that they wouldn’t know where they were or what was happening to them, or if they were even still alive.

The mole we have in Bundy’s ranks doesn’t have much access to information yet, as he’s still a fairly new plant. But we do know from the recordings he brings us that Bundy speaks about Emma frequently. His fixation with her was immediate, probably beginning the night he was invited to dinner at her home with Eric, and solidifying as the night went on.

He isn’t shy to admit how deeply he wants to corrupt the sweet, soft-spoken woman who has hosted the evening.

The recordings are full of needed information, so I have to listen to them. It makes me fucking insane.

Jesse can have Eric, that’s fair for what he did to Lily. Fuck it, Emma can join in if her heart ever feels up to it. But I want my turn with Bundy when the time comes. For thinking of her, for getting off on the daydream of hurting the woman who belongs to me. I flay him to pieces in my mind at night, like a visual lullaby that soothes my fucked up head.

Someone close to me betrayed us, and now Bundy’s men laugh about Eric’s misfortune at having his wife pimped out by the same organization that wants to take him down. Not when he’s present, of course. Apparently, Eric’s close tie to Bundy protects him from being face to face with the men who laugh at him.

Every single one of them will get a bullet through their skull, but not until I’ve broken them physically and mentally and they’re sobbing at my feet for me to make the kill shot.

Theysawher, and I can’t fucking have that.

The only thing I don’t hate about this situation is that now Eric knows. He’s been forced to see how I make Emmaflywhen I have my hands on her. Willfully, without any force at all. She fucking loves it.

God, I miss her.

Hindsight is twenty twenty and all that. I should have told Emma sooner that she’d never even been reported missing. Let her slowly accept the fact that her family wasn’t looking for her. It hadn’t been very kind of me to force that knowledge on her right after strong-arming her back into the house.

There’s something about desperation that makes you do things, you know? Seeing her tantrum, her fear of me, before taking off into the woods? Nah. I couldn't let her do that, so I did the only thing I could to break the illusion that Eric—or her corrupt family—would save her.

She would have come to that realization on her own, but the break-in changed everything. It made it necessary to cut andrun, and there just wasn’t any time left to let her figure things out by herself.

I sit back in my chair, running my hand through my dark hair. I need a cigarette before I pass out at my desk.

It’s been three days and a useless effort. There’s a rat. Someone who wants to hurt Emma, and cause chaos in our ranks. I can’t imagine the motive. If they knew where she was, why not come and get her? Why simply lock her in and show her the fake emails?

After spinning in circles with the men at an hours-long table meeting, the only conclusion we can come to is that the lead Jesse and I had received that morning, that had us leaving the cabin in such a hurry, hadn’t just been to get to Emma and Bo. It had been a trap for Jesse and I, one we’d just barely dodged.

Cold fear drips back into my nervous system at the memory.

After nearly threehours in the car, Jesse’s initial steely excitement had gone. When he glanced over at me, hand sliding nervously along his jaw, I saw fear.

“Something doesn’t feel right, Noah.”

I ‘d cut my eyes back to the road. We’d been trying to pin this man for almost a year, but he’d been a slippery fuck. I knew the father of the girl he’d assaulted would be thrilled to hear about us taking turns dog-walking his ass before executing him.

“What do you mean?”

“This feels off. I think we should go back.”

My jaw clenched. “Jesse, we cannot miss this chance.”

“If the tip is real, we can have someone tail him. I can call in the guys up North and have them tagged. Then we can make a plan, and we’ll be back up in just a few days. But this…it feels fucking weird and I don’t feel right about it.”

It’s true we didn’t usually get intel that way, from a third party informant. But almost no mark had ever gone off the map that long, and I’d jumped on the information before we could miss our shot. The little girl was twelve. I wanted to make him taste our justice. Fucking drown him in it.

His voice had cut through that image. “What if I’m right, Noah? What if something happens to us?”

Jesse usually isn’t the reserved one, the second guesser. Both of us have tendencies toward rash decision-making; one of the reasons I’d put off taking the reigns of Mercy from Dad. He frets over every avenue of our missions because the weight of everyone’s safety sits heavy on his shoulders. I don’t have that problem.