Page 96 of Knotted their Beauty

“What the hell are you talking about? What are you waiting for?”

“Where’s Cali, Butler? I know you have her.”

His head swings in my direction, fear slipping into his features briefly before he spews his next lie. “They took her, not me. I tracked her here. These two are the ones you want.”

“Why are you in your underwear?”

Butler swallows hard but doesn’t skip a beat. “They made me strip, just before you walked in.”

“Is that so?” I ask as I walk a little further into the room toward what I now see to be an adjoining door to the room on the other side of the wall. “You really expect me to believe they”—I nod toward the team who are still very much focused on this dumbass—”broke from behaviors that have been repeated for thirteen kills, kidnapped a six-year-old, took her to a shitty motel, then when you came in to save the day, told you to strip down to your old man lingerie?”

“March, you son of a bitch, you know⁠—”

“So, you’re telling me the guy working the front desk isn’t going to ID you as the one who paid cash for this dumpster fire? He’s not going to say you showed up here with a little girl matching the photo in my wallet?”

Butler hesitates for a moment, a beat of silence passing before his lips pull into a sneer. “You couldn’t just fucking retire, could you? Couldn’t quietly take your package and pension, and leave the bureau behind you?”

“That’s what this is about?” I say, a little shocked that this bastard went to these lengths just to push me out. “The fact that I didn’t retire early?”

“I can’t fucking believe… They wanted to promote you, March, not me, but when your little brat started taking up more of your time, they had to reconsider.”

I drop my aim and shoot Butler in the knee without thinking twice, a shock of joy rocketing through me as he howls in pain and stumbles to the bed behind him.

“Bastard!” he cries out as he drops his gun and cups his shin with both hands. “Fucking bastard, you shot me!”

I take out his other knee and grin, “Don’t make me do it again. If you answer my questions, I might even let you live.”

“Okay!” he shouts as I get ready to fire again. “That promotion was mine, it is mine! I wanted you gone years ago, but the higher ups know how valuable you are to the bureau. They promoted me in your place, told me to my fucking face that after thirty years, I was just a placeholder until they could have who they really wanted running things. I’m a goddamned puppet! This is your fault, March, not mine. You forced my hand!”

“Where’s my daughter, Butler?”

“I don’t know.”

I shoot his left shoulder and growl, “Where. Is. My daughter?”

“I don’t fucking know! Don’t shoot me again!” he squeals. “I gave her to your ex when I heard the window in the bathroom break, told her to take her and go.”

I rush toward him, his confession like a signature on his death warrant, and shove the barrel of one gun into his mouth while I shoot through his right palm with the other and bury my knee in his sternum. “You better know where they’re going, Craig, or so help me, I will shoot your lying tongue straight out of your skull, and I promise, that will be the only piece of you left, and I will make sure no one ever finds it.”

His eyes go wide and tears stream down his face as he shakes his head, his words muffled around the end of my gun as he tries to speak.

I nod as I remove it and shove it up under his chin, and he gasps. “I swear, I don’t know! I admit that I called her and told her where you are, but I don’t know where she’s taking her!”

I hear a sound behind me and glance over my shoulder.

One of the two men tapped his booted foot on the ground and when they see me lift my gaze in their direction, both of them give me the slightest nod in the direction of the adjoining door.

She’s still here.

For some reason, these two cold-blooded killers haven’t made one move toward me, they haven’t shifted their focus from my boss once, and regardless of the way that they've made Butler their target, they’ve chosen to help me.

They don’t have to use words for me to know that’s what this has turned into.

They most likely saw Butler take Cali—I wouldn’t doubt it since my entire life has been plastered on screens everywhere lately and smart serial killers tend to follow their own cases—and decided he was their next victim. They know he’s a piece of shit, and they seem to want to vanquish people like him in order to defend those who can’t defend themselves. It’s basic math. That’s what they do, there’s probably some deep seeded reason why, and they chose to help me and my daughter because we couldn’t be further from what they go after.

The sense of relief that floods me at that realization—not that they won’t hurt us but that they know where Cali is and want to make sure I find her—is massive, and it puts me a little at ease. If they aren’t placing any serious urgency on running to her right this second, I’m confident in my belief that my daughter hasn’t gone anywhere with that cunt, and she’s unharmed.

For some reason, I know in my gut if either of those things were true, the two men behind me would have spoken up sooner and handled Butler so I could go after them.