Judged (The Mercenary Series Book 4) Read online

  Judged

  The Mercenary Series

  Book Four

  Marissa Farrar

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One | V

  Chapter Two | X

  Chapter Three | V

  Chapter Four | V

  Chapter Five | X

  Chapter Six | V

  Chapter Seven | X

  Chapter Eight | X

  Chapter Nine | V

  Chapter Ten | X

  Chapter Eleven | V

  Chapter Twelve | X

  Chapter Thirteen | V

  Chapter Fourteen V

  Chapter Fifteen | X

  Chapter Sixteen | V

  Chapter Seventeen | V

  Chapter Eighteen | X

  Chapter Nineteen | V

  Chapter Twenty | X

  Chapter Twenty-one | V

  Chapter Twenty-two | X

  Chapter Twenty-three | X

  Chapter Twenty-four | V

  Chapter Twenty-five | V

  Chapter Twenty-six | X

  Chapter Twenty-seven | V

  Chapter Twenty-eight | V

  Chapter Twenty-nine | V

  Chapter Thirty | X

  Chapter Thirty-one | V

  Chapter Thirty-two | V

  Chapter Thirty-three | V

  Chapter Thirty-four | X

  One Year Later

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Chapter One

  V

  I lied when I’d told my sister Nicole we were going home.

  The walls surrounding us now remained unchanged from our childhood. The roof above our heads had sheltered us, the floors the same we’d run across as children, chasing each other down the vast hallways. Even the scent of the place evoked memories of childhood. But nothing else about this building made me think of home.

  Slowly, Nickie wandered down our father’s hallway. I watched the back of her dark head as she trailed her fingers across the walls, the banisters of the stairs, items of furniture, as though it had been years since she was last here instead of a matter of days. A lot had changed in that time. Nicole was still shaken, understandably, from what had happened.

  She shivered and turned back to where I stood, framed by the front door, the keys in my hands. “It feels weird being here when dad is ...” She trailed off.

  “Not here,” I filled in for her.

  I didn’t want to say dead, knowing it had been her hands that brought about his demise. Or at least I hoped he’d met his demise. I’d be feeling a whole lot better right now if we’d been able to find a body. Though I’d heard the crack when Nicole had struck him across the head with the tree branch, and had seen him fall, it bothered me that we hadn’t been able to find him out in the forest. We’d taken the keys from his car, which was how we’d gotten into the house, so he wouldn’t have had a vehicle to get away in, not that he’d have been in any state to drive, and the temperature had been close to freezing that night—I knew that better than anyone.

  As though the memory preempted it, my injured finger began to throb. The loss of the tip of my finger itched more than it hurt now. The irritation drove me crazy, and it was all I could do to stop myself from using my other hand to dig my nails into the blackening scab and burrow down into it. I managed to hold myself back, even though the intense itching—like thousands of tiny bugs crawling beneath the surface of my skin—made me scream with the discomfort. I knew doing this would only prolong the healing process, and the injury was healing now. When that scab came off, I hoped there would be fresh new skin beneath it. My hand was never going to be pretty, but that was the least of my worries.

  “Yeah,” said Nickie, exhaling a sigh. “The place feels different with him not around. We grew up here, but right now it feels like we’re invading. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant. I didn’t feel like we were supposed to be here either. “Your room is still your room, though,” I told her, “and we need to make sure everyone thinks we’re supposed to be here. Wandering around like a couple of meek lambs is only going to get us killed.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll get over it. Just feels weird right now.”

  When we were children, this house had been home. Yes, there had been men coming and going at all hours of the night and day, and sometimes we heard raised voices. During those times, our mother would shepherd us into her bedroom and sit with us on the bed, with us tucked in under each arm. She’d smile brightly and tell us stories in a voice that was strangely too quiet and too loud at the same time. But we weren’t frightened of these men. Quite the opposite. We knew most of them as ‘uncle’—Uncle Stevie, and Uncle Louie, and Uncle Lawrence. They would stop to ruffle our hair and call us ‘kiddo’ and more often than not brought us some kind of candy. Only when I got older did I start to grow suspicious of them. Perhaps it was because of their constant presence around our house, or the way my mother reacted to them. In time, I’d grown mistrustful of my father as well. I’ve never been an angel, but perhaps if I’d been raised in a different household, I’d have turned out differently, too.

  The last thing I wanted for my and X’s baby was to raise him or her the same way, but until I got X freed from jail, I didn’t have any choice. We were going to need money for lawyers, but more than that, I needed my father’s people. Men with connections. X might have killed plenty of people, but he wasn’t responsible for Harvey Baglione’s death. There had to be a body, and I knew he’d been shot, and not killed by X’s car as the police believed. If I could find the body and the gun, the cops would have to let X go free. Someone must know what happened to Harvey’s body, and I intended to find out.

  I needed to figure out a way to get my father’s men on my side, and there were only two things men like them responded to—money and fear.

  I put my hand to the swell of my belly and immediately snatched it away again. That was a habit I needed to break, at least until I’d made my mark. My pregnancy would be seen as a weakness, and I couldn’t afford to be weak.

  There were a couple of guys I knew I’d have trouble with. My father’s right-hand man, the same one who’d kept all of his businesses running while he’d been inside, would be the one I’d have most problems dealing with. Everyone knew by now the reason I’d been away for so long was because I was going to testify against my father. That made me a snitch, and a snitch was a very bad thing in this business. Being a rat was bad enough, but I was also a woman. Women in this world were either wives or mistresses. The last thing these men would want was a woman telling them what to do.

  My father’s men wouldn’t dare to kill me, not without my father’s strict instructions, which was something they were never going to get. The fear of Mickey Five Fingers turning up and discovering they’d killed his daughter would be enough to steady their hands, at least for the moment. I had no idea how long that would last. At some point, they’d realize their boss wasn’t coming home, and when that happened, things would take a new turn. I hoped I’d have X out of jail by then, and we could all take off to some place new.

  “What do we do now?” Nickie asked, turning her dark eyes on me, wide and worried.

  “I’ve got someone I need to see.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t leave me here alone!”

  “No one is going to hurt you, Nicole.”

  “Really, ’cause it seems like everyone wants to hurt us these days.”

  “What our father did was never about physically hurting us. He never has, remember? He’s taken everyone we love away from us, and that’s how he causes us pain. Even though he’s gone, we’
re still suffering.”

  Emotional pain took far longer to heal than a physical one. A physical injury would heal in time, but we kept the loss of our loved ones with us for the rest of our lives.

  “You’re still your father’s daughter, Nickie,” I continued, “and you need to remember that. No one else knows what happened, and we need to keep it that way. As far as we’re aware, he went away on a business trip and we have every right to be here.”

  She took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay, but I still don’t want to stay here alone. Where are you going, anyway?”

  I tightened my jaw. “I’m going to pay one of our father’s friends a visit.”

  Chapter Two

  X

  The metal clang of the jail cell door closing made every muscle in my body tense, though I tried not to show it. Wafts of bleach and stale sweat and urine assaulted my nostrils, and I blinked hard to prevent my eyes from watering.

  “Make yourself comfortable, Mason,” the corrections officer yelled to me, using the only name they knew me by in here. Lee Mason.

  I wasn’t alone in the cell. My cellmate—a large white guy with a shaved head and homemade tattoos—already lay on the bottom bunk. He scowled at me as my gaze slipped across the small space, and I avoided making eye contact with him. He literally had white supremacist written all over him, and the last thing I wanted was to be forced into anything gang related. I had enough problems as it was.

  I knew I wouldn’t be staying in this cell for long. I’d be moved into the dorm rooms within a few days. This was just to let me adjust, to get my bearings—as if anyone could ever really adapt to this place.

  I’d already been taken before a judge to be formally charged, and given a public defender who barely looked old enough to be out of law school. The guy didn’t exactly give me much hope that I would be out of here any time soon.

  I couldn’t escape the irony that I, as a hit man, was locked up for a murder I didn’t actually commit. I wasn’t innocent, far from it, but I was innocent of the crime for which I was awaiting trial.

  My thoughts stayed constantly with Vee and our unborn child. It killed me to think I might be behind bars when the baby was born. I hated to think about how I would be missing the changes in Vee’s body, watching her belly stretch and swell, feeling the baby kick beneath her skin. I hoped Nicole would change her attitude now that she knew Vee was pregnant and would help her instead of constantly acting like a weight around her neck. When I’d last seen the two of them, the girl had acted as though she’d finally opened her eyes to the truth, but she was eighteen—young and unpredictable. Who knew what would happen?

  I crossed the cell toward the bunk beds against the wall on the right. The top bunk was free. As I approached, the skinhead sat up, planting both feet on the floor and leaning forward to place his tattooed forearms against his thighs. His gaze drilled into me, daring me to stare back. I wasn’t going to give him what he wanted. I knew how that would end up. He’d ask me what the fuck I was looking at, and it would just be an excuse to start something. Everyone in here felt the need to go into each new encounter as top dog. This guy—his name was Callum Hooper, the corrections officer had informed me with a smug smirk—was doing exactly that.

  Throwing my few belongings onto the top bunk, I continued to ignore him.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he snarled.

  I kept my voice calm. “Getting onto my bunk.”

  “Who told you that was your bunk?”

  “I took a lucky guess.”

  “Well, it ain’t.”

  The muscles in my jaw tensed, but I did my best to not let my internal anger show on the outside. “I don’t see anyone else in here. You need two of them?”

  “Yeah, actually, I do.”

  I exhaled a sigh. “Okay. I’ll tell you what, you tell me when you want to swap, and then we’ll swap.”

  “What?”

  “If both bunks are yours, I’ll sleep in whatever one you’re not currently occupying. Unless you’re able to divide yourself in two, of course. Or perhaps that’s your way of saying you want someone to divide you in two?”

  His mouth gaped. “Are you fucking threatening me?”

  “Nope. Just pointing out the logistics.”

  “The what?”

  “The physicality of you not being able to be in two places at one time. So, shall I take the top bunk?”

  He looked at me in baffled confusion, as though he thought he’d ended up in a cell with a lunatic. “Errr ...”

  I didn’t give him a chance to think it through any further, but instead hauled myself up onto the wire frame bed, with the mattress so thin I could feel the metal of the base through it. I hoped the guy now lying beneath me didn’t get it into his head that shanking me through the thin mattress while I was sleeping was a good idea. The ceiling was only a matter of a foot from my face. I could make out the cracks running across it and the dark speckles of mold growing in the edges. I couldn’t decide if things would be better when I moved from here to the dorm. Here, I only had one guy to deal with instead of the twenty or so I expected in the dorm, but there was something about being locked in here with this guy that set my teeth on edge.

  I rolled to my side, the bed squeaking, hearing a grunt of annoyance from my bunkmate. Where was Vee now? Would she have found a motel? How long would the money last if she was staying somewhere like that for any length of time? It wasn’t that I gave a shit about the money—I didn’t—but I wanted to know she’d be able to take care of herself and the baby. Prenatal care was expensive, and I knew she didn’t have insurance. I also worried about what she’d be doing in response to my arrest. She wouldn’t just walk away. She’d be furious and doing everything in her power to see me free again. How far would she go? She knew I hadn’t killed Harvey Baglione; she’d been there when he died. What lengths would she go to in order to prove my innocence?

  I didn’t think I’d sleep at all that night. My thoughts, together with the possibility of the guy below knifing me while I slept, did everything they could to keep me awake.

  Incredibly, the blare of the alarm signaling the cells unlocking jolted me from sleep.

  The corrections officer slammed his hand against the door. “Rise and shine, children. Time for breakfast.”

  Breakfast was at six. I’d already been given that information during check in, and my possessions removed and logged.

  “Have I got time to take a piss?” I asked the guard.

  “No. Hold it.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with him. The guy had one of those mean-looking faces that made me think he liked to pull wings off insects when he’d been a kid, and just watched them spinning in useless circles.

  I did my best to avoid eye contact with my bunkmate Callum. I let him go first and followed his bulky back out of the cell and into the corridor.

  “You wanna watch that one,” Callum hissed at me over his shoulder. “Don’t get on the wrong side of Damps.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was trying to warn me or threatened me.

  We fell into line with numerous other men, each one as mean and ugly as the other. I spotted a few of the more regular looking guys—older men with paunches and thinning hair, most of whom walked with their shoulders rounded and their heads down. They were the bankers, the accountants, the politicians, who had all been caught doing something they shouldn’t and were now awaiting trial. I didn’t envy those men. Sure, they were most likely assholes, but they didn’t stand a chance in here. I didn’t want to be here any more than they did, but at least I was young and strong, and I knew how to handle myself in a fight.

  I caught the same C.O. watching me as we lined up for breakfast, that annoying smirk on his face as though he knew something I didn’t. I picked up my tray and held it out for other inmates who were working kitchen duties to slop the gray substance, which I assumed to be oatmeal, into the dip designed to hold it. I kept my chin lifted, my shoulders back, but continue
d to avoid eye contact with anyone. I was trying to go with an air of not being one to be messed with, while not deliberately causing anyone to mess with me.

  I scanned the cafeteria, trying to figure out where the hell to sit. It was like being back at school again, only this time with far more dangerous, fully-grown people. Racial groups had divided off, the blacks with the blacks, the Latinos with Latinos, white with white. I didn’t want to decide based on skin color—being a racist asshole was never my thing—so I spotted the group of men I’d noted in the line. The older guys weren’t my group either, but I wasn’t going to allow some white supremacist to start tattooing me to show my allegiance.

  I stepped forward, but someone moved into my space. It was the C.O., Damps, the one with the mean face. “Where you think you’re going?”

  I jerked my chin toward the table I’d set my sights on. “To sit down.”

  “Your place is over there.”

  He nodded toward the table where my cellmate sat. They were all looking at me, daring me to disobey. I wasn’t about to let myself be bullied by any of them.

  “I’m fine where I’m going.”

  I took a step forward, but he moved toward me and the next thing I knew, the tray flew out of my grip, the few items of a juice box, bread, and the porridge flicking into the air. It landed on the floor, the tray hitting a split second after, the clatter making the rest of the cafeteria inhabitants turn around.

  I gritted my teeth, my whole body tensed. I couldn’t react. This was a test. They were seeing what I was made of. Hot-headed and easy to antagonize, weak and frightened, or cool and unruffled.

  I went with the final option.

  I glanced down at the spilled food. “I wasn’t hungry anyway.”

  Moving to walk away, something struck me from behind, pitching me forward.

  “Clean up your goddamned mess, inmate.”

  I realized Damps had shoved me in the back with his foot. I took several deep breaths to prevent myself from spinning back around and lunging at him.