Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [232]
No, what he was beginning to feel for Tess went a lot deeper than that. It went all the way to his heart.
“God damn it, Tess. Pick up!”
Ben Sullivan’s voice was shrill, quivering, his entire body shaking uncontrollably from trauma and a fear so intense he thought he might pass out from it.
“Fuck! Come on—answer.”
He stood in a nasty pay phone booth in one of the worst areas of town, the chewed-up, crusted-over receiver gripped in his bloody fingers. His free hand was clamped at the side of his neck, sticky from the horrific bite wound inflicted there. His face was swollen from the savage pounding he’d taken, the back of his head screaming with pain from a goose-egg-size lump he’d gotten from the window of the SUV.
He couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead. He had thought for sure he would be killed, based on the fury with which he’d been attacked. He’d been stunned when the guy—Jesus, was he even human?—ordered him to get out of the vehicle. He’d thrust the photograph of the kid he was looking for into Ben’s hand and let him know that if this Cameron, Camden, whatever, turned up dead, Ben would be held solely responsible.
Now Ben had been enlisted to help find him, to make sure the kid got home in one piece. Ben’s life depended on it, and as much as he wanted to hightail it out of town and forget he ever heard the word Crimson, he knew the lunatic who attacked him tonight would find him. The guy had promised he would, and Ben wasn’t about to test his rage in a second round.
“Damn it,” he grumbled, as the call to Tess’s apartment went into voice mail.
As bad off as he was now—as deep in the shit as he’d landed tonight—he felt a moral obligation to warn Tess about the guy she’d been messing around with lately. If his buddy was a psychotic freak of nature, Ben was betting that the other one was just as dangerous.
God, Tess.
When the voice-mail greeting left off with a beep, Ben rushed through the night’s events, from the surprise ambush at his place by the two thugs to the attack on him a short while ago. He blurted out that he’d seen her with one of the guys the other night and that he worried she was risking her life if she continued to see him.
He could hear the words spilling out of him in a breathless stream, his voice pitched higher than normal, fear edging on hysteria. By the time he’d gotten it all out and slammed the phone back down onto the chipped cradle, he could hardly breathe. He leaned back against a graffiti-tagged panel of the phone booth and bent over, closing his eyes as he tried to calm his rattled system.
A barrage of feelings came at him in a giant swell: panic, guilt, helplessness, bone-deep terror. He wanted to take it all back—the past several months, everything that had happened, everything he’d done. If only he could go back and erase things, make them right. Would Tess be with him, then? He didn’t know. And it didn’t fucking matter, because he couldn’t take any of it back.
The most he could hope to do now was survive.
Ben dragged in a deep breath and forced himself to stand. He pushed out of the phone booth and started walking down the darkened street, looking like holy hell. A homeless person recoiled from him as he cut across the road and hobbled toward the main drag. As he walked, he dug out the picture of the kid he was supposed to look for.
Glancing down at the snapshot, trying to focus on the bloodstained image, Ben didn’t hear the approaching car until it was nearly on top of him. Brakes screeched and the vehicle was thrown into an abrupt stop. The doors opened in tandem, a trio of unfamiliar bouncer types pouring out.
“Going somewhere, Mr. Sullivan?”
Ben jolted into flight mode, but he didn’t even get two steps on the pavement before he was seized by all of his limbs. He watched the photograph