Barbed Wire Heart Read online

  Barbed Wire Heart

  Alexes Razevich

  Razor Street Publishing

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Afterword

  Also by Alexes Razevich

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright 2018 Alexes Razevich

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidently and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author. Requests for permission should be sent to [email protected].

  ASIN: B07CMFRYDS

  Cover by Deranged Doctor Designs

  Created with Vellum

  1

  No one should have been in the office at—I glanced at my phone—seventeen minutes after midnight on a Thursday night. I hesitated outside, my hand on the doorknob, listening. Behind the door a woman sobbed as if her heart had been shattered like spun glass dropped from a great height.

  Being psychic and an empath meant I often felt other people’s emotions whether I wanted to or not. If I opened that door, the woman’s grief would pierce me as if it were my own. I could do without that.

  Her sobs increased.

  Come back later, Oona, I told myself, even as my hand was turning the key in the lock. I opened the door slowly and looked inside.

  The woman in the reception area sat hunched into herself on one end of a brown leather couch. She was fortyish with pale skin and shoulder-length, well-cut, auburn hair. Her gray skirt and deep green blouse looked well cut and expensive. Her suit jacket lay bunched up next to her on the couch. A large, expensive black leather bag sat by her feet. She caught sight of me and hastily wiped at her wet eyes. The bridge of her nose had that red stripe of someone who normally wore glasses.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pushing a hank of her hair away from her wet face. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  I glanced at the cart I’d pulled in behind me—the blue canvas sack that could hold the contents of twenty office trash cans, the bottles of environmentally friendly versions of Windex and Pledge hanging in a pouch slung from the chrome handle bar. The cart was my cover. I was there to search inside the smaller, private offices off the reception area.

  “I can come back later,” I said.

  “No.” The woman sniffed and wiped her eyes again. “It’s all right. I don’t want to disrupt your schedule.”

  “I’ll just work around you then.”

  I set about dusting the three big rubber plants in the room’s far right corner, which let me turn my back on the upset woman and give her some privacy. I hoped she’d take the opportunity to slip on out. I hadn’t felt her emotions yet, which was a good thing, or caught much of a vibe at all from her. That was unusual but not unheard of. Sometimes a person was so self-contained that even when sobbing their thoughts and emotions stayed stifled inside them. I felt bad for people like that but counted myself lucky I didn’t have to feel whatever was causing her so much pain.

  I kept my back turned to her, giving her time to get up, walk out of the office, take the elevator down to the ground floor where the night guard might ask some questions, or not, depending on his mood, and let her out of the building.

  She didn’t leave though, I saw when I glanced quickly over my shoulder, just sat on the couch, squeezing her entwined fingers together.

  I felt sorry for the woman, but I had a job to do. Pulling my cart into one of the inner offices and shutting the door behind me, I looked around the room slowly, taking in the dark paneling on the walls, the large, corner office windows, the big mahogany desk empty of anything but a spiffy new computer. The office reminded me of Juliana Peet’s at Danyon and Peet, the investigative agency I consulted to.

  Danyon and Peet was the reason I was here in the middle of the night. The agency had been hired to find evidence that a senior VP of a company that distributed designer handbags was selling counterfeits on the side. But I couldn’t go rummaging around looking for fake bags hidden in the credenza or whatever if there was even the smallest chance the woman in the outer area might take it into her head to open the door while I was in there. I cast a tiny spell on the door, so it couldn’t be opened. If the woman tried, she’d assumed it was locked. It would have been easier if the door had a lock, but it didn’t.

  My colleague and boyfriend, Diego Adair, should have been the one here tonight but he’d been hurt in his ice hockey game earlier in the evening. Diego, who I called Dee, played goalie. Some idiot who thought every game was game seven of the Stanley Cup championship had come screaming down the ice, lost an edge, and rammed straight into Dee, hitting him just right and hard enough to cause whiplash. The big bruiser was lucky I wasn’t on the ice when it happened. I’d have hip checked him not only into the boards but right on through them.

  Yeah. I could be protective like that. Which would have mightily embarrassed Dee, who certainly didn’t need protecting, but hurt someone I cared about and they would feel my wrath.

  My psychic abilities weren’t needed for this kind of a job and Tyron Danyon and Julia Peet, who owned D&P, weren’t the sort to waste money on two people for a one-person job. Dee’s wizard talents probably weren’t needed on this job either, but Juliana and Tyron seemed to like to send Dee out on all but the most mundane jobs. I probably would have come along anyway to keep him company. Instead I was here on my own while he’d stayed home to work on healing his aching neck and rattled brain.

  I tugged on a desk drawer. Locked. No worries; I had a spell to handle that as well. I wasn’t the wizard Dee was, didn’t have anything near his power or knowledge, but in the six months we’d been dating I’d learned to cast a spell or two. I said the words, sending a little spark of my will along with them.

  The drawer lock clicked open. It was crammed full of what looked like high-end designer handbags. I reached out and touched the top bag—a small, lovely, oxblood-colored leather purse with a discreet silver clasp and chain. The leather was good quality, but not top. The finishing was decent, but not excellent. The real thing would retail in the $400-$500 range. This bag was as fake as a serial cheater’s remorse.

  More telling than the not-quite-top-quality materials and workmanship was the coating of guilt, worry, and greed that lay on the leather like oil. I felt the guilt as a small ache in my chest.

  I took several of the bags from the drawer, laid them out on the executive’s pristine desk, pulled my phone from my purse and shot close-ups of all the little details that betrayed the bags as counterfeits. Mr. Senior VP was going to be in a world of trouble in the next day or two.

  When I emerged from the office, the woman was still on the couch, clutching a ragged, stuffed toy white rabbit to her chest and sniffling. She hadn’t had the rabbit in her arms when I walked in. It must have bee
n in the large black purse sitting by her feet.

  “Can I tell you something?” she said.

  My throat went dry. So far, I hadn’t felt anything from the woman, but if she started telling me her story, chances were, I would. Chances were the story would be sad and her sorrow would flood me. I had enough of my own, thanks. People really should keep their grief to themselves.

  I’d once had hope against the assault of other people’s emotions. Dee had told me about another empathic psychic who’d built a protective net around herself with magic. It saved her from empathic onslaughts without cutting off her psychic abilities. He’d given me some of his own magic to build it with, but I’d never learned how or figured out for myself how to make one. His old mentor, The Gate, knew how it was done, but refused to tell me—which didn’t exactly endear him to me.

  And now this crying woman wanted to tell me a story.

  “Sure,” I said reluctantly, standing primly next to my cart.

  Her mouth worked, her lips compressing and uncompressing against each other as if searching for and then discarding the words she wanted.

  I started feeling antsy. I’d done the job I came here to do. I wanted to get home to Dee to see how he was—whiplash was nothing to fool around with—and I really, really didn’t want to be tugged into this woman’s problems tonight. I grabbed the handle of my cart, making ready to leave.

  “It’s my aunt,” she said, her gaze cast down at the stuffed rabbit clutched in her hands. “She is my aunt even though she’s only two years older than I am.” The woman looked up at me. “Isn’t that funny, how you can have an aunt who could have gone to the same school as you, a couple of grades ahead? In high school, we could have double-dated.”

  “Is your aunt in some trouble?” Because really, why else would this woman be sitting on the sofa in an office suite after midnight, crying and clutching a toy bunny?

  “She’s missing,” the woman said.

  A zing of anxiety shot through me—the woman’s anxiety, loosed now. I felt it as keenly as if it were my own. A small pain started behind my temples.

  I kept my voice neutral. “Have you called the police?”

  She nodded. “Of course. Right away. You know, it’s not true what they show on TV, how the police won’t search for a missing person until they’ve been gone 24 hours. They went to her apartment right away. I met them there. Let them in.”

  I nodded, to encourage her to go on. I wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible, but I couldn’t leave her with her worries jammed inside of her. She had to let them out and it seemed I was elected as her sounding board.

  “Everything looked normal,” she said. “There was a suitcase and some clothes missing. The police said she’d probably gone on a trip and hadn’t told me.” The woman leaned forward. “That’s not right. We’re close, Mich and I. Michelle, that’s her name. Everyone calls her Mich or Michie. She never would have gone somewhere without telling me.”

  “What do you think happened?” I said.

  The woman squeezed the bunny so tightly I worried the stuffing would pop out.

  “Kidnapped,” she whispered.

  My eyebrows shot up. “By who? Why?”

  The woman shook her head. When she spoke, her voice had returned to a normal volume but was still shaky. “I have no idea. She doesn’t have any money and neither do I. We’re all the family either one of us knows of.”

  She sniffled some more and suddenly thrust the bunny toward me.

  “Mich gave me this on my seventh birthday.”

  I was clearly meant to take the stuffed animal, maybe coo over the poor raggedy thing like it was alive and adorable. I wiped my hand first, the way you do when something old and ratty is being handed your way and took it.

  There was a sudden, horrible pressure inside my head followed immediately by a terrible sense of vertigo. I dropped the ragged rabbit, grabbed the handle of my cart, and leaned on it to keep my balance.

  Dammit, dammit, I thought, knowing that the vertigo would be followed by a vision. I hated when the knowledge came unbidden. It hit me full force.

  Shadows crawled along the sides of darkened buildings. A man made of fire stood over a bloody body. An ambulance siren I knew wasn’t anywhere near me blared in the night.

  I looked up at the woman without really seeing her. Words born from the knowledge tumbled out almost of their own accord. “You aunt is in danger.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Your aunt is in danger,” I repeated as my eyesight sharpened and I saw the crying woman and the office again.

  The woman’s mouth fell opened. “I knew it. The kidnappers—”

  I wasn’t sure kidnappers had anything to do with it, but this Aunt Mich was definitely in peril. I felt someone’s desire for Mich like a dark syrup coating everything about her.

  The woman leaned toward me. “How do you know this? What do you know? Tell me.”

  I turned my hands palms up. “Sometimes I just . . . know things.”

  She scoffed. “What do you mean—know things? Like a psychic?”

  People are strange. This woman wanted and didn’t want to believe I had some secret knowledge about her aunt. I’d run into this reaction enough times that it no longer surprised me. I’d seen what I’d seen, though. The aunt was in danger. I couldn’t not warn this woman.

  “I know it sounds like bull,” I said. “I’m not going to do some mind-reading trick to convince you, but it is true. Your aunt is in danger. You need to go back to the police first thing, get them looking for her.”

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes darting around the room as if proof of my words lay in some corner. “Yes, I believe you.”

  Desperation will make people believe the most unlikely things. She’d wrestled through her own conflicted feelings and decided I was telling the truth because it confirmed what she’d already decided. She leaned forward and snagged the bunny from the floor, then came to her feet.

  “Can you find her?” the woman said. “Use your, whatever, your psychic powers and find her now?”

  “It isn’t like that,” I said. “I only got a hint. I don’t know where she is or who might want to harm her or why. Do you have any idea?”

  “No,” she said. “None. Everyone loves Mich.”

  “How long has she been missing?”

  The woman swallowed hard. “Two weeks.”

  She reached to grab my hands and I stepped back. I hated touching strangers, having strangers touch me. Sometimes it was fine, and I didn’t feel a thing. Sometimes I felt too much.

  She dropped her hands to her sides. “Please, you have to help me find her. Do you want to hold the rabbit? It seemed like when you touched it, that’s when you knew Mich was in danger. Maybe if you held it, took it home if you wanted, you’d know more.”

  I shook my head. “This really is a job for the police, or maybe a private investigator. I know a good agency, Danyon and Peet. I can give you their number.”

  I’d started working as a psychic consultant with D&P to help find the person who’d killed Brad Keel, who I’d known. It turned out the killer wasn’t a person at all, but a beast from another realm. Stopping it had come close to killing both me, but it wasn’t my own near-death experience that made me want to walk away after—it was the horror of feeling everything the murder victims had felt in their last moments. I’d also thought a beast of that realm had killed Dee, and that belief had just about destroyed me. Dee had sworn the work with D&P wasn’t usually like that. So far, no case since Brad’s had been, but I lived in fear that some job that started out innocent and easy would wind up with dead bodies. I didn’t want anything to do with any more violent deaths.

  Still, I couldn’t very well tell this woman I actually worked with Danyon & Peet without fumbling around for an excuse for my cleaning person masquerade. If she hired the agency and we met up later in that capacity, no problem—the Senior VP probably would have already been dealt with and I could explain it t
hen.

  The woman shook her head vigorously. “No more police. They didn’t believe me the first time. I don’t think they’ll ever believe me. But maybe a private investigator is a good idea. Would they believe me?”

  “They’ll look into things,” I said. “It’s a very good agency. They get results.”

  She drew in a deep breath and sighed it out. “All right. I’ll try them.”

  Relief rolled through me. The aunt was in danger. I’d be happy to officially look for her, though there wasn’t a guarantee my talents would discover any more than what I knew now. In that case, it became a follow-the-lead situation and either Dee would look into it or one of the many other freelancers D&P kept on their roster would do the legwork.

  “I think I have a card for Danyon and Peet in my purse.”

  I rummaged around in my bag until I found the small card case I carried. My head was starting to pound. Getting hit by the knowledge did that. I wanted the woman to leave so I could go home.

  She took the card and stowed it in her purse.

  I pulled out a second card and a pen. “Give me your number. I’ll call if anything comes up.”

  “I’m Petra Folger,” she said taking the pen and card and writing on the back.

  “Oona Goodlight,” I said, giving my name in return, and taking the card she handed back.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said. “For the first time in weeks I feel like there might be some hope.”

  She didn’t hold out her hand for a shake, for which I was grateful.

  “Call them,” I said. “I’m sure they will help you.”