Page 4 of The Bratva's Innocent Pregnant Bride
She very kindly offered to finish my monthly report for me, but I declined. I liked her, but couldn’t trust anyone at Axon since management was constantly pitting us against each other. We gossiped for a few minutes, clinging to our humanity in that sea of toxicity, when she leaned closer, lowering her voice.
“Do you remember Jordan who used to sit at the end of the row?”
I nodded. “He was always volunteering for extra work until he quit.”
She nodded even harder. “But he didn’t quit, not with any notice or anything. He disappeared.”
I rolled my eyes. Yes, we got pretty bored in our little pens. We often made mountains out of molehills. “How do you know that?”
“How do you think?” she asked. “Gossip, and I stalked his social media. He was hot.”
“He was a dick, like the rest of them,” I said.
She lectured me about being a man hater, which I wasn’t. I only hated the kind of men who seemed to flock to Axon.
“Anyway,” she said, trying very hard to look somber instead of bursting to tell me the rest. “He’s dead. Found yesterday. What was left of him anyway.”
“Oh wow, his poor family,” I said.
This was actually pretty big news, especially since we often joked around about the high turnover here being because people were getting taken out. Not the stressful atmosphere, the constant harassment, the overwork leading to people getting fed up. It was much more fun to whisper about conspiracies.
“Do you think Mel will turn up next?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood by referring to someone who’d quit just last week. I made the mistake of eating lunch with him one time and he decided we were basically fated soulmates. I was relieved when he finally left and ignored his last message to me, sending it straight to the spam folder.
She tried to look stern, but neither one of us had known Jordan very well, and he’d done his best to make us look bad on more than one occasion. “He was murdered, Paisley!”
“Yeah, and this is LA. We’re one of the murder capitals of the world.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Mr Caraggio looked like he had something to be scared of.”
I groaned. “His report not getting turned in on time. I better get started so I can get out of here before ten pm.”
Mr. Caraggio was high enough on the food chain to have a private office, albeit a tiny one. His computer was still logged on as he promised, and not only was his desktop screen littered with open files, but his actual desk and keyboard were covered with loose papers. Irritation crowded out the unsettled feeling I had about hearing someone I knew being murdered, despite putting on a flippant attitude about it.
The unsettled feeling came back in force when I caught Jordan’s name scrawled on one of the pieces of paper I slid into a neat pile. I took it out and saw that it was a list. Jordan’s name was third down, the names of two other employees written above his, three more underneath. Four of them I recognized from my time working there, the others I recognized from our silly gossip sessions about the curse of working at Axon.
My stomach rolled over when I saw the check mark next to Jordan’s name and the two above him. The last name on the list was Mel’s, the guy who had the stalker-like crush on me.
What the hell?
I looked at the screen, the report in the center of the other open files. The rows and numbers all blurred together as I pulled my phone out of my blazer pocket and scrolled to the socialmedia account I used solely for my coworkers. I didn’t have time to go out much or have much of a life outside of work while I was scrimping and saving for my goal of starting my own business, so there weren’t any pictures on my account. It was just so people could contact me and I could keep them from having my phone number.
Mel’s messages had been sent to the spam folder a week before, when he didn’t show up for work. For all I knew they might be permanently deleted by now and I’d never know what his last message to me was before he quit.
Or disappeared.
Or was murdered.
I laughed nervously. Leslie’s overactive imagination and the completely coincidental news of Jordan’s death had me on edge. Extra on edge, since I was never relaxed as long as I was at work.
The messages were all still there and my finger hovered over the unopened one, bracing myself for a dick pic now that I couldn’t report him to HR anymore.
No picture, just one line of text.
Leave Axon now. Get in touch with me when you’re safe.
My eyes jerked back to the list, Mel’s name jumping out at me. No check mark. I pressed the button to call him through the app, my heart thumping in my chest. It rang through with no answer so I messaged him back, asking him to call me right away. Staring at the screen, I waited to see if it would show being read until my vision blurred.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said out loud.
