Follow the devil a danny.., p.1
Follow the Devil: A Danny Devlin Thriller (The Danny Devlin Thriller Series Book 1), page 1
FOLLOW THE DEVIL
A DANNY DEVLIN THRILLER
BOOK 1
PATRICK MCNULTY
PRAISE FOR THE DANNY DEVLIN SERIES
“A perfectly paced thriller from an author who knows his craft.”
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“Gripping, fast-paced and intense!”
~ AMAZON REVIEW
“Danny Devlin is the hero I’ve been waiting for.”
~ AMAZON REVIEW
“An action-packed thrill ride!”
~ AMAZON REVIEW
Copyright © 2025 by Patrick McNulty
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Patrick McNulty
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CONTENTS
Monsters & Mayhem Community
Follow the Devil
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
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
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FOLLOW THE DEVIL
A DANNY DEVLIN THRILLER
CHAPTER
ONE
Seattle, Washington
Sixteen-year-old Ruby Sinclair knew she was about to die.
She was curled into a ball on a dirty twin mattress, staring up at the bank of flickering fluorescents mounted overhead. The sickly green light illuminated the dank, ten-by-ten, concrete room that had been her whole world since…God knew how long.
She remembered leaving school as she usually did. A little later than usual, maybe. She had gotten caught chatting with her girlfriends about weekend plans and the next biology quiz. It seemed so trivial now. The things she had worried about: cute boys or the right shoes to wear with the right skirt.
Stepping out of the warm school into the wet and miserable Seattle winter, Ruby jogged to the same black Audi with the tinted windows that had driven her to school and home again every day for the last three years. She slipped into the backseat without a second thought.
It only took a moment.
The hulking, bearded man behind the wheel wasn’t Jason, her usual driver. Before she could open her mouth to ask a question, the door locks snapped shut and the huge man swivelled in his seat to face her. He wore a surgical mask over his mouth, and in his hand, he held what appeared to be a can of spray paint.
A moment later, the backseat was filled with a thick white cloud that stung her eyes and clogged her throat. Instantly, she couldn’t breathe as if her throat was suddenly filled with sand. She clawed at her neck as her eyes burned and bulged in their sockets. Fear exploded in her brain, and her legs kicked the back of the front seats in jerky spasms as her vision swam and curled in at the edges.
And then nothing.
Darkness.
Ruby didn’t know how long she was out. But when she awoke, she was here. Wherever here was. In this tiny room with the concrete floor and the butcher block table and the buzzing, flickering fluorescents.
Over the hours or days or even weeks since she had been taken, she had lost all sense of time. The cold, the darkness, and the indignities of relieving herself in a steel bucket in the corner of the room not far from her bed had forced her to retreat inward, where her mind reverted to survival mode and did its best to keep her safe.
Now, her short life was cut into two parts. The before and the after.
The lights above hummed and flared, and for a moment, sharp shadows twitched across the walls covered in industrial-strength soundproofing.
Ruby shifted onto her back and pulled her shackled left wrist closer to her thin chest. She had lost weight since being in captivity, and she could feel the edges of her ribs through her filthy T-shirt.
She examined the handcuff for the thousandth time. The skin closest to the metal was red, chafed and painfully swollen. As she moved, the heavy chain welded to an iron ring set in the floor rattled across the concrete, announcing her every move.
This once-beautiful girl was now an emaciated ruin. Glazed blue eyes stared blankly up out of sunken pits; her pale, almost grey cheeks were hollow. Her dyed black hair lay flat and plastered to her skull, greased with sweat.
A series of snaps and clicks was followed by the grating sound of a metal bolt being pulled back, signalling another visit from her captors. The heavy wooden door creaked on massive hinges as a section of the wall swung inward, revealing a doorway lit by watery yellow light.
Ruby’s heart kicked into overdrive, knocking painfully against the brittle cage of her ribs. Instinctively, she shuffled backwards on the mattress, desperate for some distance.
A woman’s narrow silhouette slipped through the doorway, holding a plastic cafeteria tray, carrying a plate of some gruel that had the same consistency as oatmeal, a small green apple and a cardboard cup of water. It was the same meal she had been given twice a day since she awoke in this hell.
The woman had introduced herself early. Her name was Wren, and Ruby pegged her as being somewhere in her twenties, even though she looked much older. Harder. Her body was thin and muscular like a long-distance runner, and the contours of her face were all knife edges. She didn’t smile. Didn’t offer comfort or even pretend that there was a world in which Ruby would or could escape. She was as hard as a coffin nail and stank of sweat, cigarettes and stale coffee.
Wren moved with whispered steps to the butcher block table and made a disapproving noise in her throat when she saw Ruby’s last meal still sat there, untouched, except for the two flies that had landed in her oatmeal.
Ruby had felt queasy and lightheaded after eating the oatmeal last time, and she was convinced they were drugging her to make her more docile and compliant. She had decided to stop eating anything but the apple, which she figured was a safe bet.
Wren set the new tray down next to the old one and glared at the young girl. Even her eyes were hard, Ruby thought, like chips of flint. “You need to eat, Ruby,” she said.
Ruby shook her head.
“Not hungry,” she whispered through cracked lips.
Ruby blinked, and when she opened her eyes, she discovered that Wren had moved soundlessly from the butcher block to within inches of her bed. Wren’s face, twisted in irritation, studied her from above her like an angry pale moon.
“Eat,” she said, her voice hoarse and raspy, “Or you get the feeding tube again. Your choice.”
Ruby couldn’t respond.
The memory of the big man, the one who had picked her up from school and had delivered the spray, came rushing back. His name was Merrick, and he scared her more than Wren ever could.
When Ruby refused to eat, he had entered the room without warning and with one hand grabbed a fistful of her hair while the other clamped down on her mouth. Wren strapped her to the bed using zipties around her ankles and wrists.
“Feed it,” Merrick hissed to Wren.
The thought of the man’s hands on her skin, or the feeling of the feeding tube being forced into her nose and down the back of her throat, made her flesh break out in goosebumps. She couldn’t breathe as a single tear slipped over her cheek. She squeezed her eyes closed, praying Wren would leave. Disappear.
A moment later, Wren’s footsteps retreated. The heavy door slammed closed. Two locks clicked into place, and the metal bolt was slammed into its cradle.
Wren was gone.
It was time to go. It was now or never.
CHAPTER
TWO
A moment later, Ruby was in motion.
She rolled off the mattress and dropped painfully to her knees beside the bed. Immediately, she ripped up the thin sheet, and her fingers found the two-inch slit she had torn in the thick fabric of the mattress.
She shifted aside the dense padding and bits of foam until she felt the three-inch nail she had pried from the wall. She had found the nail sticking out from the drywall on what would be her second day in the cell. At first, she thought she could use the nail as a weapon, and for days afterward, she imagined waiting until Wren was leaning over her, her mouth pressed into a pale line.
In her mind, she watched herself stab the woman in the throat. Again and again. Blood would geyser from the wound, and the keys to her handcuffs would spill out onto the floor as Wren would flail and flop on the concrete in an ever-growing pool of blood as she quickly bled out.
But Ruby knew it was just a fantasy. Killing her that easily with a rusty nail was a long shot at best. Plus, she was as weak as a kitten after her hunger strike, so she switched her focus to escape. And after probing the padded walls within her grasp, she found that a section of padding could be pulled away near the top of the wall.
Nail in hand, Ruby removed the food tray from the butcher block desk and placed it on the bed. The wooden block ground against the concrete as she shifted it closer to the wall, and Ruby winced at the noise, but it couldn’t be helped. She wasn’t strong enough to lift the block off the ground; she just prayed that no one would hear it, and if they did, they wouldn’t want to investigate.
Using the bed, she managed to climb up onto the desk and carefully peel back the heavy soundproofing to reveal a section of drywall pockmarked with hundreds of tiny holes.
Watery daylight streamed through the pin pricks made by the nail. Furiously, Ruby scraped the nail across the drywall, carving out a rectangle that she hoped led to a narrow, unlocked window.
Heavy footsteps stomped toward her door, and she froze, her blood beating a drumbeat in her temples.
Please no. Not Merrick.
She froze in place, ready to jump from the butcher block and slip back onto the mattress if the door locks began to disengage. Seconds ticked by as she stared at the narrow band of light beneath the door. The shadows of two boots broke the watery yellow light. What was he doing there?
Listening?
Could they hear me?
Was he coming in?
Ruby held her breath, feeling faint and scared and ready to throw up. Sweat slid down her chest and plastered the T-shirt to her back.
What seemed like a lifetime later, the boots stepped away.
Ruby let out a shaky breath and returned to gouging the rectangle into the piece of drywall. Faster and faster, she carved through the plaster, the nail gripped in her fist until she could push her fingers through the holes that she had created and rip the dirty chunks away.
She stood on her tiptoes as the dull gray sunlight washed over her face. Rain pelted the narrow window that granted her a view of what looked like an alley. She could see trash littering the space and, to her far left, the corner of a rusted, green dumpster. Her heart leapt in her chest. Only a swinging latch kept the window from being opened.
Ruby reached for the latch with her left hand, but the chain keeping her tethered to the concrete floor pulled taut and kept her fingers inches away from the window handle. She used her right hand and unlocked the window. The ancient hinge creaked and groaned, but the window opened, and she could hear the engines of cars and the thrum of tires on wet pavement.
Ruby pulled on her cuffed wrist, desperate to pull her thin hand through, but the cuff was locked tight. She swore, twisted her position on the butcher block and reached for the window again. Still, the cuff held firm, digging painfully into her heavily bruised wrist.
No. Not now.
She was so close. She could see the rain sliding down the dirty glass of the window and the alley beyond. Without the cuff holding her back, she would be gone. The window was narrow, but she was confident she could get through it. It was just the goddamn handcuff.
Frustrated, Ruby stepped from the wooden desk to the bed and then to the floor. She studied the iron ring and the heavy chain, and eventually her cuffed wrist. There had to be a way out of this.
There had to be.
She knew if she didn’t escape right now, she could die. Or worse.
Earlier, she had tried to pick the handcuff lock with the nail, but the rusted bit of metal was too wide to fit into the keyhole. She had no other tools. No other options.
Ruby stared longingly up at the little basement window and then at the plaster dust that had fallen to the concrete floor. As soon as Wren or Merrick came in, they would see it. The dust had dropped outside of her reach, and she had no hope of cleaning it in her current predicament.
They would know. They would pull up the soundproofing and find the window. They would punish her. They would beat her. They would hogtie her and leave her for hours or days. At the very least, they would move her to another room, and the last sliver of her hope would be gone.
This was her only chance.
She grunted and swore as she leaned backwards with all of her weight on her handcuffed hand. The edges of the cuff bit into her flesh, but the bones of her hand kept the cuff locked in place.
Precious seconds ticked by.
Frustrated, she grunted and slapped her hands down on the butcher block table. She had to get her hand out of the cuff. Now.
She couldn’t break the chain.
She couldn’t break the cuff.
Her stomach curdled with the thought of what she had to do.
Ruby knelt beside the butcher’s block table and wrapped her right arm around it. Using her legs and what remained of her core muscles, she was able to lean back and raise the heavy wooden table off the floor. She leaned back more and more and managed to raise the table a solid twelve inches.
Sweating and shaking, she placed her cuffed left hand flat against the concrete and, without another thought, slammed the table down with everything she had. The heavy wood smashed into the thin bones of her left hand with a sickening crunch. Pain shot like a lightning bolt up her left arm and exploded in her chest. Ruby clamped her right hand over her mouth to stifle the scream that barreled up her throat. She couldn’t stop. The task wasn’t done.
She leaned against the table, and again, she lifted the block from the floor. Her left hand lay trembling against the concrete, shattered and dotted with blood. Ruby rose the table as high as she could and again, smashed it down onto her hand. Bones snapped like dry kindling, and Ruby let loose a short bark of pain.
She yanked her hand from beneath the scarred leg of the table and cradled it to her chest. Two broken fingers were pointing at odd angles, and blood flooded her palm. The pain was a living thing, twisting and screaming inside her as her vision swam and vomit churned in her belly.
Greased with sweat, Ruby blinked to keep herself from passing out, even as her vision dimmed and darkened. She stared down at her mangled hand and shuffled on her knees past the end of her bed until the chain pulled tight. The cuff bit once again into her pale flesh, but now, Ruby could see sharp points of broken bones poking against her gray skin.
Leaning as far as she could, she threw herself backward and felt her ruined hand squeeze free of the cuff as the rest of her body slammed to the concrete floor in a heap. A strangled cry exploded in her cell as her left hand flopped against the ground with a splat of blood-soaked flesh. Ruby lay shaking and whimpering on the cold floor until the sound of running footsteps thundered down the hall, skidding to a stop in front of her door.
CHAPTER
THREE
The first lock snaps open, and Ruby is up off the floor and onto the bed, gasping and struggling to keep her balance on the thin mattress as the springs bite into her bare feet—whines of pain leak from her trembling lips as she moves. Every inch of her body feels like an open wound.
