“I know about you and Dallas,” he says, confirming my suspicions. He walks over to the desk and stops at the other side. “And the truth is—”
The sound of my phone blaring through the office interrupts his words.
If these calls weren’t so fucking important, I’d put this son of a bitch on silent.
I glance at the phone to see if I can ignore it, but when I see the name, grim determination moves through me. I show the phone to Gabriel and he nods, silently agreeing to table this discussion for now.
It’s Patty.
Gabriel knows. And I don’t even know how he feels about it. Growing up on the streets like Gabriel and I did makes being able to hide your emotions a necessity.
I shake my head to clear my thoughts and answer the phone, putting it on speaker, gripping the letter opener so hard it digs into the wood of the desk.
“Aye, Dom, you there?”
Patty sounds jovial, like a little kid on Christmas morning. Something in my stomach sinks.
“Are you ready to settle this like men?” I growl.
“I thought about that,” he says, and I can imagine him pacing giddily up and down.
He has something.
I glance at Gabriel and he grimaces. I can’t tell if it’s about the phone call or the fact that he knows, somehow, about me and Dallas. He could’ve known this entire time. It’s only been a few days, which seems completely insane when I think about it, that in a few days this dream-made goddess has entered my life and remade it completely.
“But then I decided that I don’t really want to play into your petty games,” he goes on. “So what I did is something very clever. I had drones spy on your estate. You can get them online these days, you know. It was very high-tech of me. That was how I learned about you and your consigliere’s daughter.”
Dallas. No. Please God no.
“Anyway, I already had a plan in place to kidnap Samantha, his ex-wife. But I thought, well, why not do one better than that? You see, I had to target Gabriel’s family because you don’t have any, Dom. I sent my man Cillian out to seduce this Samantha slut, which was pathetically easy to do. And then I had her contact her daughter and lure Dallas out to me. And now, well, I have them both. It really worked very fucking well, if I do say so myself.”
My mouth feels dry as his words try to untether me. I stab the letter opener into the desk and hold it there, pinned, my body trembling and my fist so tight I can feel the desk quivering.
“You have Dallas and her mother,” I murmur, my voice somehow calm.
Iceman, Dallas teases from within.
“That’s right,” Patty says. “So I’ve got a new proposition for you, Dom. You and your consigliere are going to come and meet me—alone. I’ll know if you tell your little whore in the police. If you let anybody know where you’re going, the sluts die. If you bring weapons, they die. And if you keep me waiting, what do you think happens, Dom? I’ll text you the address. You’ve got one hour.”
“How do we know you have them?” Gabriel snaps, real emotion stabbing in his voice.
There’s a rustling on the other side of the line and then, about a minute later, I hear Dallas’s voice raised and behind it Poppet’s yapping.
“It’s okay, girl. Just be quiet. Just settle down and everything will be okay, I promise.”
“Please, just let us go,” Samantha cries.
I make to talk, to call out Dallas’s name, but then the line cuts off.
A moment later, the address comes through.
Gabriel and I exchange a glance and then wordlessly climb to our feet, walking silently to the elevator at the rear of the room, the private one that will take us straight to the parking lot.
Chapter Twenty-One
Dallas
Mom and I sit in the corner of the dank gray cell, the stone walls moist and cold. Poppet’s finally stopped barking at the two guards who stand at the door, but her hackles are raised and she’s taken to pacing up and down, snarling at them every so often.
Every time she does this, I have to tell her to stop because otherwise, I’ve got no idea what they’re going to do to her.
Mom sulks beside me, sobbing softly.
Tears of my own have already dried and crusted on my cheeks.
The impact of this morning’s events thud through me with cruel vividness.
I remember the look on Mom’s face when she saw me walking up the alleyway, where she’d texted me to meet her behind the restaurant. She’d started to cry immediately and, at the last moment, she threw her hands up and screamed.
“Run, Dallas,” she cried. “Get out of here, now. I don’t care if they kill me. Oh, God, what have I done?”
I stared at her in confusion for a moment, which turned out to be a moment far too long. Armed Irishmen emerged from the shadows all around us, dressed in black masks, gloved, looking like a SWAT team as a van pulled up and they bundled us all inside. I was so focused on keeping Poppet calm, I just went with them, and now we’ve been sitting in here for hours, our only toilet a disgusting broken thing in the corner.
Neither of us has had to use it, thankfully.
Yet.
I know now that Cillian was part of the Irish mob, and Mom’s so-called technology detox was actually an excuse for him to kidnap her and not arouse my suspicion. He brought her here and then they used her to lure me out here. I’d almost be impressed if it wasn’t so fucked up and evil.
I close my eyes and try not to let my mind return to the way Dom looked in that video, the casual way he took those men’s lives. I don’t want to think about it because it
