“Any luck?” I texted Burke around noon.
“None. This guy’s a fucking ghost.”
I bit my lip. I knew I had to be patient…but thinking about Kelly getting hurt, thinking about him finding her and Charlotte…
OK, yeah, I got why Scott had his rules. I couldn’t think straight on this mission. When it was all said and done, I, too, was fucking quitting Kelly or quitting DOM. And unlike a couple of days ago, it wasn’t so evident which one would be out the door.
“I’m going to check on the girls,” I wrote back. “Let me know if you find anything.”
Burke did not reply. Good. The less time he spent looking at his phone, the better.
I drove over to the motel and went up to the room number I knew they were at. I knocked.
No one answered.
I knocked again. Again, no one answered.
This isn’t right. Much as I would have loved to believe all three of them were just in some weird combination of naps and showers, I knew better. Coincidences didn’t happen, only things we called coincidences when we did not have enough information.
I knocked one more time. This time, when no one answered, I slammed my shoulder into the door. When the lock held me in place, I picked it and opened the door.
It looked…
It looked clean.
Too clean.
No one had gotten on the bed. Nothing looked out of place. A sinking gut feeling hit me.
I went into the bathroom. There was a certain humidity to it, a certain wet feeling that suggested someone had showered here somewhat recently. So perhaps they had come here. But for the room to look so clean and for there to be no trace—
My phone rang. It was Kelly.
But even before I picked up, I knew something was amiss. I steeled myself for the worst, promising myself not to crack at whatever happened on the call.
“This is Liam,” I said, fully aware Kelly was probably not the other one on the line.
“Ah, the asshole that fucked my life up in Miami.”
Sean. So much for steeling myself. The rage building up inside of me…boy, I’d make this fucker suffer. He had no idea what was coming to him. He’d wish that I’d killed him back in Florida.
“How are you, buddy? Do you miss your girlfriend and daughter?”
“What do you need to get them back?”
It took far more strength not to chomp at the bit than anything that my voice suggested.
“However much these bitches paid you, I want,” he said, “And on top of that, you’re going to pay for a ticket for me to go to Brazil. With Emily.”
“You said—”
“Shut up, whore!”
I winced at the sound of her getting smacked. There was nothing I could do for now. But there was plenty I would do when I saw Sean.
“You know where to find me. It won’t be hard.”
“You—”
“I need it by midnight, Liam. Otherwise, neither of us will ever see what we want out of this deal.”
The line went dead.
Fuck.
Fuck!
I slammed my phone on the bed, about the only surface in this motel where I knew my phone wouldn’t shatter. The only silver lining in this was that Sean didn’t seem to know that I had Burke here—or if he did, he was even smarter than I had to begrudgingly give him credit for. But that still meant we had to make a plan while Kelly, Emily, and Charlotte suffered in ways I didn’t even want to fucking think about.
I grabbed my phone and called Burke.
“I’m picking you up outside the grocery store,” I said. “You can’t miss it. I’ll see you in five.”
And just before I drove off to meet him, I got everything together that I knew I’d need for this encounter.
Burke and I sat in my truck in the parking lot of the grocery store. Around us, people dropped their groceries off into the trunk of their vehicles, blissfully unaware of what was going on—and certainly unaware that there was a psychopath in town, holding three girls hostage.
“He’s at the ruins of the house,” I said. “I’m fucking sure of it. There’s no place else that Sean would go.”
“Why the fuck there?”
“Probably figures the smoke and burned down building gives him more cover than he’d have elsewhere,” I said. “He’s very clearly setting us up for a trap.”
“Wouldn’t be a bad guy if he wasn’t.”
“So I need you to stay in the back and offer help however you can.”
Burke nodded.
“Snipe the fucker down?”
“With your gun? The more in the shadows you are, the better,” I said, “so if that’s what it takes, then yes. Worst case is him escaping and knowing you’re here with me.”
“Don’t worry about it, Liam,” he said. “We’re fucking DOMs, not some green cops.”
I sure hoped he was right. I put the car in drive and began the long trek toward Kelly’s old house. The two of us sat in silence. What the hell were we going to do, talk about the sports of the day? That wasn’t going to fucking happen.
I didn’t give two shits what Liam was thinking about. I was just getting myself zoned in, focused on the task at hand. I had two women and my daughter to protect. I had to channel my rage and fury properly, to use it as a motivating force to eliminate this evil, but not to have it make stupid decisions for me.
At the entrance of the woods, I stopped the car.
“It’s about half a mile up the road,” I said. “Best that you get out here and walk on foot. You can’t miss it. Just stay near the road.”
“Got it.”
I hated that it was
