Chapter Six
I didn’t know how longI stood there staring at the wreckage of The Chief’s office. It hurt to see it, because I could picture every hit he took, every punch, every break. Heat and fear blasted through me as I imagined it. Esteban had knocked Helix and Melinda out cold with no effort, but The Chief he kept awake and fought. Unless The Chief didn’t go down the way Esteban expected.
I turned to Hawk who stared around the room with an equally stunned expression as I’m sure I wore. “Can you access the security camera in this office? So we can see what happened and make sure he’s still alive?”
“He’s still alive,” Hawk said, his tone hard and finite. I wasn’t about to argue, but I also needed to be sure. Because if The Chief was dead at Esteban’s hands well, I’d be going to him for sure, with my blades, and my magic, until I beat him into a pulp. I let myself imagine it long enough and then studied the scene again.
When Hawk didn’t make any moves to leave, I rolled my eyes, walked around the desk, and dug through the drawers to find The Chief’s laptop. He never used it, but I knew Hawk kept it secure and updated for him in case he decided to.
It only took a few minutes to log in and find the feed archive on the server. Somewhere in this wreckage the routers were still functional, thank goodness.
I opened the file and let it load. It showed The Chief behind his desk, writing in a notebook, and then he looked up. His reaction was almost instant, he’d cleared the desk and went out of the frame in seconds. Not bad for an old guy.
Then he came flying back into the desk and sank to the floor. But he didn’t stop trying to fight until Esteban stood over him and struck him in the side of the face. Watching The Chief lay by his desk unconscious felt like it might kill me from the inside out. It was a sort of helplessness I hated and feared in equal measures. Give me a straight out fight over waiting any day.
Hawk shoved around me and loaded the video himself. At the end, while Esteban loaded the Chief up onto his shoulder and carried him out, he cursed and threw the laptop off the desk into the shelves.
I didn’t blame him. Part of me wanted to do the same thing but destroying anything else in this office wasn’t going to help The Chief right now.
We both shuffled around the room, looking for any kind of evidence, or another note. Anything that might tell me how to get to Esteban and retrieve The Captain. But of course, we found nothing but the wreckage of an old man’s career. A father’s career. A soldier’s career. I had to hold onto those facts. He might be three times my age, but he was always a scrappy fighter. Anything to win, for him, meant anything.
“He’ll be okay,” I said in the quiet room. Was I reassuring Hawk, or myself?
“Of course he will,” Hawk said. “What do you think? Anything useful?”
I shook my head just as Fin walked into the room. He gaped at the mess, his sympathy in his eyes. I walked into his open arms and let him wrap me up in him for a moment.
Hawk gave the room one last look and then came toward us.
Fin shifted so he could get out to the main floor. “I got a few things packed up. We need to go somewhere else. These locations are no longer safe.”
When Hawk didn’t respond, I patted Fin’s back to let him know I heard. In his arms, I could almost believe things would be okay. I wanted to be the kind of person who could believe it.
Fin led me out to a waiting black SUV. Melinda and Helix sat stone-faced in the back. A few minutes later, Hawk climbed in, his files tucked under his arm. None of us were up to fake smiles as Fin drove us away from The Office. How had it gone from full to empty in a matter of hours?
We drove out of the city but not toward the mansion we’d originally hunkered down in when he and I started working together. The house we drove up to sat bracketed by the countryside. A quaint two-story thing framed by fallow fields. I actually vastly preferred it to the big one.
I followed Fin inside, allowing the others to come in when they were ready. The floorboards creaked as we crossed to a bedroom in the back. I instantly loved the place for its character. After a quick walk around the room, I exited to find Hawk sitting at the worn dining room table talking on his phone. Or shouting more like.
When he finished, I couldn’t ask about it before he dialed up another number and did the same thing. Duh. He called his contacts for information. I should be doing the same. And yet all I felt like doing was curling up the couch and sitting this one out for a while. One hit coming one after the other can eventually wear anyone down.
Helix and Melinda went up the stairs and closed the doors to their separate rooms quietly. See, they got to hide, yet again.
I immediately felt unkind for the thought. They didn’t ask for Esteban’s place in their lives any more than I had. Fin tugged me to the couch, and I sat. “I should be doing something.”
“If Esteban wanted to kill The Chief he could have done it at The Office and saved himself a lot of trouble,” he said after a few minutes of tense silence.
As usual, he was right. I knew it, and yet, I still queued everything in my head as if every second The Chief spent with Esteban would be torture. Logically, I doubted it, especially if he wanted to use my stepfather as leverage. “I just need a minute, and the I can get to work.”
Fin carefully tugged the elastic from his hair and gathered it back up in a messy bun. “Work on what?”
I waved at Hawk, still talking on the phone. “Call my contacts and see what I can do to find him. Someone might have spotted them, or something strange enough to notice.”
The look he gave me said he had thoughts about that statement. “So you’re going to call every single person you know and ask them if they have seen, or had seen, something that might lead you to The Chief, or Esteban?”
When he put it like that...okay, it didn’t sound like a great plan.
Fin continued, shrugging out of this sweatshirt. “If these people are your contacts, potentially, they know who The Chief is. You don’t think they would contact you unsolicited to attempt to garner some favor?”
Okay so someone was actually thinking this through. That fact, combined with his nearness, eased the thing in my chest which had been squeezing tight since I watched that security tape. If something happened to The Chief I didn’t know what I would do. He’d been the rock I threw myself at for years, and now that I’d finally figured out how to engage with him, he’d been taken from me.
A warmth spread through me now, chasing out the numb, killing the edge to my inability to act. Grief can make someone freeze, but anger could fire them back up again. Ignite that pain and allow them clearer sight.
I snapped my eyes to Fin. “You’re right. I haven’t been thinking clearly. I’ve been trying to accept my magic, trying to rectify who I am as a whole person between being part fae and part mage, but that wasn’t what I should have been doing at all. I’m a fucking bounty hunter. The Chief trained me himself and I’m damn good at it.”
I shifted on the couch to face him, my foot flush into my thigh. “Esteban has taken advantage of my inexperience. Of my lack of balance. And why shouldn’t he. It’s little more than a game to him. When he forced me into that sending, he mentioned you, and your perfect life. Hurting me is a way for him to hurt you, and he knows it.”
Confronted with the truth of it, everything up until now seemed silly. He’d targeted me as a move against Fin, thinking I was nothing more than a pawn to be shifted about the board until he could pick me off. It came down to sibling rivalry so what started it?
I eyed him and the look he gave me in return told me he didn’t like the look in my eyes, or the feelings between us. “What? I’m sure I don’t want to know but you’ve got that look you used to get before you did something both brilliant and reckless.”
“What started this fight between you and Esteban. I’m sure it started as children, teenagers?”
He shook his head and stared away. “You think he’s killed this many people. Done all of this because of some spat between us?”
“It may have started as a spat, but then things escalated. People died and the thing grew harder, darker, more dangerous between you.”
When he stood abruptly, I almost toppled off the edge of the couch. “No. If it were like that then why target you so hard from the beginning?”
“Uh...mate bond, remember? The one everyone knew about before me? He thinks hurting me will result in the most hurt to you.” Okay. Maybe I was making it all about me. My original thought that this was about mates floated into my head like a feather falling in slow motion.
“I want to understand the root of this so we can find a plan to move forward. It’s how I hunt. Understanding the target, thinking like them, is one of the most important steps.”
It started when he took So—Melinda and turned Mage. We spent so long searching for her that I assumed she was dead until you came into my life.”
“But why? Why did you seek my help in finding him in the first place?”
He faced me again and cupped my cheeks in his hands. I didn’t have any choice but to lean back to meet his eyes. “Because it was time. I felt that it was time to finally learn what happened to my sister. To get revenge for all the death I’d endured. And to finally find my mate. Every fae’s father to his love is different, I knew I’d find mine in blood since I was a child.”
Not a flattering thought but considering how much he’d spent on doctors since we met, an apt one. “How did you know?”
He tapped his chest with his palm. “In here. I just knew when it was time. Then I saw you in that alley and it was as if I’d been listening to the world with earmuffs on and suddenly they had disappeared.” He chuckled to himself. “I fought against it. Damn it, you’re so mouthy and brash and you drive me insane. I fought but eventually knew I couldn’t fight anymore.”
That was possibly the strangest and most romantic thing a man had ever said to me. I didn’t even try to resist kissing him. When he scooped me up in his arms, I let out a squeak and pulled away.
He carried me to the bed and then returned to close and lock the door. I watched him approach and when he stepped into the space I made between my thighs a thrill shot through me.
“You’re incredible. Insane and reckless. All the things I’ve tried not to be in my life Everything has always been about order and control for me. You’re the universe’s gut punch, but it worked. I can accept your virtues and your flaws, but can you accept mine?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Of course, what kind of question is that as you’re standing between my spread legs. Jeez.”
He leaned in and teased my mouth with his. Okay, if this is all he needs to know I trust him then I’m super in. But then I felt it. The faintest brush of his power, the faintest ripple through me. It started at my lips, the sensation flashing so bright for a moment I gasped against his mouth. Then the magic trailed lower. Like a lover’s hand shaping my body to his embrace, except, inside me, a more sensitive, intimate caress than anything I’d ever felt before.
He gently laid me back onto the bed and I arched up, my head and hips the anchor points to the storm he’s already ignited in me. It hit me. He was using his mind control power on me. Subtly, gently, but with no way I could question it.
Another caress over my body and I moaned, ready to strip out of my clothing and rub up against him. “You better be ready to finish this and not just teasing me.”
With a wicked grin he sank down slowly, then tugged my pants down with a quick jerk. He left them around my ankles, shoved my legs apart, and put his mouth exactly where I needed him most. But not just his mouth after all. I felt him all over my body. Inside me, on top of me, under my skin, and in my heart. There was nowhere to tell where we separated when it came to the pleasure he gave me.
I dug my hands into his hair, needing to touch him in return. He only hiked my legs up over his shoulder and pressed his mouth against me harder. I melted into the bed and arched my hips up toward him, griding back as he licked me in broad flat strokes. It didn’t take long for my orgasm to begin, and he used his powers to somehow amplify it until I had to press the bed pillow to my face to stifle the scream which built in my throat.
After I sank back into my own body, he lifted his head and gently shifted out from under my knees. “I think you ripped out some of my hair.”
My head lulled from side to side. “It’ll grow back, I’m sure. If not well, consider it a well-earned battle scar.”
He chuckled, stood, and climbed onto the bed beside me. I reached for him, wanting to reciprocate some of what he gave to me, but when I reached for his belt buckle, he caught my hands.
“Tomorrow. For now, it’s been a long day and you need to sleep. Rest.”
No part of me even wanted to argue. Hell, I didn’t even have the mental capacity to take off my pants, still restricting my ankles, before I passed out hard.