Not surprising, since the bastard wasn’t loyal to anything. Still, he played along, humoring the man. “What can you tell me?”
“I can...” Hector thought for a second. “I can tell you that there’s a change in leadership now. There were five before.”
“I already know,” the Shadow Man told him. “I killed three of them.”
Hector gulped visibly. “And one of them killed the other. There’s only one in power now.”
Interesting. He must have missed that in the two months he’d spent with her, giving her all his time to heal slowly.
“What about the rest of the organization?” he asked, walking around in the shadows, watching the other men constantly turning to see where his voice was coming from.
“It’s the same. They don’t know about the change in leadership.”
That meant Vin, Dante's man, didn't know about it either, which meant that entire side was still in the dark. Over the last few months, he had left breadcrumbs for them to find her, keeping them busy while buying himself more time, and mainly he had sent Vin chasing Lyla's friend, the girl who had been good to his little flame. For that alone, she deserved his consideration. While Vin had found a list of redheads in the business, Dainn had mainly had him focused on Malini, knowing that she would talk about her friend and give him a clue.
“And how do you know that?” he asked Hector. The man's brother, Victor, was rampaging through the underworld trying to find him, with no idea that he was in Gladestone. Too many people wanted a piece of Hector, and no one deserved it more than Lyla.
“This man... he was the one who contacted me when I worked for Alpha, about getting his sister-in-law,” Hector elaborated. “Zenith was one of the girls who went missing twenty years ago. That was the last big batch they got, and it got fucked up because she had been the kid of some mafia boss.”
Indeed she had been. Zenith had been the real Morana, which made him wonder about her.
“Why the attacks on Morana?” he asked, genuinely curious. That was the one thing he hadn’t been able to put together.
Hector hesitated. “Her father had had information about The Syndicate. When they realized she was his child, they thought she had the information too, especially since she’d begun to dig into the organization. So they began to work to eliminate her.”
Stupid of them, considering she had both Tristan’s and Dante’s protection. And unbeknownst to them, she had his protection too, mainly because of Xander. She was good for the boy, and he needed that. Until Lyla could decide for herself what she wanted to do with her past, he was going to keep an eye out for the kid, just like she’d asked him to. She could ask him to do anything and he would, and he wondered if she even realized half the power she had over him.
He circled around the small room again. “Tell me about this man, the leader.”
Hector groaned, his arms shaking with his weight. He was hanging from the same chains he had put her in. “He’s an older guy,” the man began. “I haven’t met him but his user account was ‘thesyndicater03’. He was interested in Zenith. Wanted her bad.”
“Why?”
“Because she escaped. She left behind L... Lyla.”
He had not known that, but it made sense. Both girls had been taken together, so both girls had become friends. And Zenith had escaped as a child, leaving his little moon behind.
“Did the man punish Lyla for it?” he asked, wondering if he needed to add another reason to his list kill the man.
“I don’t know. But he did keep her with him for a while before sending her out.”
Hector was proving useful after all. Maybe he’d let him live another day.
He stepped behind the second man, the one who had been silent, the one who had also done lesser damage to her, and broke his neck in the blink of an eye.
Hector cried out in shock. “Please, no, I’ll tell you everything else. Let me go.”
The Shadow Man walked out, locking the room, as the cries followed. Mulling over the new information, he made his way back to the hotel, climbing the ladder and jumping into the room on quiet feet. His eyes went to her, to see her hogging his pillow and snoring softly, wrapped in the blanket like a burrito, and something inside his chest loosened at seeing her like that.
He headed to the bathroom to take a quick shower and wash the night off, before walking back to the room and rounding the bed to his side. He slowly slipped inside, adjusting her so as to not wake her, and she settled on him, clinging to his chest, her head on his arm, her lips parted, her eyes moving behind the closed lids as she dreamed of something.
Pressing a soft kiss to her delectable mouth, he hoped she dreamed of something nice as he watched her, marveling at the woman she had become. He had seen people through his life become monsters, especially people who had traumatic childhoods found it difficult to break the chains. And though he had helped her, she had been the one to always defy the chains, even bound to them. She had been the one to run off into the dark and save her child. She had been the one to endure punishment and keep her head high. She had been the one to live day after day just so she could know more about her son.
Pushing her flame hair back from her face, he wondered where she got the courage from, to keep going without letting the world tarnish who she was, without them extinguishing her light, without them taking away her ability to ceaselessly love. She faced her traumas with him and let him make another memory for it. She saw him for who he was and still looked at him with her heart in her eyes. She doubted herself everyday and still kept going on.
He didn’t know if the tightness in his chest was what she called love, but he knew if there was an alternate reality where he could feel like normal people did, he would love her. His main motive now was to never let her long for that alternate version of himself.