“It isn’t. The tracker is showing that she is here.”
“He’s playing us,” I bit out.
Kingston knelt to the floor, dipping his fingers in the pool of blood. “This isn’t her blood.”
“What?” Lincoln demanded.
“This is not her fucking blood. It’s too old.” King then picked something up as Yates appeared nearly right in front of him, examining it. I blinked in surprise as Yates went completely still, looking like he was about to tip right over into insanity.
“There’s another note,” Sterling called out, he and Stratton examining a paper that had been soaking in blood.
“Smile for the explosives.”
Motherfucker.
Before we had a chance to further search for clues on where she’d been taken, we were sprinting through the room and down the hall. The first of the charges started rocking the building from the outside in, the walls and ceilings crumbling. Luckily, Lincoln had grabbed Yates from hesitating in the room, because seconds after we left it, it went up in an inferno. Whatever evidence was in there was fucking gone now, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe, even when we made it outside and all of us got back into our cars. I could tell we were missing men, but that was the risk of this life.
That was the danger of being under Ross protection.
I looked back as the entire building exploded, top-down, and immediately moved my mind to finding Dahlia. To finding my baby girl.
“He wants us to chase, that’s why he left the photo,” I spit out. “I have no idea if he expected us to die or not, but he is leading us on a fucking chase.”
“He cut the tracker out of her?” Stratton said the words that I had been avoiding thinking about.
“King.” I looked over at my cousin, his gun in his hand and pointed at the floorboard, his eyes on the skies above through the sunroof.
“Helicopter. I heard it when we were driving here, but I thought I was imagining shit.”
I sorted through my head as I tried to think of where the fuck my father would be taking her—
“The cliffside.”
“What?” Sterling demanded.
“It’s the last place I went with my mother before she left,” I grit out. “He hates that place, and he would find it fucking hilarious to bring her there.”
I went with my gut instinct and shouted an order to the driver to immediately speed there. I didn’t waste time trying to explain it to them and instead pulled out additional ammunition, making sure everyone reloaded.
Just get to Dahlia.I had to complete this mission and get to her. Then…well, then I could let myself feel all the shit inside of me.
Then King’s phone rang. He immediately picked up the call.
“Good to know you survived.” My father’s voice had me nearly tipping over into the abyss. “Although I cannot say the same about your girl. I have her in such a precarious position—imagine it, a step away from falling off the cliffside, only safe in Ian’s arms. I bet both of those things bother you, don’t they? I’m sure my son won’t be pleased to have his girlfriend die in the same place as his mother. Still, at least come see her before I put a bullet in the center of her head. Then I can do the same to you.”
I closed my eyes, my ears ringing as I considered his words. I had always wondered. I had always fucking wondered if she’d really run away, because I hadn’t mourned her like an absent parent—I had mourned her as if she were dead. Had he ever told me she’d run away? Or had he just said she was gone?
My father had killed my mother, and now he was going to kill Dahlia the same way.
“I have to kill him.”
The words were ones I had thought about for some time. It wasn’t a ‘want’ or ‘desire.’ No, I had to be the one to kill him, and I knew no one would fucking argue the point, especially after what he had just admitted.
When we arrived, parking our motorcade along the dirt road, our team kept a perimeter as the six of us walked forward, knowing that we couldn’t bring all of them or else he could act rashly. As we walked up the hill and finally came to level ground, the wind and icy splatters of ocean water cold against my skin, I felt everything come to an absolute halt.
I had felt fear in my life, but not like this. This had the potential to break me.
Ian had Dahlia by her hair, his other hand restraining her hands, right on the edge of the cliff. She was shivering, her face red and lips blue, the deep splotches of color on the robe making me worry how much blood she was losing. My father stood nearby looking supremely confident, grinning at our arrival and motioning to the two of them as if it was a goddamn show.