"What do you need, Delilah?" Scar asks.
"My stepdaughter," she says, turning her icy gaze on him. "Lopez promised to deal with her. She hasn't been dealt with."
"We can't handle your problem if we can't find her, Delilah," Scar says. "Maybe you shouldn't have tried to push her down a flight of stairs."
Jesus Christ. She's trying to kill her own stepdaughter?
"The little bitch had it coming," she snaps. Even in the dim light spilling from the car, the hatred flashing in her eyes is evident. "He left her everything. Everything!"
"And we'll take care of the problem, just like we said we would," Scar says. "Just as soon as you find her."
"I found her," she grits out. "She's hiding in a hovel in the woods out near The Falls."
"You're sure?" Scar asks.
"Positive. The old bat who lives out there called the sheriff today, complaining about a girl with a bunch of dogs lurking around out there. He came straight to the house to tell me." She smirks. "That missing person's report came in handy."
Scar jerks his head in a nod. "I'll get people out there to look."
"When?"
"As soon as I can round them up."
"I'll go."
Scar and Delilah both turn to look at me. Fuck. This is the last thing I need to be doing…but I'm not going to let them murder an innocent girl.
"No fucking clue where The Falls are," I lie to Scar, "but if you'll draw me a map, I'll head out there and start poking around. You can send backup once you've got people to send. Hopefully we find her before the sheriff does."
Scar hesitates.
"Send him!" Delilah snaps at him. "Or you can explain to Lopez why my services are no longer at your disposal."
"Fuck," Scar growls. "Fine." He turns a hard glare on Delilah. "But you're not going out there. You're going home, where you'll stay for the rest of the night."
"Fine by me." Her gaze flashes to me. "Make sure it looks like an accident."
"Oh, we will," I promise, though I don't tell her who will be having the accident. I step away from the vehicle and then pause. "What's her name?"
"Aneira. Aneira Buchanan."
Forty minutes later, Constantine meets me at the cutoff to The Falls in his SUV.
"Dante is going to shoot you in the kneecaps one of these days, Dimitri," he says, his long legs appearing as he climbs out of his SUV. "You're always getting into bullshit."
"Don't even act like you weren't dying for a reason to leave the club," I say, shaking my head at him.
"I was considering faking my own goddamn death," he mutters with a straight face, making me chuckle. Only because I'm fairly sure he isn't joking. He drags his fingers through his dark hair, collecting it in one hand before quickly tying it back away from his face. "You're an asshole for roping me into that bullshit."
He hates helping out at the club. The girls keep asking him out. He's shot every single one of them down, but they just keep asking. I'm pretty sure it's a competition at this point to see who can get him to say yes. Watching him squirm is amusing as hell to me, so I don't bother telling them that he'll never agree.
Constantine doesn't mix business with pleasure any more than I do, which is to say we just fucking don't. He told me once that he's too fucked up to ever tie a woman to him. I feel that. The last thing a woman needs is a motherfucker like me sharing her bed. I've started avoiding the goddamn water in this town just to make sure I don't fall. I'm not made for hearts and butterflies.
Neither is Constantine. We're two peas in a fucking pod on that front.
"You know you love it," I tease him anyway.
He grunts, lifting his middle finger in the air. "Prick. What's the situation?"
"The Carmona Kings are headed this way in search of a girl by the name of Aneira Buchanan. If they find her, they intend to kill her."
His long lashes flutter over eyes as dark as midnight. His expression doesn't change, but I know him. He can kill a man with one hand tied behind his back and a knife between his ribs and do it with a smile on his face. He's one scary son of a bitch. But nothing pisses him off more than cartels targeting women. He lost his sister to one.
"Her stepmother sent them," I say.
"Jesus," he growls, stomping back to the driver's side of his Range Rover. He leans in, only to re-emerge a second later with two assault rifles tucked under one arm and a shotgun under the other.
He slams the door and heads my way. "Which do you want?"
"Shotgun."
"You're going to graduate to big boy guns one day," he mutters, tossing the shotgun to me.