He shrugs. “We won’t know that until the autopsies are completed.”
“You would know.” My voice comes out louder than intended. It even makes Rocco jump. “You’d know because she’s eight months along…” I swallow the unease burning my throat before correcting, “Shewaseight months along.”
With my head cloudy from the debilitating images in the report, I honestly feel like I’ve stepped back twenty-two months. Rocco is right, I’d know if Fien was hurt, I’m just struggling to get my logical-thinking head with the program. It’s coded to see the worst in everything. Very rarely does it consider the silver lining.
Conscious our conversation may hit a stalemate, I remove the photograph of Audrey I placed into the breast pocket of my jacket, then pass it to Brandon. I hate the sympathy vote. More times than not, it makes me angrier than recalling how my enemies have played me for a fool the past two years.
I’m not feeling that sentiment today.
Brandon wears his heart on his sleeve. If I can play on it, I’ll have him eating out of the palm of my hand even quicker than my daughter’s upside-down grubby face stole my heart from my chest.
“I paid the ransom they requested.” My jaw tightens to the point of cracking. “They didn’t uphold their side of our agreement.”
It dawns on me that Brandon was closer to Tobias than realized when he asks, “Was Tobias aware you paid the ransom?”
His expression remains neutral when I shake my head. “Tobias approached me a few days after the drop. He said there was a complication securing Audrey.” I can’t admit my wrongdoings in her ransom. If I do, guilt will eat me alive in an instant.
“I told you he’s smarter than he looks,” Smith says down the earpiece lodged in my ear when Brandon gabbles out, “You’re not searching for Audrey. You’re trying to find your child.”
“Tobias was supposed to get her out. He assured me she was safe, and that it would be only a matter of time before she was returned to me.” Those were the exact words Tobias spoke to me the night he called to say they were raiding the Castro compound within the hour. I begged him to wait until I got there. He said he couldn’t. “Then—”
“Tobias was killed during the Castro raid?” Although Brandon sounds as if he’s asking a question, I don’t see it like that. He’s summarizing.
After a couple of minutes of deliberation, he moves our conversation in a direction I never saw coming. “When was your daughter last seen?”
“I didn’t get you out of lockup to investigate my daughter’s disappearance.” Although I appreciate his wish to help, the last time I got a federal agent involved in Fien’s disappearance, I lost her for months on end. I won’t let that happened again. “I did it so you can continue with your ruse to force Castro out of hiding.”
Shock registers on Brandon’s face. It’s quickly swallowed by anger. “You can’t use the Bureau to get revenge on Castro.”
I smile an evil grin. “I’m not getting revenge on Castro. I’m going to kill him as he did my wife.”
Roxanne’s father may have held Fien by her feet after removing her from Audrey’s stomach, but he wasn’t the only man in the room. There were several of them, and I’m confident the ringleader was Rimi Castro.
“I can’t legally help you with this, Dimitri.”
With his resolve strong enough to know words won’t crack it, I get inventive. “You’ll do as I ask, or I’ll release this to the hounds.”
Blood drains from his face when I hand him a drafted bounty for his long-lost girlfriend, Melody Gregg. It hasn’t been lodged, but all it will take is a single push of a button for her bounty to be activated. Unlike the payout on Roxanne’s head, this one will be cashed in because men like Clover don’t back down when they’re on the hunt.
Brandon grips the single sheet of paper enough to crinkle it down the middle before he strays his eyes to mine. I had never really paid their hazel coloring any attention previously. I only switched things up today because they’re filled with so much fury, they appear more green than brown. “How do I know you haven’t already released this?”
“She’s still alive, isn’t she? Living it up in a fancy penthouse apartment in New York City with her billionaire boyfriend.” I show him the video Smith and Ellie downloaded when they discovered Brandon’s ruse to have Isabelle impersonate Melody at a function later this week. It doubles the blatant rage in his eyes. “Even with a wrong set of photographs attached to her file, the real Melody wasn’t hard to find.”
I don’t mention the fact his father led a member of my New York chapter right to his ex. Vincent McGee only owed me one favor, but when you like your women young enough, you’ll face consecutive life sentences if word gets out, you’re a little more generous with your ‘colleagues.’
Vincent’s association with my family is being taken care of as we speak, but I’ll have to save the details for another day since Brandon shifts our exchange from civil to prudishly fun in zero point eight seconds.
He grips the lapels of my jacket before dragging me to his side of the cabin. “If you hurt her—”
“You’ll what? Kill me as I want to slay the man who murdered my wife. He cut our daughter out of her stomach, then left her to die! He treated her like fucking scum, so if I have to use your high school sweetheart as bait because your hero-complex wants to stop a war that started long before you joined the Bureau, I fucking will. I’ll do anything it takes to gut Castro as he did me.”
My rant started with Audrey in my thoughts, but it ended with Roxanne. I’ve told myself time and time again the past two hours that she was breathing in the footage I saw of her, and she looked unharmed, but my gut knows better. She’s hurting. Deep down inside, there’s no denying the truth.
Needing Brandon to go before I forget he isn’t the man I’m chasing, I remember the reason I got him out of lockup. “Do what needs to be done to get Castro out of hiding, then leave the rest up to me.” When I hear Rocco release the lock mechanisms on the door, I lean across Brandon to open his door for him. “And start here as he’ll get your Honey Pot out of lockup even faster than your daddy’s fancy title will.”
Brandon misses my accidental slip-up. He’s too busy staring at the entrance of Isaac Holt’s nightclub, stunned as a mullet that I brought him here.
It takes him a handful of attempts to get his legs to follow the prompts of his brain. I assume because his knees are knocking about meeting the man who pipped him at the post but am proven wrong when he pops his head back into the cabin of The Tank. “If you do this, you’ll be hunted as fiercely as you’ve been chasing Castro the past two years. What kind of life will that be for your daughter? Hasn’t she been through enough? You’re her father. You are supposed to protect her, not put her in more danger.”
