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Laughing, I followed her out to her own Tahoe and got in the passenger seat.
24
Delaney
The damage done to the garage was noticeable as soon as Raven pulled into the parking lot. The shop’s huge front window was completely shattered, and from the looks of it, things had been thrown everywhere inside. My heart felt heavy as we passed the garage bays and I saw just how beat-up they were. It looked like someone had rammed their vehicle into two of the doors. The other damaged doors weren’t nearly as bad, but still hard to look at.
If Uncle Tony, Navarro, and the man who had come to take me away the night before had caused this much property damage, just how much destruction would they have caused in human lives? I shivered at the possibilities. I could have so easily lost everyone in that house the night before, and it left me feeling sick to my stomach just imagining it.
The damage downstairs was nothing to that in the actual apartment. The door had been kicked in, the thick wood splintered in the middle, and the door hung off its hinges. The couch had been turned upside down. All the pictures on the walls were now on the floor, the majority of which were broken, the glass littering the living room floor.
In the kitchen, dishes were broken all over the place, the fridge was lying on its front and unplugged, making all the food inside inedible.
The bedroom was the worst, though. They had taken a knife to the pillows and the mattress itself, and everything from the closet was scattered on the floor. At first glance, it didn’t look like any of my stuff was missing, until I started picking up my clothes and realized my panties and bras were nowhere to be found.
“Gross,” I signed to Raven. “That guy always gave me the creeps when I would see him from my bedroom window back at Aunt June’s house. But I didn’t realize he was…”
“Obsessed with you?” she offered when I couldn’t find the words to describe him. I nodded. “It can happen with something as simple as a glance,” she explained with a twist of her mouth. “Maybe he saw you staring at him when you were looking out your window and imagined you were just as emotionally invested as he was.”
“I’m just glad he’s gone now,” I told her before picking up a pair of Max’s jeans and folding them.
“Me too, sweet girl.”
The two of us worked together and attacked one room at a time, starting with the living room. Some of the pictures that had Max in them had been ripped in half, but Raven promised me it wouldn’t be any trouble replacing them. All she had to do was print most of them off her computer at home.
Everything in the kitchen had to be trashed. Raven told me that once we got the place cleaned up, the two of us would go shopping for new everything—dishes, fridge, and mattress, especially.
By the time we were finished with the kitchen, Max and his dad came upstairs to let us know they were going to the hardware store for a few parts. He told me his cousin hadn’t arrived yet but should be by with a new window for the shop before he returned.
Giving me a kiss, he made sure I didn’t need anything before following his dad out the door.
Between moving around heavy furniture and lifting all the trash bags we kept filling, my body was beginning to feel the effects, causing me to move slower as we started the cleanup of the bedroom. Raven was cleaning up the pillow and mattress stuffing with a shop-vac, and I was closer to the door, picking up the clothes and folding them as I piled them up next to me on the floor.
When a hand caught my ponytail, jerking my head back, I cried out so hard, I felt a sting in my throat. Startled by the sudden attack, I didn’t have time to react when I was forced to my feet and had something cold and hard pressed to my temple.
Raven
The dull ache in my back from having to clean up the mess caused by Garcia and his men was enough to make me fantasize about being the one to take the bastards out. My son popping them a few times with a bullet wasn’t nearly enough punishment in my eyes.
With the destruction they had caused, the fear they had
put my newest daughter through, and the danger they had put other members of my family in, I wanted to make it long and painful. Poor Delaney was taking it all in stride, thankfully. Max hiding the darker side of our lives from her had been wrong on so many levels, but after she’d passed my first test—making sure it was love she was feeling and not something more nefarious—I hadn’t been worried that she would run screaming and crying in the other direction when Max’s true self was unveiled to her.
A noise caught my attention, and I turned to check on Delaney out of instinct. When my gaze landed on her standing there, a woman I knew from pictures to be her bitch Aunt June, who was supposed to have taken care of her the past eight years, pressing a gun to my newest daughter’s head, I had to stiffen my muscles so I didn’t immediately react.
Back when I’d gone with Kelli to look for Delaney, we’d learned a lot about Tony Garcia, but I had been more curious about the man’s wife. She’d been given sole responsibility for her brother’s daughter upon his death, and yet as many times as she’d been in gossip rags and other shit, never once was there a mention of her niece.
But those gossip rags and speaking to people who supposedly knew “the real June Garcia” had left me with the impression that June was possibly more dangerous than her vile husband.
After the fiasco of the night before, Bash had some of the MC brothers watching the house. A good thing, or they would have missed the men who had come with Garcia and Favre—the fucking French arms dealer himself, from what Lexa had told me when she and Tavia had picked up the kids that morning—and had been in hiding nearby. Ready to shoot the place up if and when bullets started flying.
Bash and the boys had taken them all out before they could cause trouble and hurt someone.
But they hadn’t mentioned June. And I hadn’t given the cunt much thought either.
I fucking should have, though.
“Tell me where Tony is!” June yelled, her hold on Delaney tightening.
