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“Oh, bugger,” Matthias muttered. “Every time. It’s like she saves it for me.”
Lucia looked like she was trying not to laugh. “Um, well, at least she’s comfortable with you!” She took Izzy back and waved over her shoulder as she headed for the nursery. “I’ll be right back.”
Matthias glanced at me briefly. “Noah’s on his way up.”
I rocked back on my heels and let out a slow breath. It was odd, being part of the family yet still on the outside. Noah and Lucia had built something together that I would never truly be a part of, and I was happy they had. They’d fashioned a true family filled with people with ties even tighter than blood. It was something that had taken years to build, years that I hadn’t been there. Nothing could change that, but at least I knew my sacrifices had been worth it.
Lucia would never be alone again.
“Hey, you could have come back.” Noah appeared at my elbow, looking stressed and tired.
“I didn’t want to intrude. You mentioned you needed something.”
Noah glanced at Matthias before nodding. “Yeah, I didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.” He handed me a slip of paper bearing a name that I didn’t recognize.
“This piece of shit has been slippery as fuck. He keeps a very low profile online, which is why Matthias is having trouble tracking him. But no one does old-school tracking like you do.”
I grinned. It made me feel a million years old to have the methods I’d been trained in described as “old school,” but there was definitely value to the manual methods. Plenty of people avoided leaving an online footprint, particularly because of how easy it was to track. But no matter how careful this guy was, it was impossible to exist without leaving some trace. He had to eat. He had to rest his head somewhere at night.
And when he did, I would find him.
I’ll take care of it.”
Lucia appeared again with Isabella changed into a fresh onesie “Okay, let’s try this again. I wouldn’t want her to miss her uncle fix. No one calms her like you do, Rafe.”
I accepted the baby back and, for the next hour, walked around the penthouse murmuring softly to her. Lucia was all too happy to take advantage of the free time and left to do some laundry. I glanced over at Matthias.
“I’ve gotta go. Can you let Lucia know that I’ll be back tomorrow?”
Matthias nodded and took the baby. When she sighed and didn’t wake, he looked relieved. Right before the elevator doors closed, I heard Matthias’s soft curse.
“Bloody hell. She’s soiled her nappyagain?”
CHAPTERTWO
Diana
I squinted as if my eyes were deliberately deceiving me.
There he was with his friends. His stride was easy, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. What was that like?
My whole life, I’d always feltuncomfortable. Like I was waiting for something bad to happen.Thank you, Rafael DeMarco. The day he’d come into my life, I’d been scarred in ways I could never have predicted.
With my long-lens camera, I took several photos, zooming in on the digital images as they came up. The tall one with the cocky stride was Noah Blake. Blake Security was his.
Had he been the one to call the hit on my father? Was Rafejusta hired assassin? There were so many questions there. Before a few years ago, Noah Blake hadn’t seemed to exist beyond a social security number and patchy school records. Not so much as a menial job at a 7-Eleven.
And then suddenly there he was with enough money to open his own business. Averynice business considering Blake Security occupied the penthouse of this building. I took more photos.
Snap, snap, snap, snap.
The soft click of the shutter filled the silence in the car.
Blake had his arm wrapped around a woman with a baby strapped to her chest. Her long, curly hair was flowing in the wind behind her. The way he tucked his arm around her protectively made it clear they were together. A family unit. No one was breaking them apart.
The one I didn’t know was the younger guy. Oh, he was just as tall and looked just about as deadly as Noah and Rafe did. Dark hair, some tattoos peeking out from under his T-shirt. Of all the guys, he was the hardest to pin down. He hardly ever left the building.
I’d managed to catch him skulking out like he didn’t want to be seen about a month ago. But that had been it. From my surveillance over the past several months, I knew there were at least four more. They all seemed relatively normal, which didn’t make any sense.
